LO PSEUDOS TRA TESTUALITÀ E SOGGETTIVITÀ: IL CASO DI VLAD ȚEPEȘ NEL DIARIO DI DRACULA DI MARIN MINCU

This article examines Marin Mincu’s Il Diario di Dracula (1992) as a radical literary experiment that interrogates the relationship between subjectivity, fiction, and writing through the concept of pseudos. The novel, constructed as a false autobiographical diary of Vlad Țepeș, employs fiction not as a mask concealing deeper truth, but as the only possible mode of subject existence. Through the analysis of the diary’s narrative structure, this study demonstrates how Mincu deconstructs historical identity by transforming Dracula into a self-aware falsifier who internalizes and amplifies the defamatory narratives constructed against him. The protagonist emerges as a postmodern subject who exists only through the act of self-narration, embodying the crisis of modern identity through what the article terms “conscious self-calumny”. Drawing on psychoanalytic and postmodern theoretical frameworks, the analysis reveals how the text transforms confession into symptom, turning the diary into a theater of the unconscious where the boundaries between author and character, truth and fiction, authentic voice and theatrical mask dissolve. The work positions itself within the broader context of European postmodern literature while offering a unique perspective on the performative nature of identity construction through writing. Ultimately, the article argues that Mincu’s Dracula represents a paradigmatic figure of contemporary subjectivity: an identity that constitutes itself through and within language, discovering in pseudos the only authentic form of existence possible