Virgil Tănase

The work entitled Virgil Tanase - Playing Tag with the Death (The portrait of a Romanian provincial) aims at bringing into focus of the reading public an authentic and worthy writer, only seldom mentioned in the literary or dramatic reviews, never honoured with a monography or a chapter in a volume. His exclusion from the array of the Romanian literature is mainly due to his early exile. Similarly with his countryman Dumitru Tepeneag, as they both were members of the oneiric group in the 60s-70s, he has lived his social and literary life in Paris, being eliminated from a totalitarian system in 1977. The reason: Leave, you're annoying! He makes his debut as a novelist and playwright in a foreign country, in another language which, at first, his inner self does not feel too close: To live a writer's life, anywhere near authenticity, I had - mind you - to 'carve out' my works in a language different from the one I learnt at home. For Virgil Tanase, the exiled is that lonely wanderer in a world requiring to jaunt in company, accompanied by military music, while the exile literature is "literature in a zoo, with animals which do not live their natural life".