Dimitrie Bolintineanu's Patriotic and Sentimental Travels

Dimitrie Bolintineanu's travel memoirs are one of the largest bodies of work of its kind in the 1848 generation in Romania. During his extended, nine years-long exile abroad, he visited especially the Eastern Mediteranean, always on a quest for culturally and artistically meaningful experiences, but also fulfilling several political or diplomatic missions. His travels are those of a romantic and of an exile, and the mournful and elegiac tone of his prose is to be attributed to his longing for home. The goals which may be identified in his memoirs, and which this article explores, are to describe artistically interesting territories and to operate an advantageous comparison between his native country and those of the places he visits. There is a patriotic atmosphere to his writing, and also a desire to educate and inform his reader, which makes his memoirs sometimes a hard read. However, his writing is always very expressive, although sometimes this is due to the old and picturesque expressions from an obsolete form of the literary language this romantic writer uses exuberantly.