Réprimer le multilinguisme : la naissance d’un grand écrivain national dans les ruines de l’Empire.

The article aims at rendering how the negotiation of the multilingual inheritance in the Austro-Hungarian Empire worked in Liviu Rebreanu’s case. Generally esteemed as the most important novelist of the interwar period, Liviu Rebreanu (1885-1944) was educated—both as an intellectual and as a writer—within a cultural environment stamped by the features of the early twentieth-century Budapest. In fact, his first literary takes (between 1907 and 1909) should be related to German and Hungarian languages, whose perfect command is proven through the writer’s extensive readings from the two literatures. Also, young Rebreanu had a close relationship with Hungarian writers; some of them became his collaborators, while others had been translated or imitated. His reinvention as a “national writer” implied thus to re-define and repress this multilingual inheritance. Before he became a “major” writer of an emergent literature, Rebreanu had developed as a “minor” author (in Deleuze’s terms) within an environment marked by diglossia, by the overlapping of several literary cultures, and by their conflictual articulation. At the same time, his case illustrates the process of literary emergence coming after the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, but also the mobilization of a state of hybridity, which was made possible by the very existence of this multinational aggregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]