Amours et politique ; les politiques de l’Amour : à propos de Popi de Teodor Scorțescu

In this paper, I would like to analyze the nouvelle Popi (1930) by Teodor Scorţescu (1893‑1976), an author unjustly forgotten in his country, in order to identify cultural relativism lessons emerging from a story with Greek subject told by a Romanian. The narrative relates a love affair on the background of the great "National Discord" (Εθνικός Διχασμός), that is to say, the "fierce hate" which, since the World War I, had torn Greece, between supporters of King Constantine and those of the liberal leader Eleftherios Venizelos. A young Romanian, on business trip in this humiliated by defeat and shaken by revolutionary convulsions country, observes the raging political passions of his hosts, first with amused detachment, and then he learns to put it to use to seduce a beautiful Athenian woman and to drive away an annoying rival. The double posture of the narrator gives to Scorţescu’s story a double kind of profile. On the one hand, as a "study of manners", it may teach the Greeks the benefits to contemplate domestic things with the eyes of a stranger, and in this sense seems, relatively speaking, a "Persian letter" à la Montesquieu. On the other hand, Popi is also a "libertine" story that, with a little nod to Diderot, focuses on the art of make speaking a too quiet feminine "jewel".