Reassessing Florika Stefan’s Literary Legacy

Abstract

Florica Ștefan (1930–2016) is one of the rare authors of Romanian nationality to have secured a place within the canon of Serbian literature. Alongside Stevan Raičković, Branko Radičević, Mira Alečković, Miroslav Antić, and others, she stands out as one of the key representatives of subjective lyricism. Her work was not marginalized by literary history; on the contrary, she is cited in all major histories of Romanian literature in Vojvodina, as well as in numerous monographs and anthologies dedicated to Serbian poetry. Nevertheless, her oeuvre has long been interpreted through the predominantly masculine critical frameworks characteristic of the second half of the twentieth century, which led to her being categorized primarily as a lyrical poetess. As a result, a significant portion of her literary and extra-literary engagement has remained overshadowed by the pronounced sentimentalism associated with postwar poetry. The analysis of Florica Ștefan’s life and work is further complicated by her simultaneous affiliation with Serbian, Yugoslav, and Romanian literary spheres. It is therefore essential to examine critical discourse in both Serbian and Romanian in order to determine her canonical status more precisely. This paper offers, on the one hand, an overview of existing critical interpretations of Ștefan’s work, the literary canon, and its influence on the educational system and broader cultural context; on the other hand, it provides a new, comprehensive feminist analysis. The study’s underlying premise rests on the gynocritical hypothesis that women’s authorship must be revisited in order to identify themes, motifs, and strategies suppressed within the established critical paradigm, with the aim of challenging and destigmatizing the category of women’s lyric poetry. Florica Ștefan’s poetry is indeed partly shaped by feelings of love, nostalgia, and at times suffering, but it also constitutes an ethical and social expression. Through the prism of the personal, the poet speaks of the collective — of women’s destinies, the patriarchal rural world, corporeality, identity, history, and the culture of not one but two peoples. Beneath the lyrical beauty of her love poems lies an entire world saturated with pain, injustice, generational trauma, and powerlessness. Reflecting the realities she portrays, her poetic depictions of patriarchal society are stark, stripped of lyrical embellishment or euphemism. In this way, Florica Ștefan transforms the literary text into a form of social critique, seeking justice through her verses for all the unfulfilled destinies of women. For her, literature has not only aesthetic but also moral value — and it is precisely this dimension of her work that deserves to be brought to light.