Vintilă Horia, God Was Born in Exile. Uprooting and Literature

Abstract Vintilă Horia is one of the most interesting writers of the Romanian exile of the second half of the 20th century. His novel entitled God Was Born in Exile, published in 1960, explores the meanings of human uprooting under tragic circumstances and discusses exile (of the character and also of the author) as a tragic characteristic of mankind. Forced to live away from his native Romania because of the authoritarian regime imposed after 1945 in all Eastern European countries, Horia finds a symbolic version of his own life in Latin poet Ovid’s exile imposed by Augustus; therefore the protagonist of the novel gradually turns into the author’s alter-ego, being a lucid writer, completely assuming this painful uprooting and finding his true artistic identity precisely within exile, by the exquisite literary works he creates during the last years of his life.