Sorana Țopa – Journal Pages

Abstract In the spring of 2017, we had the chance of receiving several unpublished documents from actress Sorana Ţopa’s personal archive. Recovered by Mrs. Lucreția Angheluţă from a dark cellar in Bucharest and generously given to us to help our doctoral research1, the handwritten notebooks and typed pages help to shed... light both on the actress’ personality and the image of an era. Here are some of the pages from the manuscript Journal, fragments through which one can better see Sorana Ţopa’s personality, her reflexive abilities, her capacity to scan the relation human – destiny – era. With the hope that, one day, the Journal will be published in its entirety, we hence begin a project of restitutio in integrum – which we find both natural and necessary in a time when values are being overthrown and those who strive to start an artistic (or other type of) career feel the increasingly inequitable fight with the pressures of the socio-economic system. Reading these pages, one understands that freedom of spirit cannot be crushed by any political regime, on one condition: being aware of the fact that “becoming an easy prey for these masters of pulling ideological strings would be proof of downright superficiality and gross immaturity”. And maybe there is something else to be understood: any of Thalia’s servants’ chances are based equally on talent and the reading of profound pieces of writing. Beyond the pages of the Journal, there is the... telling silence of doubt. “Your eyes, becoming more accurate, clearer, could reflect the entire deposit at once; that is, you could have a clear image of the entire process and of the most intimate structure of this self. And if the eyes are not completely open, completely untouched by any intervention of the wish to see clearly and also of those obscure reactions that automatically appear from memory, then of course the state of fog persists somewhere, springing from who knows what corners of the consciousness that have not yet been cleared.”