Castelli neri e palazzi di diamante. Rappresentazioni spaziali tra Gotico e Fantastico nella poesia di Mihai Eminescu

The castle and the palace – variations of the abode archetype – magnet- ize the Romantic and Post-Romantic nocturnal imaginary, and survive within the avant-garde literatures, especially within the Surrealist texts that are aimed to re-se- mantize the Gothic genre. Our contribution analyses the metamorphoses of these two spatial archetypes in Mihai Eminescu’s poetry. If among the pașoptiști (Alexandrescu, Alecsandri, Bolintineanu, and so on) the poetics of royal space were still structured on Western cultural models which were permeated by retrospective medievalisms, it is in the poetry of Eminescu that they define themselves at a more profound level. By focusing on the different archetypical hypostases of royal space – the medieval castle as isolated and vertical «centre» or as locus absconditus; the black and damned castle; the marvellous and enchanting palace; the castle as ideal place of erotic epiphanies – we will demonstrate that if among the pașoptiști it still shares the chronotope function since it is linked to history and represents the national past inscribed in collective memory, in Eminescu it turns into a mirror of the soul and a palimpsest of being. Eminescian castles and the palaces (black or white, gothic or marvellous) rather result as secret architectures of anima, which, re-establishing the I-verticality, set themselves within the interior and psychical (both sacred and profane) history of the individual.