Ion Negoiţescu's review of Romanian literature and contributions to literary theory generally stood in contrast to the nationalist and national communist recourse to traditionalism or anti-Europeanism, and engaged it polemically by advocating the values of Western culture.

[8] As a high school student before and after the outbreak of World War II, Ion Negoiţescu also became interested in politics, and rallied with the Iron Guard, a revolutionary fascist movement which would establish the National Legionary regime (in existence between 1940 and 1941).

"[20] On 13 March 1943, at a time when Romania had rallied with Nazi Germany and the Axis Powers, he defied Antonescu's regime by affiliating the entire Circle with Lovinescu, himself marginalized for supporting liberal democracy and for rejecting the application of ideological censorship.

[1] The Sibiu writers' statement ridiculed the officially encouraged traditionalist and nationalist literature, whose bucolic and anti-modernist themes it called păşunism (from păşune, "pasture"), while accusing its proponents of having replaced aesthetic appraisal with extreme dogmatism.

[5] These judgments scandalized the far right press, who successfully identified their actual source, calling on the Antonescu government to impose severe punishment: the fascist venue Ţara notably stated that the young men "should have patriotism inscribed with a whip on their sternums".

[3] In early 1945, some months after the King's Coup deposed Antonescu and aligned Romania with the Allies, Ion Negoiţescu also became editor of the newly founded Revista Cercului Literar, a review published by, and named after, the Sibiu group.

[8] Negoiţescu's cultural opposition also touched his friendships: in 1954, he played a part in rescuing Caietul albastru ("The Blue Notebook"), a samizdat work by Balotă, which the latter had discarded in Gara de Nord while pursued by agents of the Securitate secret police.

[15][16] His publishing activity at times adapted itself to the exterior requirements of Romanian Socialist Realism and the communist ideology, such as in a 1957 article for Teatru, where he reviewed Papadat-Bengescu's play Batrînul ("The Old Man") exclusively as a progressive social critique of "bourgeois" society.

[21] Similar condemnation was expressed by other Gazeta Literară contributors: Savin Bratu (who alleged that Negoițescu was one of those who circulated "names, works and ideas that we find foreign"); Mihai Gafița (who held Negoițescu and his colleague Alexandru Piru responsible for preserving "bourgeois ideology", while urging "the editorial staffs of literary reviews, the publishing houses [and] the Marxist critics" to react against this phenomenon); as well as Mihail Petroveanu (according to whom the trend represented by Negoiţescu signified "the penetration of modernist, apolitical or profoundly retrograde, traditionalist tendencies" coupled with "the infiltrations of liberal objectivism in union with precious, inaccessible language").

[43] Together with other Romanian acquaintances who had been expelled from or fled Romania (Călinescu, Nemoianu, Raicu and Vianu among them), he was also a member of the editorial college for Agora, a United States-based magazine founded by poet and dissident Dorin Tudoran with support from the National Endowment for Democracy.

Comparing Negoiţescu to both Eminescu and Percy Bysshe Shelley, the Sburătorul theorist insisted on discussing his young disciple's appearance as an exterior sign of literary finesse: "A fine, feminine, androgynous; delicacy, shyness, quickly alarmed by some sort of bashfulness betrayed by discreet shades of carmine.

"[54] Such aspects prompted Bogdan Creţu to suggest that Negoiţescu's work was primarily characterized by a "critical consciousness", made possible by his "specific [and] tragic histrionism": "although it caused him great distress during his lifetime [...], it compelled him to become, no matter what the risks, consistent with himself; that is to say honest, enthusiastic, genuine.

[12] Written in parallel, Povestea tristă a lui Ramon Ocg, described by Ştefănescu as marking Negoiţescu's brief affiliation with Surrealism,[1] romanticizes the life of Mexican film star Ramón Novarro, with emphasis on Navarro's homosexuality.

"[15] Literary historian Ion Simuţ, who theorizes a separation between the Circle's ideology and Negoiţescu's own Euphorionism, also notes that, having earlier used Eugen Lovinescu to emancipate himself from Blaga and traditionalism, the young critic and all those who agreed, weary of seeming too detached from their roots, were invoking Goethe as "an antidote to Lovinescianism, that is to say against sheltering oneself in aesthetics.

[2] The interval is explained by the memoirist as being related to his identity crisis: "I was being driven by a terrible vital demon, an unprecedented impulse for affirmation, an acute individualism, maybe even an instinctual tendency for domination, all later curbed by my homosexuality, which imposed timidity on me, and eventually by the rigors of history".

[49] According to literary historian Mircea Martin, Ion Negoiţescu and his Sibiu Circle colleagues represented a larger faction of intellectuals who, once empowered by 1960s liberalization and the prospect for resuming historical debates, voiced their support for Europeanism and cosmopolitanism.

[67] This community, he noted, was primarily reacting against the ethnic nationalist and protochronist ideologies promoted, within the limits defined by the communist regime, by such figures as Paul Anghel, Eugen Barbu, Edgar Papu, Mihai Ungheanu or Dan Zamfirescu.

[69] Contrasting Negoiţescu's "aestheticism", "individualism" and "quasi-anarchism" with the "gray, stiff and fear-impregnated everyday of communism", Călinescu also noted: "Nego's daily heroism was that of being himself, no matter what the consequences of this social preservation of his identity and the refusal to hide it.

[12] After the National Legionary State was replaced with Ion Antonescu's regime, the critic expressed his support for the country's alliance with Nazi Germany, for Operation Barbarossa and war on the Eastern Front, describing the promise of a "great future".

[12] Manea stresses that, in later decades, the transformed Negoiţescu was able to use his youthful affiliation to fascism ("the traps set by exultation") as insight into other forms of political experimentation: "The experience of gregarious jubilation [prepared] the easily charmed novice to accumulate mistrust of the multitude".

[72] The "emotional genesis of Negoiţescu's ideas and thought" is also seen by Adriana Stan as a possible explanation for "the Iron Guardist episode", which she dismisses as "a conjectural accident of an adolescent too candid and cosmopolitan to nurture the symptoms of profound intolerance.

While acknowledging that the political context of the Second Vienna Award had made "national sentiment" more precious to Transylvanians than ever before, the text cautioned against a revival of nationalist exclusiveness in the literary field, and rested the fault for păşunism with the early 20th century Sămănătorul review.

[5] Negoiţescu had designed a portion of the letter as a lampoon targeting "neo-Sămănătorists", whom he portrayed as demagogues camouflaged in modernist trappings: "Burning with the fever of exultation when they yell out the word 'culture' at each and any street corner, all the headmasters of patriotism, or morals and of poetry, in love with the 'holy soil' only because they view it from the comfortable armchairs of the city they still curse, the păşunists imagine themselves day and night at the plow horns".

Discussing this rumor in his 1946 correspondence with Deliu Petroiu, Ion Dezideriu Sîrbu speculated about the possibility that his friends were merely seeking to survive in a new society facing communization: "A certain political indifferentism gives an absurd hue to all hopes for the best.

"[16] Sîrbu expressed a belief that the Sibiu Circle cell could form "an honest island in this chaos of asserted and legalized ignorance", and stated that, in case this was not possible, he would join them in planning an escape, through Arad County, to a Western Allied-controlled territory.

Discussing the context for the incident, British historian and political analyst Tom Gallagher assessed: "Privileges and carefully modulated intimidation encouraged intellectuals to stay quiet and sometimes even police their professions on behalf of the regime.

[73] According to critic and literary historian Gelu Ionescu (himself a member of the Radio Free Europe staff), Negoiţescu, Goma and Vianu were the only figures of their day to question "the legitimacy of the system", a situation which he believed was rooted in "the character of Romanians", particularly their "fear".

[80] At around the same time, Negoiţescu also reacted against the tendency of some Romanians to reassess their national literature purely on the basis of its political status under communism, primarily noting that various works once considered valuable for their subtext had come to lose their importance, and called for a reevaluation.

"[72] Petreu believes that "taking seriously" Negoiţescu's anti-fascist messages, alongside Balotă's early demand for Romania to recognize the Antonescu regime's complicity in the Holocaust, could have engendered a reassessment of the past, thus preventing the resurgence of political and social problems.

[84][85] Deeming his friend a victim "of the Romanian appetite for filth, rummages through one's private life and public executions",[85] Nistorescu decided to temporarily remove the article from the newspaper's online archive, prompting accusations of censorship.