Political repression
Political repression pushed Manoliu away from his work as a novelist, but allowed him to carry on as a diarist. As noted by Florescu in 2008, his 1970s "Jurnal de peregrin" ("Pilgrim's Diary") "provides one of the most dramatic images of the aging intellectual, taken with the notion of failure and the awareness of his demise", a "despairing monologue, with no possibility of evading into the much richer past." Also according to Florescu, these last work mark Manoliu's return to his early idols, Ortega y Gasset and Mihai Eminescu.