The ruin motif in literature is often the site of a fierce negotiation of identity, whereby a writer tries to recapture from the past an aspect of national character that seems lost or forgotten. But while internalizing collective anxiety, the writer also enacts his/her own anxiety towards death, personal loss or failure. In 19th century Romantic literature, and even more in countries like Romania (The Danubian Principalities) that were barely awakening to national statehood, the poetry of ruins was an important way to define and promote national character. But the real complexity of the motif was only reached by Mihai Eminescu, who in his ample poem Memento mori (1872) added to these a personal meditation on the failure of history, on poetry as ruin and on the individual soul. Almost 150 years later, the identity question has changed, but the anxiety towards the past is still there. The novelist Ioana Bradea writes, in her book Scotch (2010), about the devastated monuments of the Communist regime, abandoned plants and warehouses turned into vast graveyards of a past that people either want to forget, or desperately cling to. It is also a reflection on individual identity and the powers of literature in a time defined by belatedness: post-communism, post-industrialism, post-modernism.
