Hanu Ancuţei by Mihail Sadoveanu
Published in 1928, the volume Hanu Ancuţei represents for Mihail Sadoveanu's creation "the masterpiece at the crossroads"; this makes the transition to the stage of the great Sadovian books, but it is also a synthesis of the elements encountered in previous stories.
The story Fountain between the Poplars is part of the volume Hanu Ancuţei by Mihail Sadoveanu. The technique of frame storytelling involves duplicating the narrative instance . There is a narrator of the frame narrative able to faithfully transpose , over time, each narrative heard. The other narrators, characters in the frame-narrative and, in turn, listeners, have in the stories told by them various roles: narrator-witness, character-narrator. The nine narrators transfigure by masterful word personal experiences, testimonies of an old way of life, and the tenth, anonymous, elevates these experiences to the rank of culture and gives them the value of permanence.
The fountain between the poplars is a story because it is a subjectivized narrative (narration from the narrator's angle, involved as the protagonist of the story), which is limited to telling a single epic event, a love story from youth, in fact a failed initiation. Importance is given to the act of narration, which has the effect of reviving a lost world. The story is situated in a plane of the past, its main characteristic being the evocation . The emphasis is on events and situations, hence the ethical character, exemplary of the story.
The fountain between the poplars is the fourth story and has as its theme the tragic love, and as a narrator-character the mazali captain Neculai Isac. One autumn, Neculai Isac brings wines to the land of Suceava and stops at Hanu Ancuţei. Riding on the banks of the Moldova River, he meets a group of gypsies bathing. He is greeted by Hasanache, an old beggar, who unsuccessfully chases Marga, an eighteen-year-old gypsy, out of the boyar's path. The girl's beauty disturbs him and gives the two of them a silver coin. The girl looks for him at the inn the next day to show him the shoes bought with the money he received. Then the young people spend a night at the poplar fountain and promise a new love affair when he returns. The symbolic connection between her being and the aquatic element (the topos of the meeting - the fountain) is present at every meeting with the narrator-character. The girl rises from the water and will end up in the same element. The significance of the fountain with four poplars is the center of the world, a sacred place that no longer protects lovers, being defiled by everyone's guilt and doomed. The water of the well inevitably mixes with the blood, and symbolically, love with death.
The narrative in the first person , subjective, involves two planes: the representation of the events lived in youth and the self-analysis of the facts from the perspective of maturity. The narrator thus evokes an event he experienced in his youth , over twenty-five years ago, "in these lands." The story tells a single epic fact, a sad love story that had the role of initiation in the life of the narrator. The atmosphere of the story is related to the way in which the narrator "directs" a certain tension throughout the story, in order to capture the attention and interest of the listeners / reader. The action takes place alertly, being identifiable all the moments of the subject .
The stories are situated in a plane of the past, their main characteristic being the evocation of a past world, of the “other Ancuta”. The space of the story has a mythical value, an image of the lost paradise: a place to stop and party, a protector like a fortress and known to travelers from ancient times, of the other Ancuta.
As in any story, the predominant conflict is the external one, manifested between the protagonist and the gypsies. But there is also an inner conflict in the narrative, which starts in Margai's soul, who has a choice between love for Isaac and duty to family.
The narrative is combined with dialogue and short descriptive passages .
The ways of narration present in the text are: narration, representation, storytelling, and the stylistic dominance is orality . The relationship between the narrator and the receiver is close; the first and second person are used in their dialogue. The ceremonial of the story consists in the fact that the dialogue presupposes a system of conventions. The narrator addresses the interlocutors in a ceremonious way, appropriate to his noble rank, and the listeners finally intervene with comments, questions, reflections.
In conclusion, Hanu Ancuţei approaches storytelling as a narrative technique , because the narrator and the interlocutors are present in the same space - the inn, at the same time - "in a golden autumn", a setting that allows the narration of all nine stories in the cycle.
