La colpa e il sacrificio nella poesia di Ileana Mălăncioiu

In the philosophical essay Vina tragică. Tragicii greci, Shakespeare, Dostoievski, Kafka (1978), Ileana Mălăncioiu describes the fate of the tragic hero, analysed in relation to the idea of “guilt”, a concept that, in the reading offered by the author, knows a double declination, on the basis of the synonymic alternatives made available by the Romanian language, culpă and vină. In this article, we shall focus on the distinction that Mălăncioiu makes between these two terms in the context of ancient and modern tragedy, and then explore the theme of personal sacrifice, evoked in an expiatory perspective, identifying the characters that become manifest in the poetic composition, thus transferring the plane of analysis from the tragic hero to the lyric self.