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Tag: writer

  • Writer Nora Iuga, the subject of a documentary film

    Writer Nora Iuga, the subject of a documentary film

    One of the most successful Romanian films last year
    was Nora, written and directed by Carla-Maria Teaha. The first foray into
    documentary film-making from Teaha, who has previously worked as an actor and
    radio journalist, the film follows Nora Iuga, one of the most important writers
    in this country, who turned 93 years old on 4th January. Released in
    2023 at the Transylvania International Film Festival and also screened at
    Anonimul and Astra Film Festival, Nora creates a touching portrait of
    this charismatic writer and poet who made her debut in 1968 with a
    book of poems (Vina nu e a mea), received a number of awards from the Writers’
    Union and has remained very active, publishing an autobiographical
    novel (Hipodrom) in 2020 and another book of poems in 2023 (Fetiţa strigă-n
    pahar, Nemira).

     

     

    Shot over the course of four years, the film also
    captures Nora Iuga’s fascinating inner life as she has retained her
    youth and contagious exuberance, as well as the special friendship
    between her and the director, who accompanies Iuga at the Frankfurt
    Book Fair. We spoke to Carla-Maria Teaha about how she created
    the documentary film and the enthusiastic response of the public:

     

     

    I didn’t have a certain script in
    mind, especially for our trip to Frankfurt. From the very beginning I
    wanted the dialogue to be created by speaking freely with Nora. Starting
    from what would appear to be mere chit-chat, my intention was
    to get Nora Iuga to tell her stories, because along with other qualities,
    she is a fascinating story-teller and the camera loves her. This is why I never
    felt the need to introduce other characters that would speak about her. As this
    is my first film and I didn’t have a lot of experience in this area, I relied a
    lot on my intuition and I wanted to show Nora Iuga as I see her. I decided I
    wanted it to be a film about this Nora Iuga even if I would fail, so I based it
    on the chemistry between us and the things that I find touching about her. And
    what’s fascinating is that people were able to relate to me, to this image I
    had of her. Deep down I hoped this would happen, I hoped Nora Iuga’s charm
    would have the same effect on the public that she had on me. Moreover, I worked
    very hard on this film. I was brimming with joy at the reaction of the
    audience, when, at TIFF, the film received standing ovations after the first
    screening, on June 14 last year. People also stayed for the Q&A session,
    nobody left. And somehow that very strong impact the film had on the audience
    did not diminish at all, after the screening in theatres people stay in there a
    little longer and applaud, even though we’re not speaking about a special event
    and we are not there with them to have discussions. I am very happy because of that, I am happy
    because film had such an impact and because it has done its job, I am happy it
    touches people. I really thought it was just as normal for Nora Iuga’s fans to
    be keen on watching the film, but I am also glad that even those who didn’t
    know her or were unfamiliar with her work, fell in love with her. So many
    people told me that, having watched the documentary, they bought her books,
    searched for interviews with her, they were even looking for info about her. It
    is wonderful that, through this film, we succeeded to bring fil aficionados and
    reader together, these two bubbles somehow met, which is great, I think.

     

     

    Before becoming a writer, Nora Iuga wanted to become
    an actress, so the documentary made by Carla Maria-Teaha made Nora Iuga’s dream
    come true.

     

    To tell you the truth, I wanted
    to become an actress ever since I was in high-school. I ‘ve always wanted to
    become an actress, perhaps it is something that comes from my family, my
    parents were artists and so were my grandparents. My mother was a ballerina,
    father, a violinist, one of the grannies was an opera singer, a grandparent was
    a stage director, so I never thought of myself as taking a career path which
    was different from that of an actress. I have always dreamed of that, what’s
    most astonishing is the fact that I have never ceased to want to become an
    actress, even after the great actor Radu Beligan flunked me at the Drama School
    admission exam, telling me my elocution was not good enough. I personally do
    not think there is a problem with my elocution, other people didn’t tell me
    that either, yet I cannot question Radu Beligan either. Now, returning to the film
    made by Carla Maria Teaha, as days go by, it comes as something clearer and
    clearer to me that it was all about a miracle, a very old dream of mine came
    true just now, after a lifetime.

     

     

    Mircea Cărtărescu heaped praise on Nora Iuga’s most
    recent poetry volume. Fetita striga-n pahar is hitherto the peak
    of Nora Iuga’s poetry and one of the most powerful poetry books I have read
    recently. It is like a shrapnel exploding in your face, spreading splinters,
    shards, rough pieces of metal, of memory, of brain, of quotes, of any kind of
    stuff suitable to write on your skin the judgement of a fragmented, abused
    beauty .

     

  • The poet Tudor Arghezi (1880-1967)

    The poet Tudor Arghezi (1880-1967)


    Born Ion Nae Theodorescu and using the pen name Tudor Arghezi, the 20th Century writer approached all literary genres, from poetry to short stories, novels, theatre and journalism, although he excelled in poetry. He was also passionate about painting and drawing.



    Arghezi was born in 1880 in Bucharest and died in 1967 in the Romanian capital city. He made his debut in 1896, and in his early years he was close to Symbolism and the Vienna Secession movement. As a young artist, he became friends with the journalist and priest Gala Galaction and the left-wing writer Vasile Demetrius. During the 1907 uprising, he stood up for the oppressed peasantry, and became close to the Socialist-leaning writer and journalist N. D. Cocea. But during the same period he also wrote art criticism articles and he became close to Liberal-leaning personalities like Eugen Lovinescu and Ion Minulescu, as well as to art collectors like Krikor Zambaccian and Alexandru Bogdan-Pitești.



    During the Great War, he expressed pro-German views in the “Gazeta Bucureștilor” (Bucharest Gazette), put out by the German occupation authorities between 1916 and 1918. At the end of the war, he was sentenced to 5 years in prison for collaborationism, but was pardoned by the king after only serving one year.



    After the war, he worked extensively as a journalist and a writer. In 1928 he became the director of a literary publication called “Bilete de papagal”, which ran in 4 series, in 1928-1929, June-October 1930, 1937-1938 and 1944-1945, with well-known Romanian poets like Otilia Cazimir, George Topârceanu, Felix Aderca and Urmuz seeing their works published in it.



    In the inter-war period, he wrote childrens literature, and during WWII, in 1943, because of a parody targeting the German ambassador to Bucharest, he was arrested for a year. The Radio Romania archive preserves an audio recording of Tudor Arghezi reading the 1931 poem “Flori de mucigai” (“Flowers of Mildew”), which dwells on his prison time.



    After the war, Arghezis work was banned during 1948-1952 by the communist censorship. But thanks to Mihai Ralea, a cultural personality who had joined the ranks of the communist nomenklatura, his name was cleared and he took full advantage of his new position. He wrote poetry acceptable to the regime, and saw his 80th anniversary celebrated by the Academy of the Peoples Republic of Romania in 1960. On that occasion, Arghezi gave a speech exuding false modesty, duplicity and self-victimisation, in which he made a point of slandering pre-war democratic Romania:



    Tudor Arghezi: “Although in the Socialist era my writing enjoys almost undeserved appreciation, a recital for me is overwhelming. It was my fate to experience the great chasm between two ages, both for literature and for my insignificant self. What was, in the old times, a writer, a composer, a painter or an actor? A lesser or a bigger shame, depending on the family in which they had been born. Personally, over the years I had to fight, during my creative years, against all the related cultural authorities: the academia, the Academy, poetry, prose, print media, the police, the judiciary, the censorship, the gendarmes and even my fellow writers. I was isolated, with my pen and my notebooks, on an ice bloc as large as the country, I was ridiculed, spit at, insulted. The only right and the only duty of a writer were to die on a mat in hospital or in a mental institution. Save for some patriotic poems, sung in the army and in primary school and written by Alecsandri, and for the works of Carmen Sylva, with their royal atmosphere, anyone else was irrelevant, almost loathsome.”



    Tudor Arghezis home on Mărțișor street in Bucharest is now a museum, preserving the poets legacy. (AMP)


  • 35 years since the death of philosopher Constantin Noica

    35 years since the death of philosopher Constantin Noica

    Constantin Noica, one
    of the leading Romanian philosophers of the 20th Century, was born
    in 1909 in Teleorman County, in the south of Romania, and died on December 4, 1987
    in Sibiu.




    He attended the School
    of Philosophy and Letters of the Bucharest University, where he graduated in 1931
    with a paper on the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. He was drawn to the views
    of Romanian existentialism, whose main promoter was Nae Ionescu, one of Noica’s
    professors.

    In the 1930s, Noica was close to the Criterion philosophy
    society. In 1940, after a one-year residency in France, he returned to Romania
    to present his Ph.D. thesis in philosophy. That same year, he left for Berlin,
    to work with the Romanian-German Institute, and stayed there until 1944, when
    Romania left its alliance with Nazi Germany. During his stay in Germany, Noica
    attended Martin Heidegger’s philosophy seminar.




    After the war and
    after the communists seized power in Romania, in 1949 Noica was placed by the
    authorities of the time in a forced residence in Câmpulung-Muscel. In 1958 he
    was arrested, prosecuted and sentenced to 25 years of forced labour together
    with the other participants in the informal meetings of the so-called Noica-Pillat
    group.




    Released in 1964, he
    was employed by the Logic Centre of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest. This is
    where he became friends with acclaimed Romanian intellectuals like the
    philosophers Gabriel Liiceanu, Sorin Vieru, Andrei Pleșu, Andrei Cornea. In
    1975 he moved to Păltiniș, a mountain resort 15 km from the city of Sibiu, where
    he received the visits of those seeking answers to the philosophical questions
    of the time.




    Noica’s work
    comprises 32 volumes of philosophy, literary and art criticism, journalism articles,
    of which 20 published during his lifetime and 12 after his death.


    The philosopher and essayist
    Andrei Pleșu was one of Noica’s disciples. Pleșu made it quite clear that he
    owes his intellectual growth to the jailbirds, as the Romanian intellectual elite
    sent to prison by the communists were dubbed. One of the jailbirds was
    Constantin Noica.




    Andrei Peşu: I was lucky to get my training next to a
    number of jailbirds. They were of decisive help to me, they shaped me, they
    made me rebuild an intellectual continuity with the previous generations, and
    this was tremendously important for the young man that I was. I was lucky to
    meet early on Alexandru Paleologu, Sergiu Al-George, Remus Nicolescu, Teodor
    Enescu, I. D. Sârbu even, although not in his capacity as a teacher. As a
    student, I was colleagues with a gentleman 10 years my senior, who had graduated
    from the theology institute, had also served some time in prison, and now he
    was an art history freshman. His name was Marin Tarangul and I had a lot of
    respect for him, because he was a gentleman and he had an extraordinary
    library, for those times. One day he came to me and said, Listen, there is
    someone writing for România literară now, you certainly didn’t hear about it.
    His name is Constantin Noica. Read him, Marin said, to see what the true
    language of philosophy sounds like.




    For Andrei Pleșu, meeting
    Noica’s philosophy, and then meeting Noica himself, meant the opening of an new
    existential and cultural horizon.




    Andrei Pleşu: I read it, I was in awe, it was a completely
    different sound from what I had heard before. It so happened that I was
    studying English with a lady Meri Polihroniade, the widow of a right-wing
    professor who had died in prison, but whose second husband had served time in
    prison with Mr. Noica. And this is how I was able to get to Mr. Noica. He was
    living in Berceni, in a two-room flat in a new apartment building. He was quite
    properly dressed, I remember I was surprised with his elegance. After talking
    with him, together with Marin, he offered us 10 ancient Greek lessons. And he
    was also the one who told me, if you want to take up philosophy, you absolutely
    need German, so start learning the language. And he also gave me 3 books to
    read.




    Constantin Noica remains
    a great name in Romanian 20th Century philosophy, not only thanks to
    his scholarly works and translations from ancient Greek philosophers, but also
    as a model of professionalism and academic integrity. (AMP)

  • Radio Romania at the Gaudeamus Bookfair

    Radio Romania at the Gaudeamus Bookfair

    The
    29th edition of the GAUDEAMUS Bookfair was held over December 7 and
    11 in Bucharest’s Romexpo Exhibition Compound. After two years of going online,
    Romania’s most widely-read bookfair organized by the Romanian Radio Broadcasting
    Corporation returned to the format that has imposed it for almost thirty years
    now. At the recently-held edition of the Gaudeamus Bookfair in Bucharest more
    than 600 editorial events were ongoing as part of the fair. There were more
    than 200 participants who offered the reading public a very wide range of
    editorial products.


    Eli
    Badica is the coordinator of Nemira Publishers’ N’author collection. Diana
    Epure is Paralela 45 Publishers’ PR and the coordinator of the First Love
    collection. We invited them both in Radio Romania International studios. We had
    them speak about their publishing initiatives, specifically, about two of the
    projects that have succeeded to bring today’s Romanian literature in the
    spotlight. The First Love collection, coordinated by Diana Epure made its debut
    with five novels written by Romanian women and men writers, Diana Geacăr,
    Andrei Crăciun, Andrei Dosa, Alina Pietrăreanu and Cristina Ispas. The collection was launched at the summer edition of
    the Bookfest Bookfair. It is a contemporary
    Romanian literature collection targeting the young readership. It was available
    at the Gaudeamus Boookfair and recent releases will surely prolong its life. With
    details on that, here is Diana Epure.


    There is indeed a continuity, therefore, as part of the
    collection, a micro-novel by Stefan Manasia will be brought out, entitled The
    Sycamores of Samothraki. Ștefan Manasia is a Generation 2000 author, he is a very
    talented writer, he is a poet, an essayist and a prose writer, highly appreciated
    by the readers. The Sycamores of Samothraki is Ștefan Manasia’s second prose work
    and can be compared with art film for high-school students. It is about a boy
    who is initiated in his quest by his uncle, the boy is warm and open-hearted and
    all this warmth of the main character overflows in Stefan Manasia’s book which
    I don’t think high-school students cannot fall for it. As I’ve said many times
    before, I asked our writers to come up with a book for teenagers, a book they themselves
    wanted to have read in secondary school or in high school, but back in the day they
    didn’t have such a book. That’s how the First Love collection was started and
    it is true the writers tried their best and the micro novels that came out of
    their efforts were indeed extraordinary. That is the case of Stefan Manasia’s novel
    that was launched at the Gaudeamus Bookfair at the stand of our publishers. I
    should also like to say that at this edition of the Fair, the Paralela 45 Publishers
    had the largest stand ever to have hosted the publishers’ releases, since we
    wanted to have as comprehensive as possible a presentation of our publishing
    house. We promote all the facets of a
    publishing house for generations, just as we consider ourselves to be. And by that,
    I mean all the genres the Paralela 45 Publishing House is specialized in.


    Four years have passed since the Nemira Publishers has
    launched N’autor, a collectipon of contemporary Romanian literature, which reflects
    the world we live in, in a variety of ways. It is one of the most widely-read
    contemporary Romanian literature collections. The most recent release and the most eagerly-awaited is Florin Chirculescu’s The Necromancer. Here is the
    coordinator of N’Author, Eli Badica, speaking about the collection’s novelties.


    Florin
    Chirculescu’s book is, indeed, an event.
    It is a remarkable book in any respect, stylistically, but also plot-wise, since
    the central character is the towering figure of the most important Romanian
    poet,
    Mihai Eminescu. And
    also remarkable is the fact that it succeeds to render Mihai Eminescu more
    human. I do not know of any other such text, with such a wide scope, capable of
    depicting so convincing a portrait of Mihai Eminescu. It is an impressively well-documented
    book, whose underlying scholarship is tremendous, yet it is at once a book written
    with so much originality and so much humour. Now, returning to the N’Author’s
    recent releases, Raluca Nagy’s novel, A Horse in a Sea of Swans and Tales
    from the Garage by Goran Mrakić, these books happened to be
    brought out simultaneously, which reminds me of a tour we took in 2018, when we
    had these two authors travelling with us, after the aforementioned volumes had
    been launched. Actually, among the novelties you could access at Gaudeamus,
    there also was Goran Mrakić’s debut novel, Death’s petty Pleasures , brought
    out earlier this fall. It is a book where the author continues the literary mapping
    of Banat, something he had also dealt with in the previous volume. Also this past
    fall, Horea Sibișteanu’s first novel was brought out, a puzzle-novel. With this
    mosaic novel, Horea Sibișteanu has already seen his second book brought out as
    part of the N’autor collection. Entitled Hold Out Your Hand, Tiberiu, the novel’s
    central character is a young man in pursuit of his identity, nay, he is trying
    to come to terms with it. Also, he is trying to recompose his childhood of the
    1990s, from scattered pieces, also trying to understand himself in a
    present-time which is so very close to us. Also among the novelties there is the
    first novel of Liviu Ornea, whom everybody knows to be a mathematician, a translator,
    an academic, a researcher and a theater critic. After his debut with The
    Future in the Past, in 2022, this year he returned with Life as a Silly Joke,
    which is, like I said, his first novel.


    As an absolute first, on the premises at the fair and
    jointly with the partners of the recently-held edition Comic Opera for Children
    and the Versus Association, two areas were arranged, dedicated to interactive
    activities for the youngest visitors. The Mircea Nedelciu National Reading
    Contest, targeting the high-schools students, in 2022 unfolded in an original
    format, based on vide-cast essays. The theme of the contest was The Marin Preda
    Centennial. Commemorating 100 years since his birthday.(EN)



  • Romanian well-established writers’ recent accomplishments

    Romanian well-established writers’ recent accomplishments



    Nora Iuga, one of the most critically-acclaimed living writers, is the author of Hippodrome, a novel brought out by the Polirom Publishers in Bucharest. Having got her novel published, Nora Iuga said she was having a rest after that, writing poetry.



    Poet, prose writer and translator Nora Iuga was born on January 4, 1931. She is a member of the PEN Club and a member of Romanian Writers’ Union. Nora Iuga has got more than 20 volumes published so far, poetry and prose. Here are some of the titles of her works: I’m not the one to blame (1968), The Captivity of the Circle (1970), Opinions on Pain (1980), Heart as a Boxer’s Punch (1982, 2000), The Sky Square (1986), The Night Typist (1996, 2010), The Dummies’ hospital (1998, 2010), The Hump-backed Bus (2001, 2010), Party in Montrouge (2012), The Wet Dog is a willow tree (2013), Hear the brackets crying (2016), Leopold Bloom’s Soap Bar (1993), The Sexagenarian and the Young Man (2000), Harald and the Blue Moon (2014).



    Nora Iuga’s prose and poetry works have been translated into several languages. In 2007, Nora Iuga was the recipient of the Friedrich-Gundolf Prize, awarded by Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, (The German Academy for Language and Literature). In 2015, at the recommendation of the President of Germany, Joachim Gauck, Nora Iuga was awarded the Cross of Merit Order in the Rank of Knight. In 2017, Romanian president Klaus Iohannis bestowed the National Order of Merit in the Rank of Commander on Nora Iuga.



    We had Nora Iuga as a guest on RRI. We invited the distinguished senior writer to speak about her most recent novel, Hippodrome. It is a book with an obvious autobiographical character, dedicated to the city she was brought up in: Sibiu. It is There that she met the Ursuline nuns, it is There that she saw Jovis, the white horse, in Schuster’s window case. The horse still lingers in her memory. It is also there that she taught German during the communist regime, becoming one of the pupils’ favorite teachers.



    Nora Iuga:



    The project of this book dates a while back. It should be 15 years now, I guess, since I have been thinking I owe this city. But it’s not that I owe it like it’s a liability, like it’s a sum of money I borrowed and I need to return. I insist, all throughout the book, on that particular name, Hermannstadt, as it’s that city I have been most attached to, Hermannstadt, and less to the Sibiu of today. As it was there that for the first time I felt the thrill of love, when I was ten, without realizing what that mix of feelings meant, I just couldn’t explain the feeling I had on a winter night, when I was on the main street running to the Romans’ Emperor, Sibiu’s most important Saxon hotel. It was there that my daddy had his live concerts, he was a violinist and head of the orchestra, and I was hurrying to give him the little pine three cake he had to rosin his bow hair with. This city also occasioned encounters with people whose influence on my destiny was crucial. Unfortunately, quite a few of them have for long not been among us. No more nuns, my nuns of the Ursuline Monastery, to whom I owe half of my being. Whenever, in my books, I bring up Nora A and Nora B, I am not doing that randomly, I am made of two halves that are at loggerheads with one another, but that’s not unusual. I am dead positive that in every human being, there are two antagonistic and almost incompatible characters who quarrel all the time. And if Nora A is the frantically larksome one, Nora B is the wiser one and she is always lecturing Nora A.



    Here is Nora Iuga once again, this time speaking about how she constructed Hippodrome, the novel that captured a life lived under three dictatorships, two of them instated by Carol II and Ion Antonescu, followed by the third dictatorship, the communist one.



    There are two distinct categories of writers, those who construct, while the other ones let themselves lead by that uncontrolled inner flow, and I certainly belong to the second category. That uncontrolled inner flow can be quite like memories, since we cannot control the memories coming upon us. And so vivid are some of those memories that they almost frighten us, it is thanks to our memories that we can relive certain events as they really happened, well, almost. It seems to me memories can be compared with the dreams that can take the shape of the things that happened long before, yet in a slightly changed manner. Notwithstanding, we can identify those events that happened a long time ago, we know that a long, long time ago, we might have lived that. When old age comes, when you find yourself all alone, the greatest joy is to be able to go deeper into your inner self, but that does not mean you must relate to your biographical past.


    Just as it can be also seen in the book, I lived under three dictatorships and I can say I am still very fond of the time of monarchy during which I lived when I was a child and for which I have vivid memories that still linger in my mind, I cannot imagine a time more beautiful than that. I have always lived under the sign of contradictions, but as a child I did not realize it was unjust to walk barefoot just as I saw hucksters walking. Funny thing is, when I look back at that, right now, I seem to watch a movie which is full of poetry. What I’m trying to say is that I just cannot be too hard on everybody, I believe each and every one of us has very deep roots in childhood, and those roots cannot be torn up by anyone. Things that today can be rectifiable, for me they were a source of joy.


    (EN)




  • Poet Ștefan Augustin Doinaș

    Poet Ștefan Augustin Doinaș

    The poet, translator, essayist, academician, and politician Ștefan Augustin Doinaș, whose 100th birthday anniversary is marked this year, is known to high school students and the Romanian cultural public thanks to the poem The boar with silver fangs. The poem was a subject of study in the Romanian language and literature textbook for the 12th grade and was popularized in the 1970s by the Flacăra literary circle.



    By his real name Ștefan Popa, Doinaș was born on April 26, 1922 in Arad County, in a wealthy family, and died on May 25, 2002 in Bucharest, at the age of 80. He went to high school in Arad and became acquainted with the works of important Romanian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries such as Vasile Alecsandri, Dimitrie Bolintineanu, Mihai Eminescu, Tudor Arghezi and with the works of French poets such as Stephane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry. In 1941 he went to Sibiu to study medicine at the University of Cluj, which was transferred there, after in 1940, Northern Transylvania had been ceded to Hungary. He gave up medicine to study Philology and Philosophy, a faculty he graduated in 1948.



    Between 1948 and 1955 he was a Romanian language teacher and in the same year 1955 he gave up teaching and settled in Bucharest. In 1956 he joined the Teatru magazine, a theater criticism magazine. In 1957, after being sentenced to one year in prison, he was fired and banned from publishing until 1963. After his release, he managed to join the Lumea magazine following the intervention of George Ivașcu, an influential cultural personality. In 1969 he moved to the literary magazine Secolul 20, one of the most important Romanian literary magazines, a magazine to which he was linked until the end of his life. From 1964 to 2000 he published 13 volumes of poetry on existentialist themes. His work also includes six volumes of literary criticism and essays, two volumes of children’s literature, a theater play and a volume of prose.



    Paying homage to his personality, the poet and literary historian Ion Pop has showed that the style of Ștefan Augustin Doinaș is one in which a poetic language can be conceived by combining two opposite trends: the rigor of exact sciences and the freedom of a rule-free game.



    Ion Pop: “At a first glance, the poetry of Ștefan Augustin Doinaș seems very far from the world of games, being considered by many as a space for free activities, in contrast with the existential seriousness. Doinaș is also a refined word craftsman, and his image, engraved from the beginning in the reader’s memory, is that of an author of poems written according to the classical rigors, controlled intellectually in a strict manner. He is ‘the man with a pair of compasses as the title of one of his important books goes.



    Doinaș was also a renowned translator and had 30 volumes of translated poetry published. Doinaș translated two masterpieces of world literature, Dr Faustus by Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Nietzsches Thus Spake Zarathustra. Both translations have been rated as monuments recreating into Romanian two masterpieces. Also, the works of Doinaș were translated into 10 European languages, including English, German, Italian and Spanish. In recognition of the authenticity and value of his work, Doinaș joined the Romanian Academy in 1992.



    Doinaș was part of a generation of Romanians traumatized by the communist regime. He suffered a lot from the very establishment of the regime, in the late 1940s, when his parents were declared kulaks – prosperous peasants who were exploiting the poor peasants, according to the Marxist-Leninist ideology. In 1957, a big change occurred in his life. After Stalins death in 1953, Doinaș, just like most Romanians, was expecting big changes to occur in Romania, but they never came. After the repression of the anti-communist revolution in Hungary, in 1956, on February 3, 1957 he was arrested and sentenced to one year in prison for failure to report a crime. Writer Marcel Petrișor had visited him, had told him about the anti-communist revolution in Hungary and about the Romanians possible solidarity with the changes occurring there.



    Arrested and tortured, Petrișor had confessed to the investigators with whom he had spoken about the events in the neighboring country. However, after 1989, it was found out that the political detainee Ștefan Augustin Doinaș, himself a victim of a denunciation, had, in turn, been an informer himself. Two writers, Ion Caraion and Ion Omescu, were arrested in 1957, also in the aftermath of the Hungarian anti-communist revolution. Caraion and Omescu faced prison sentences, with Doinaș being the witness of the prosecution. Doinaș was released from prison after one year, on April 8, 1958. He married Romanian Opera House ballerina Irinel Liciu, and had a 44-year long marriage. Just like in a Shakespearean tragedy, a couple of hours after Doinaș died, Irinel Liciu took her own life, swallowing an entire box of sleeping pills.



    Ștefan Augustin Doinaș was also a politician. After 1989, he wrote dozens of virulent anti-communist articles and enrolled in the Civic Alliance Party. Between 1993 and 1996, Doinaș was a senator. (LS, EN)

  • Tradition and innovation in Romania’s literary circles

    Tradition and innovation in Romania’s literary circles

    Literary circles are essential
    for the evolution of literature. Romanian literature has never been in short
    supply of such circles, especially during the country’s modernization and in
    its bid to harmonize domestic literature with the Western one. From the second
    half of the 19th century and until the instatement of communism, several
    noted literary circles had a strong bearing on Romanian literature. Among them,
    worth mentioning is Junimea, a literary circle founded in Iasi, in the north-east,
    in 1863, by a group of Romanian intellectuals with civic and political involvement,
    headed by Titu Maiorescu. Sburatorul is another noted literary circle, founded in
    Bucharest by professor and literary critic E. Lovinescu in the early 1920s. At
    that time, Sburatorul was responsible for the synchronization of Romanian
    literature with the literary trends of Western Europe. Yet apart from those two important literary
    circles, many other circles existed in Bucharest, some of them staged by aristocrats
    with artistic leanings, while other circles were initiated by bohemian artists,
    who were rather poor. As for the literary circles in Bucharest, they were
    connected to the rhythms of the city, turning the houses and the streets where
    they were held into the capital city’s mythical, legendary places.


    Victoria Dragu-Dimitriu’s recently-published
    volume, Tales of old-time literary circles of Bucharest, traces the
    biography of those places, laden with the atmosphere of old-time artistic and literary
    debates. Also, the book reshapes a literary geography that has been lost,
    partially, since some of the historical buildings had been demolished because
    of a dictatorial regime’s desperate need to erase as many traces of the past as
    possible. One such example is Titu Maiorescu’s house located in the city centre
    of Bucharest, a place where in late 19th century the last Junimea literary
    circle sessions were held and where Mihai Eminescu got round to reading an
    early version of his poem The Morning Star, Luceafarul in Romanian. However, not
    exactly at the heart of Bucharest, but on one of the nearby streets which
    survived to this day, preserving its historical flavour almost unaltered, the
    villa is still standing, where the Zoe Mandrea’s literary circle used to be held.
    Bucharesters are very familiar with the street where you can find the villa, since
    it is on the same street that Radio Romania’s main building can also be found.
    We’re speaking about General Berthelot Street of today, whose name has been
    changed many times throughout the years, just as the house where boyar lady Zoe
    Mandrea used to live changed its many owners, in time, today serving as the…headquarters
    of a police station.


    Victoria
    Dragu-Dimitriu gave details on what was going on in that literary circle in
    the final years of the 19th century.


    They never
    called it a literary circle, as far as I remember, since it was, in fact, a
    literary salon. At that time the name of the street was Fantanii, the Fountain
    Street. Those who attended Zoe Mandrea’s salon showed up walking along Fountain
    Street and there were not few people attending, and there were not only members
    of the Romanian aristocracy or of the intellectuals in very high positions,
    there were also noted writers. The spoilt guests of the literary circle were Barbu Ștefănescu-Delavrancea and Alexandru Vlahuță. But Eminescu would
    come as well, there even was a time when he used to come more often, I think, Titu Maiorescu also
    came, himself and his family. Many people of noble origin had been wandering
    through, there.


    In
    the first part of the 20th century, the literary avant-garde also had its own
    literary circles that were extremely non-conformist, they were held right on
    the streets of Bucharest, nearby the Lazar high-school, for instance, where Demetru Dem. Demetrescu-Buzău,
    used to be a pupil, he was the weird author whose penname was Urmuz. When still
    in high-school, himself and his gang of maverick class-mates waylaid passers-by
    who were walking close to the high school or those walking a bit farther, on the
    Dambovita river quay, nay, they even crossed the river towards the former Uranus
    district. But what Bucharesters used to say about that slapdash literary
    circle?

    Victoria Dragu-Dimitriu:


    Not everybody was happy to be waylaid
    in the street with a supplication uttered in a very deep voice: If you must
    know, as a matter of fact, Romanian letters have not died and there still exist
    youngsters who have kept on writing And if the waylaid person was a wee bit
    more sensitive, they were the target of the very poem who made Urmuz famous, Well,
    some chroniclers, they say     or other fragments of prose, early attempts along
    the way of that prose of his Urmuz bequeathed us. The one giving the account of
    this episode, not only was he a witness, he also was a participant. I’m
    speaking about George Ciprian, the actor who also was a playwright, with his play
    that enjoyed so many stage performances ,The man with the jade. For us,
    though, pride of place holds The Drake’s head, another play where those teenagers’
    reckless adventure was simply transposed on stage. And Ciprian, this time in
    his book of memoirs and not in The Drake’s head, tells us the last performance was
    given right in the principal’s office, where three or four boys and several
    other classmates that had gone with them performed a dance around the
    principal, who was flabbergasted. Since they were very good pupils, they were
    forgiven beforehand.


    The
    houses that played host to most of the sessions of the Sburatorul literary
    circle no longer exist either. However, the flat in the Elisabeta Boulevard,
    opposite the Law School building, stood the test of time, it was the flat where
    E. Lovinescu moved shortly before his death, in the summer of 1943.

    Victoria Dragu-Dimitriu.


    What we have here
    is a heroic story. It is the story of Lovinescu’s wife, his ex-wife, in fact, Ecaterina Bălăcioiu Lovinescu, who stayed in the house inherited by
    their daughter, Monica, after Lovinescu’s death in the summer of 1943. Monica
    Lovinescu, as we all know, left for Paris in 1946, in very difficult and very
    dramatic circumstance, and that extraordinary lady, her mother, French teacher Mrs
    Ecaterina Bălăcioiu remained in the house, trying to continue the literary
    circle sessions Monica Lovinescu herself, while still in the country, presided,
    with several other people by her side, of course. But when Monica left, her
    mother continued the literary circles for six or seven more sessions about
    which I found out for the first time ever from Ecaterina Bălăcioiu’s letters to
    her daughter, Monica. The letters were published in two volumes that simply brought
    centre-stage, in Romanian literature, a new and a great writer of an
    extraordinary psychological strength, a writer who did not intend to write
    literature proper and who wasn’t even aware she was writing literature, in her unnerving
    honesty to depict what was going on in that country and her burning longing for
    her daughter. The book is absolutely
    formidable, and thanks to her we came across a great writer.
    Thanks to Ecaterina Balacioiu’s letters to Monica Lovinescu we have the third
    great Lovinescu in Romanian writer.


    Although she failed to resurrect the literary
    circle, E. Lovinescu’s former wife managed to save some of the literary critic’s
    manuscripts, condemned to destruction by the communist authorities. We recall
    that those authorities nationalized the flat and threw Ecaterina Balacioiu in
    jail. She was well over 70 at that time.

    (Translation by Eugen Nasta)





  • Romanian writer Augustin Buzura and the communist censorship

    Romanian writer Augustin Buzura and the communist censorship

    Censorship was extremely vigilant in Romania during the communist regime, just like in any other totalitarian regime. The communist censorship mainly targeted intellectual works, and many writers came under fire, having no choice but to alter their own texts, or give up publishing their books altogether. Augustin Buzura was one of the writers who stood up to the communist censorship and whose works were banned by the communist regime.



    Born on September 22nd 1938, Augustin Buzura died on July 10, 2017. Buzura studied medicine and when he was very young he actually considered becoming a psychiatrist. However, during his student years Buzura was a columnist for prominent cultural magazines and went on to make a final decision for writing literature, since pursuing both careers would have been too demanding. In a 2008 interview to Radio Romanias Culture Channel, Augustin Buzura recalled the time of his debut as a prose writer. Here is the late Augustin Buzuras voice, stored in Radio Romanias Archives.



    Augustin Buzura: “My debut volume was brought out when I was a 3rd year student. I had written a couple of prose works. I used to work at night, when reading rooms in our campus were less crowded. It was during the night that I managed to write the volume of short stories entitled “The Cape of good hope, which people really liked. Part of the short stories included in that volume had been published in Tribuna magazine, but some of the others were published in other cultural magazines as well. As for the volume, it was included in the Luceafarul collection of the State Publishers for Literature and Arts. So this was my literature debut, a little jammed by medicine, so to say.



    Augustin Buzuras editorial debut with his short stories volume “Cape of good hope took place in 1963. A few years later, the communist regime became somewhat more relaxed and slightly more liberal, ideology-wise, so at that time literature was no longer constrained by the ideology of socialist realism, and writers were able to express themselves more freely. However, the relaxation period was short-lived. In 1971 Nicolae Ceausescu launched the so-called “mini-cultural revolution designed after a Maoist model. Here is prose writer Augustin Buzura once again, with details on that.



    Augustin Buzura: “Censorship had not been as bad as it became after the cultural revolution of the early 1970s. There had been certain rules you were not supposed to break, but I wasnt keen on doing that, at that time: you were not supposed to write “German, but only “East-German or “West-German, names of factories or products were not supposed to be stated, well, everything that was part of that basic secrecy area. But otherwise, you could write just about anything that was not a direct attack against the regime. You could describe it, instead, which to me seemed more harmful than an attack. I opted for describing it and writing about man in general, against the backdrop of a brutal history. I wrote the novel “The Absentees, I wrote it rather easily and, to my astonishment, with the advent of the mini-cultural revolution I was suddenly banned. Then, by some weird kind of logic, the novel was banned once again in 1988, although not a single copy of it could be found in bookshops and libraries.



    In spite of his renewed attempts, Augustin Buzura failed to find out the reason why his novel, “The Absentees, was banned. After a long time, he was given a vague explanation, according to which he had described the regime in gloomy colours. In spite of the ban, Augustin Buzura did not change his style at all, so his later novels shared the same fate: they had to go through the many filters of the communist censorship.



    Augustin Buzura: “It was of paramount importance to me to speak to a censor. Writing a book took less time than fighting to get it published. Ive known censors of all types… Some of them were quite erudite, they were not at all amateur. For instance, my most criticized book, ‘Egos, went from one censors office to another, until it reached the Securitate, where they asked me how I knew about political inmates wearing tin glasses, about torture methods or working conditions at the Canal. This was the general tone the conversation had, and you had to nerve yourself for it. Conversely, other books, such as ‘Shelters, wouldnt have made it to the market if it hadnt been for the censor. He understood the kind of book it was. You could sometimes negotiate with censors who were older.



    With the fall of communism in December 1989, Augustin Buzura continued to take an active stance in culture, edited specialized magazines, led the Romanian Cultural Foundation and helped turn it into the present-day Romanian Cultural Institute.


    (translated by: Eugen Nasta, Vlad Palcu)