Ion Negoitescu
Encyclopedia
Ion Negoiţescu was a Romania
n literary historian, critic, poet, novelist and memoir
ist, one of the leading members of the Sibiu Literary Circle
. A rebellious and eccentric figure, Negoiţescu began his career while still an adolescent, and made himself known as a literary ideologue of the 1940s generation. Moving from a youthful affiliation to the fascist
Iron Guard
, which he later came to regret, the author became a disciple of modernist
doyen Eugen Lovinescu
, and, by 1943, rallied the entire Sibiu Circle to the cause of anti-fascism
. He was also one of the few openly homosexual
intellectuals in Romania to have come out
before the 1990s—an experience which, like his political commitments, is recorded in his controversial autobiographical writings.
After World War II, Negoiţescu's anti-communism
, dissident
stance and sexual orientation made him an adversary of the Romanian communist regime
. Marginalized and censored
, he spent three years as a political prisoner
. Ultimately reinstated during a late 1960s episode of liberalization
, he continued to speak out against political restrictions, and came to be closely monitored by the Securitate
secret police
. In 1977, he joined Paul Goma
and Ion Vianu
in a civil society
protest against the rule of Nicolae Ceauşescu
, but was pressured into retracting. Eventually, Negoiţescu defected
to West Germany
, where he became a contributor to Radio Free Europe
and various other anti-communist outlets, as well as editor of literary magazines for the Romanian diaspora
communities. He died in Munich
.
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
. His diverse work, although scattered and largely incomplete, drew critical praise for its original takes on various subjects, and primarily for its views on the posthumously published writings of national poet Mihai Eminescu
. In tandem, the implications of Negoiţescu's private life and the various aspects of his biography, such as his relationship to exposed Securitate informant Petru Romoşan and the revelations of his unpublished diary, have remained topics of controversy in the years after his death.
, Negoiţescu was the son of Ioan, a career officer in the Romanian Land Forces
, and his wife Lucreţia née Cotuţiu. His maternal grandfather, a member of the Romanian Orthodox
clergy in Transylvania
, had taken part in the Memorandum
movement under Austro-Hungarian
rule. In contrast, Negoiţescu's father came from outside Transylvania, being born to parents from the Romanian Old Kingdom
. The future author studied at the Angelescu High School in his native city, and debuted in 1937, when he had lyric poetry
fragments published in the local newspaper Naţiunea Română. At age sixteen, Negoiţescu also published his first of several reviews in the student magazine Pâlcul, analyzing the Symbolist
poetry of Mateiu Caragiale
. It was as a high school student that he first met poet and thinker Lucian Blaga
. Reputedly, Blaga saw his adolescent disciple as a genius and encouraged him to seek a career in literature. Negoiţescu took his Baccalaureate
in 1940, and subsequently enlisted at the Cluj University
's Letters and Philosophy Department, where he studied under Blaga.
Having discovered his sexual inclination early in life, Negoiţescu claimed to have had his first sexual experiences while still a young boy. According to his own testimony, he made his coming out
at around age sixteen, when he wrote about his homosexuality in a test paper which he then handed to his supervising teacher. Reportedly, the paper was graded a ten out of ten, without further commentary from its recipient. Negoiţescu later openly assumed his sexual identity and, in contrast to other gay men of 20th century Romania, did not deny it in front of the conservative
cultural establishment (see LGBT rights in Romania). At the time however, the various ways in which the adolescent Negoiţescu disregarded social conventions caused a rift between him and his parents, resulting in the first of his several suicide attempts. Negoiţescu's subsequent life was marked by successive bouts of clinical depression
and self-hatred
.
, a revolutionary fascist
movement which would establish the National Legionary
regime (in existence between 1940 and 1941). As he himself later recalled, he contributed to the group's press and, wearing the green-colored paramilitary
uniform of the Guardists, took part in National Legionary street parades. This choice intrigued his biographers and reviewers of his work, who generally agree that it clashed with the young man's tolerant nature and individualism
.
In autumn 1940, following the Second Vienna Award
which granted Northern Transylvania
to Hungary, Negoiţescu followed the Cluj University's Romanian section as it relocated to the south of the new border, in Sibiu
. As a contributor to the student magazine Curţile Dorului, he met and befriended poet Radu Stanca
. It was also during that interval that he participated in the establishment of the Sibiu Literary Circle
, with other young men who followed Blaga. His colleagues there included Stanca, Nicolae Balotă, Ştefan Augustin Doinaş
, Cornel Regman and Eugen Todoran. They were joined by Victor Iancu, Ovidiu Cotruş, Ioanichie Olteanu, Ion Dezideriu Sîrbu
, Deliu Petroiu, Eta Boeriu
and Ovidiu Drimba. At the time, Negoiţescu was also acquainted with linguist Ştefan Bezdechi and philosopher Petre Ţuţea
.
By that point in his life, Negoiţescu made himself known as the ideologue of his generation, expanding his cultural horizon and familiarizing himself with the Classics
, with German philosophy
, and with the main works of Romanticism
, while dedicating his efforts to promoting the work of isolated young authors such as Stanca and Mircea Streinul. He had slowly moved into the anti-fascist
camp, objecting to both the Iron Guard and its partner-rival, the authoritarian
general and newly appointed Conducător
Ion Antonescu
. In 1941, he published Povestea tristă a lui Ramon Ocg ("The Sad Story of Ramon Ocg"), a lengthy prose poem which he presented as a novel. That same year, in autumn, he traveled to the capital city of Bucharest
, visiting modernist
critic and theorist Eugen Lovinescu
, the doyen of a literary circle known as Sburătorul
. Negoiţescu, who had just purchased himself the new critical synthesis newly published by Lovinescu's rival George Călinescu
, commented on its strengths and weaknesses with his host. The meeting left an impression on Lovinescu, whose diary for that day reads: "I have the feeling he is 'different', he is an 'exceptional' young man, who is set to have a singular destiny."
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
. Signed with the pseudonym Damian Silvestru and drafted by Negoiţescu, the letter stating this position was published by novelist Liviu Rebreanu
's magazine Viaţa. 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. 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". Among the accusations launched by the fascist and antisemitic venues, Negoiţescu found himself explicitly described as a "Bolshevik
", "traitor" and "hireling of the Jews". In contrast with such reactions, Lovinescu found himself positively impressed by the group' gesture, and sent the Sibiu writers a letter which acknowledged them as his disciples. His sympathetic portrait of Negoiţescu, published later in the year by Timpul
newspaper, further publicized this special connection. The piece was nevertheless received with noted reserve by Negoiţescu's own friends and colleagues, who did not necessarily share the two theorists' confidence in each other's ideologies.
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. Alongside members of the Circle, the main contributors included the movement's mentor Blaga and various other established Romanian writers. Negoiţescu's own works of that year included the study Viitorul literaturii române? ("The Future of Romanian Literature?"), in which he expressed a belief that urbanization
and urban-themed modernist literature had rendered its traditionalist competitor, with its rural subjects, at the same time obsolete and objectionable. By 1945 however, the Sibiu group was breaking up, largely owing to the decline of cultural activity, as well as to the recovery of Northern Transylvania (since the young writers were able to consider returning to their respective homes).
In 1946, Negoiţescu attempted to create a new venue for the Sibiu authors, named Euphorion and based in newly reincorporated Cluj, but had little success in obtaining support. According to Sîrbu, who was at the time detached as a commissioned sergeant in the Romanian Army, his colleagues had been attracted into cooperation with the increasingly powerful Romanian Communist Party
, but only as a means to preserve their livelihood. Negoiţescu had earlier published the second of his books, Despre mască şi mişcare ("On the Mask and the Movement"). In 1947, one year after his graduation, Romania's official publishing house, Editura Fundaţiilor Regale, granted him its Young Writers prize for the manuscript volume Poeţi români ("Romanian Poets"). With credentials signed by Blaga and French academic Henri Jacquier, and sponsored by the Romanian oil company Titan-Călan-Nădrag, Negoiţescu was again in Bucharest, where he and Stanca both hoped to receive scholarship
s from the Institut de France
. He was involved in cultural networking: in permanent correspondence with his former Sibiu colleagues, he also established contacts with novelist Dinu Nicodin
, and befriended Lovinescu's daughter Monica
(later a self-exiled critic and journalist).
In this context, Negoiţescu was made a member of the board granting awards in the memory of Eugen Lovinescu (and named after the theorist), his influence helping in granting such distinctions to Doinaş and Stanca. However, the correspondence of this period also shows aggravated tensions between Circle members such as Doinaş and Sburătorul
affiliates like Felix Aderca
and Vladimir Streinu (who were both among the Lovinescu Award trustees). In June of the same year, somewhat intimidated by the experience, Negoiţescu returned to his home region, where, in August, he received news that his paper of Paul Valéry
's poetic style had been rejected by the Institut examiners.
, when he became exposed to political persecution. Initially, he was employed as a librarian by the Romanian Academy
's Cluj section (1950–1952). He was in tandem working on a critical analysis of Mihai Eminescu
's work, Poezia lui Eminescu ("Eminescu's Poetry"), completed around 1953 but rejected by the new censorship apparatus
. He had befriended the younger journalist and author Constantin Ţoiu, who divided his time between writing for communist-aligned journals such as Gazeta Literară and frequenting marginalized figures; reportedly, it was a consequence of this ambivalence that Gazeta Literară editor Paul Georgescu
effectively terminated Ţoiu's employment.
Despite his political dossier and the officially endorsed repression of homosexuality, Negoiţescu had by then been made notorious for his successive amorous relationships with men from all walks of life, and rumors spread that he was also briefly involved with local celebrities. His heterosexual friend Nicolae Balotă also recalled running into Negoiţescu at a 1955 party of "Uranian
s", where writer Mihai Rădulescu
and classical pianist Alexandru Demetriad were in attendance, and where Balotă was allegedly the only straight man. 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. In 1955, he was also present at the burial of writer Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu
, who had been one of the leading Sburătorul figures before being marginalized by communism: in Negoiţescu's own definition, she had been led to her grave "almost a pauper". Also then, just prior to being arrested, Sîrbu made an attempt to group his former university colleagues around his magazine Teatru. 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.
Beginning 1958, the clash between Negoiţescu and the Socialist Realist cultural mainstream reached new proportions: the Communist Party-controlled media, including Scînteia
daily, singled him out for having adopted "aestheticism
". In this context, his adversary Paul Georgescu wrote about Negoiţescu's earlier "reactionary
" stance, and claimed that the author was still failing to adopt "the judicious attitude". Similar condemnation was expressed by other Gazeta Literară contributors: Savin Bratu (who alleged that Negoiţescu was one of those who circulated "names, works and ideas that we find foreign"); Mihai Gafiţa (who held Negoiţescu 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"). In particular, such voices condemned the critic's praise of banned authors, among them Lovinescu, Blaga, Mateiu Caragiale, Ion Barbu
and Titu Maiorescu
. The same year, Negoiţescu was excluded from the Writers' Union
, and had his right of signature officially withdrawn (meaning that his name could no longer be seen in print). Eventually, in 1961, he became a political prisoner
at Jilava penitentiary, and was eventually released though a 1964 amnesty.
Reportedly, the reasons for Negoiţescu's sentencing were his participation in "hostile discussions" dealing with literary topics and his ambition of circulating an anthology of Romanian poetry that included banned authors. However, the actual arrest, concluding a major purge of the intellectual field, is also seen by some as a late ramification in the show trial
targeting intellectuals Dinu Pillat and Constantin Noica
. During his interrogation, Negoiţescu made a point of not implicating his friend Ţoiu, by claiming that the activities he had been indicted of were pursued despite Ţoiu's better advice. As he later recalled, his body of published works was kept as evidence of his hostility to the official line, while a court decision led to the expropriation
of his personal items (including his large collection of books, which was assigned to Editura pentru literatură publishers). Alerted by Doinaş, the critic's mother had destroyed all manuscripts he kept in his Cluj home, including his childhood diary (which reportedly opened with the words "I want to be a writer"). Negoiţescu himself recalled that, while in penitentiary, he contemplated suicide for a second time: "I wanted to 'pull one' on my torturers and destroy the object of their sadistic pleasure". According to one account, he had tried to poison himself with meat he had allowed to fester, being unaware that boiled food could not breed deadly bacteria.
, who later recounted how, as an employee of Gazeta Literară, he had attempted to find Negoiţescu a full writing job. Negoiţescu's new domicile, a basement room on Bucharest's Ana Ipătescu Boulevard, was a meeting spot for members of the Sibiu Circle and for young literary figures (Călinescu, Virgil Nemoianu
, Toma Pavel). During the liberalization
episode which coincided with the start of Nicolae Ceauşescu
's communist rule, a relaxation of censorship signified that he was again allowed to publish, producing the volumes Scriitori moderni ("Modern Writers", 1966) and Poezia lui Eminescu (1967). After 1965, he and other Sibiu Circle members were reunited around two new venues: the Transylvanian-based magazine Familia
and Secolul 20, a cultural periodical edited by Doinaş.
By then, Negoiţescu was working on his synthesis of Romanian literary history. Its summary version was first published in 1968 by Familia, and instantly made its author the center of attention from several milieus. Having decided not to treat his subjects in the conventional Marxist-Leninist
manner encouraged by the authorities, he stirred polemic passions on the literary scene and became a target for surveillance by the authorities. Negoiţescu's text, which linked Romanian literary history with the development of urban culture, also intrigued the cultural establishment because it seemed to leave out completely all works produced before 1800. Also in 1968, Negoiţescu moved on from Luceafărul to Viaţa Românească
, where he was also granted an editorial staff office (a position he kept until 1971). That same year, he was allowed to travel beyond the Iron Curtain
, but, as he himself recalled, the communist press at home had used the occasion to call him a "defector", "traitor" and "fascist". While in France, Negoiţescu visited Monica Lovinescu
, who was by then noted as a literary reviewer for the Romanian diaspora
and anti-communist
spokeswoman. Upon his return, Negoiţescu admitted to Romanian officials that the object of this meeting was to reestablish the Eugen Lovinescu Award, which Monica Lovinescu had considered delegating to a panel of young critics living inside Romania (Matei Călinescu, Virgil Nemoianu, Nicolae Manolescu
, Eugen Simion, Mihai Ungheanu and Ileana Vrancea); according to his account, the Communist Party structures prevented him from even suggesting this offer to the cultural official Paul Niculescu-Mizil. Later, when he wanted to revisit France and honor the personal invitation of writer Jacques Borel
, the communist apparatus denied him a new passport. In early 1969, Negoiţescu, newly readmitted into the Writers' Union, was assigned an apartment on Bucharest's Calea Victoriei
. In December of the same year, the authorities threatened to confiscate the Negoiţescu's citing a juridical rationale he viewed as untenable, and, as a result, he initiated a formal gesture of protest.
Despite the rising negative reactions against his work, Negoiţescu continued to publish essays and monograph
s: Însemnări critice ("Critical Records", 1970), E. Lovinescu (1970), ("Aladdin
's Lamp", 1971), ("Engrams
", 1975), Analize şi sinteze ("Analyses and Syntheses", 1976). These books occasionally transgressed the limits imposed by communist leaders, and sparked several of his more or less severe clashes with censorship. In one incident of 1971, the entire circulation of Lampa lui Aladin was confiscated and destroyed by the regime's representatives. Such measures caused Negoiţescu distress, and led him to attempt killing himself a third time, on August 23, 1974 (the 1944 Coup's 30th anniversary, and Romania's national holiday during communism). According to his friend, psychiatrist Ion Vianu
, Negoiţescu was hospitalized in the Bucharest Emergency Hospital
for a long period, after having swallowed a large quantity of hypnotic
s. In parallel with these events in his life and career, he published several works of poetry: Sabasios (1968), Poemele lui Balduin de Tyaormin ("Poems by Baldwin of Tyaormin", 1969), Moartea unui contabil ("Death of an Accountant", 1972), Viaţa particulară ("Private Life", 1977).
politics. That year, inspired by the Charter 77
movement in Communist Czechoslovakia
, Romanian novelist Paul Goma
drafted a collective petition critical of Ceauşescu's cultural and social policies in the post-July Theses
era. While Goma was being subjected to an inquiry by the Securitate, Negoiţescu signed an open letter
displaying his solidarity with the initiative, and openly rallied with various other forms of protest. The document in question further antagonized the regime when it was broadcast by the diaspora section of Radio Free Europe
, an anti-communist and West German
-based corporation.
Himself arrested shortly afterward, Negoiţescu was made subject to a humiliating and violent interrogation, at the end of which he again contemplated suicide. He was also threatened with prosecution on grounds of breaking Article 200
, a penal code section which criminalized homosexual relationships. The Securitate men were by then interested in the homosexual relationship between Negoiţescu and young poet Petru Romoşan, who was also taken into custody at the time, and whom various commentators of the incidents have since identified as the person secretly furnishing information on the critic's personal life. Several other men were detained as suspects, largely on charges of having had intercourse with Negoiţescu. The group, which Romoşan himself argues included some 30 people, notably included poet Marian Dopcea, at the time a student at the University of Bucharest
. The implications of Negoiţescu's arrest also made him the target of interest in the Western world
governments, representatives of which followed the case with concern. At the same time, the communist regime was forcefully expelling Goma and Ion Vianu, the latter of whom had joined the public protest by calling attention to the use of involuntary commitment
as a political weapon.
As a means of avoiding this penalty, Negoiţescu agreed to draft and sign Despre patriotism ("On Patriotism"), an essay retracting his statements and expressing regret for his action. According to writer Ştefan Agopian, Negoiţescu himself was forced by the regime to accept a marriage of convenience
, while Romoşan's punitive incarceration became notorious in the literary milieu. Still allowed to travel into Western Europe
, he attended a 1979 poetry festival in Belgium, after which he became the recipient of several scholarship
s and invitations. He published two other Romanian books: his correspondence with Radu Stanca, as Un roman epistolar ("A Novel in Letters"), in 1978, and the collected essays volume Alte însemnări critice ("Some Other Critical Records") in 1980. However, Ion Negoiţescu spent the early 1980s abroad, and, from 1982 to 1983, lived in Cologne
, West Germany, and lectured in Romanian literature at the University of Münster
. During his brief returns to Romania, he was a target for attacks in the national communist
press, led at the time by writer Eugen Barbu
and his Săptămîna magazine.
In 1983, Negoiţescu decided to formalize his defection, settling in Munich
. He became a contributor to Radio Free Europe, as well as to Deutsche Welle
, BBC
and several diaspora magazines. He was editor of two literary magazines, Caietul de Literatură and the Bad Ditzenbach
-based Dialog, as well as Radio Free Europe programmer. Enlisting the collaboration of various exiled co-nationals, Dialog published Negoiţescu's articles on authors in and outside Romania (among them Agopian, Bedros Horasangian, Mircea Nedelciu
, Radu Petrescu and Dumitru Ţepeneag
). 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
.
. As early as 1990, Editura Dacia
published his În cunoştinţă de cauză ("With Full Knowledge"), grouping his anti-communist essays written abroad. The literary synthesis he had announced in 1968 was eventually published by Editura Minerva
in 1991. Titled Istoria literaturii române ("The History of Romanian Literature"), it was still incomplete, and only covered the 1800–1945 period. Based in reunified Germany
after 1989, Negoiţescu was writing his volume of memoirs, which he believed would be regarded as his masterpiece, and on which he worked intensely. He maintained contact with the Romanian literary scene, and was notably interviewed by his younger colleague Marta Petreu
. During one such encounter, he confessed his fear of dying before completing work on Straja dragonilor.
Hospitalized for a long interval, the Romanian writer died in Munich at age 71. His body was cremated, and his ashes taken back to Romania, where they buried at a cemetery in central Cluj. He had managed to complete only two chapters of his intended memoirs, published later by Petreu and Ion Vartic as Straja dragonilor ("Guarding the Dragons", Biblioteca Apostrof
, 1994). Three other writings saw print in the period immediately after his death: the postcript to Istoria..., titled Scriitori contemporani ("Contemporary Writers"); the diary and memoir Ora oglinzilor ("The Hour of Mirrors", 1997); and his collected letters to critic Sami Damian, titled Dialoguri după tăcere ("Dialogues after Silence", 1998). His work as an anthologist, dating back to the 1950s, also saw print under Regman's direction: De la Dosoftei la Ştefan Aug. Doinaş ("From Dosoftei
to Ştefan Aug[ustin] Doinaş", Editura Dacia, 1997).
, 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
. And over all this appearance, a mask of reverie". Creţu sees Negoiţescu's career as being consumed by "romantic
gestures or enthusiastic drives, hardly tempered by the prodigious culture of this oversensitive, never matured, dandy
." Referring to their collaboration in the Sibiu Circle during the late 1940s, Balotă however noted that Negoiţescu was an outspoken critic of those who valued beauty over message, being as such in line with the group's "ambiguous aestheticism
". According to Alex. Ştefănescu, Negoiţescu, a "solitary and misunderstood" figure, approached his mission more as an "accursed poet
" than a researcher, and found in literature "a drug" to "inject in his veins". In Ştefănescu's view, this fundamental trait, like Negoiţescu's homosexuality, was incompatible with both the "forceful brutishness" of communism and the "prude" nature of Romanian society.
Novelist and critic Norman Manea
referred to "the exemplary nature of [Negoiţescu's] case", as evidence that, contrary to popular opinion, the quality of one's literature "does not arrive from the ethic to the aesthetic, but the other way around." In his assessment, Negoiţescu was "a minority member, not just an erotic one, but a chosen person, personifying the burning conditioning, truly intrinsic, [...] between freedom and beauty, not just between liberty and morality". Similarly, Matei Călinescu
recalled being "fascinated" by "his vigorous 'decadent
' aestheticism which was however paradoxically doubled by a major moral intransigence in matters of art and artistic truth". He believed Negoiţescu's artistic vision to feature "a hidden moral edge", one occasionally turning back "on himself", and making Negoiţescu "one of the major ethical figures in Romanian culture
." A similar verdict was provided by Ion Vianu
: "his proud demeanor, the rigorous aestheticism he professed were the expression of an extreme exigence, as expanded on the artistic level as it was on the moral one." 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."
As negative consequences of Negoiţescu's aestheticism, Ştefănescu cites his "excess of solemnity" and the "excessive shyness" of his critical essays, as well as a lack of determination and a tendency toward "autosuggestion
". Likewise, writer Andrei Terian saw Negoiţescu as lacking a critic's "literary head", being instead an "avid consumer of art" with "an immense sensual appetite". In reference to the issue of critic versus artist, Ştefănescu argues: "He would provide contradictory verdicts. He would most often allow himself to be guided by the will to experience a moment of aesthetic beatitude. Whenever he lacked literary heroin, he would settle for a weak text [...]. He loved depths so much that he invented them." He and other commentators assess that Negoiţescu's self-avowed love for literature and books as objects was almost physical in nature.
. Bogdan Creţu, who notes the enthusiastic reception Negoiţescu granted to Caragiale's poetic work in his very first published essay, believes there is an intrinsic connection between the two figures at the level of aestheticism. According to Ion Vianu, the "beautiful, pale and distant" Negoiţescu brought to mind Aubrey de Vere, the "morbid aristocrat" in Caragiale's novella Remember. Negoiţescu's lifelong appreciation of Caragiale's work, specifically his claim that Craii de Curtea-Veche
novel was a masterpiece formed around a "secret architecture", was contested by literary critic and Anglicist
Mircea Mihăieş. Mihăieş described Craii... a sample of "pretentious kitsch
", and accused his various colleagues of having artificially increased Caragiale's cultural rating.
By 1945, Creţu argues, Negoiţescu had reached his creative maturity, primarily by perfecting the "deconstruction
" of texts making the object of his reviews. In particular, Creţu sees as outstanding the young critic's verdicts on George Călinescu's novel Enigma Otiliei (where Negoiţescu had identified, probably ahead of all other commentators, a level of parody
running underneath the formal borrowings from Honoré de Balzac
) and on the poems of George Bacovia
(compared by Negoiţescu to the overall artistic standards of the local Symbolist circles
, with which Bacovia had been formally affiliated). Written in parallel, Povestea tristă a lui Ramon Ocg, described by Ştefănescu as marking Negoiţescu's brief affiliation with Surrealism
, romanticizes the life of Mexican film star Ramón Novarro
, with emphasis on Navarro's homosexuality. In Bogdan Creţu's definition, the book shows Negoiţescu's commitment to anti-fascism, and especially his use of satire
against "the fascist ideology, with all its abuses." Creţu also notes that the printing of Povestea tristă... was financed with money Negoiţescu had made by selling his leather boots, part of a Guardist's paramilitary
attire.
Euphorion, Negoiţescu's failed project for a literary magazine, was also his stated attempt at producing a modernist
literary manifesto. Placing his references in German Romanticism
and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
's Faust
, the critic found the tragic figure of Euphorion (in Faust: Part Two) as an ideal image of "all things new on a spiritual level". The core idea, occasionally paraphrased as Euphorionism, was defined by Negoiţescu himself in terms of an Apollonian and Dionysian
opposition, with a preference for the former term, and in combination with "modern Faustianism, that is to say dynamism, imprudent haste." Seeing in Euphorion a victim of preference for the chaotically modern elements of his own dual nature, and indicating that Goethe had initially intended to give his character a happier and more balanced existence, the theorist stated: "I shall propose as a goal that initial Euphorion [...]. All contemporary Romantic decadence, the signs of crisis and disaster, such as Naturalism
and Surrealism etc., are consequences of that tear within Euphorion's being. We ought to propose the Goethian restoration."
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." Simuţ writes that, unlike the Circle's ideological tenets, the newer program was "ambiguous, idealistic, likely to be approximated, not clearly defined of made concrete". Overall, Negoiţescu's subsequent work of the time was divided between the influences of Lovinescu and George Călinescu: commenting on this verdict and paraphrasing a statement made by Ştefan Augustin Doinaş
, Terian argued that the two mentors had become (respectively) "the cherished maestro" and "the hated maestro" to Negoiţescu. Also according to Terian, this stance echoed Lovinescu's own ambiguous pronouncements about his rival Călinescu's work. Identifying Viitorul literaturii române? as a watershed moment, at which Negoiţescu found himself disagreeing with both his mentors' core beliefs: on one hand, Călinescu's argument that Romanian literature rested on a peasant culture; on the other, Lovinescu's conclusion that Romania's cultural tendencies did not suggest any stylistic traits that were not also spread among similar civilizations.
angels, their recurring references to darkness, and their various allusions to the temptation of sin. These themes, commonly ignored by Negoiţescu's critical predecessors, were argued to have revealed in Eminescu a "Plutonian
" artist. Ştefănescu believes that Negoiţescu had intended to elude that part of Eminescu's work that had become widely accessible to a "motley" public, and instead focused the remaining secrets. The result of such studies, Ştefănescu proposes, has "the flickering—and blinding—unity of magnesium
flames", its intensity evoking "a maddening experience, leaving the experimenter to reemerge with his hair all white." In Ştefănescu's view, the passion felt by the exegete is the homoerotic
equivalent of a physical affair. He writes: "Nobody, not even Veronica Micle
, has loved [Eminescu] as intensely and as tragically as Ion Negoiţescu." This dissenting and highly personal view clashed with both critical orthodoxy and other contemporary reevaluations of Eminescu. Negoiţescu's text clashed with the conclusions drawn by Matei Călinescu's in his 1964 book on Eminescu's late poetry (which had mainly focused on the relative impact of Schopenhauerian aesthetics). Negoiţescu's concentration on Eminescu's posthumous pieces was intensely disputed in later years by literary historian Nicolae Manolescu
, who regarded this approach as exclusivist.
Istoria literaturii române is seen by Ştefănescu as "not just unfinished, but also never started": Negoiţescu had only published what was supposed to be its middle part (planning to discuss post-1800 literature in an addenda to a second volume, alongside 20th century works). Written earlier, was cited by the same critic as an example of Negoiţescu's inconsistency and lack of structure, given that it dealt with "authors who are unlinked to each other": Doinaş, Dan Botta, Mircea Ciobanu, Florin Gabrea, Mircea Ivănescu
, Marin Mincu, Virgil Nemoianu
, Toma Pavel, Sebastian Reichmann, Sorin Titel, Daniel Turcea and Tudor Vasiliu. Ştefănescu added: "Ion Negoiţescu had the negligence to promise that he would write a history of literature and then, up to the end of his life, felt himself harassed by the interrogative expectation of those around him, as if in the presence of hungry wolf mouths. He sought justifications for delaying work [...] and ultimately fashioned, out of scattered texts (some of exceptional value as essays), something that resembles a history of literature". Himself a literary historian, Paul Cernat deemed Negoiţescu's writing a "rough sketch", also noting that it follows the subjective and "impressionistic
" tradition of mainstream Romanian literary criticism. This trend, Cernat believes, linked Negoiţescu to the interwar
authors of critical syntheses (George Călinescu and Eugen Lovinescu), as well as with his junior Manolescu. In this definition, the approach, which Cernat found debatable, rests on its partisans' belief that criticism "does not represent a 'science', but a form of creation in the vicinity of art, which does not reject rigor and erudition". Cernat contends that the application of an "impressionistic" approach in Negoiţescu's 1967 book produced "extravagant" results. A similar point of view is held by Andrei Terian. He calls the work a "semi-failure", and, rejecting the notion that such problems were practical, arising from Negoiţescu's lack of access to the primary sources, finds Istoria... as symptomatic for its author's inconsistencies. In support of this interpretation, Terian cites Negoiţescu's decision to grant the lesser-known novelist Dinu Nicodin
a prominent entry in the book.
One of the main purposes of Istoria literaturii române, as stated by Negoiţescu's preface to his work, was to uncover the connections between the specificity of Romanian culture
("what we Romanians are and how we stand our ground when confronting history") and the wider European
or Western context
. The final version was also a statement against the tenets of national communism
, asserting Negoiţescu's belief that Romanian literature did not precede the birth of modern literature
, and that it had developed as an "imitation of Western literature
". Negoiţescu therefore acknowledged that such a project could only be brought to its completion outside Romania, in a land touched by "the dawn of liberty".
Although incomplete, the book opened various new paths in critical commentary. It investigated the early history of Romania's erotic literature
, and included a hypothesis that the erotic poems of Costache Conachi imitated Ode à Priape, a work by the Frenchman
Alexis Piron
. The postscript Scriitori contemporani was designed to complete his global analysis of Romanian literature, and gave ample coverage to the Romanian diaspora
authors (although, critic Mihaela Albu notes, it failed to include authors from the regions of Bessarabia
and Northern Bukovina). Elaborating on his assessment of "impressionist" criticism, Cernat insisted on Negoiţescu's habit of structuring the chapters around only select parts of an author's contribution, the results of which, he believed, were uneven in scientific value.
" literature of Eastern Europe
an cultures. According to Alex. Ştefănescu's assessment of the book: "It is for the first time that a Romanian author analyzes himself with a soberness taken to its last consequences, with even a sort of cruelty, producing confessions that others would not produce even under torture." A similar verdict is suggested by literary critic Adriana Stan: "The calm of extracting moral senses lacks [in Negoiţescu], and his authenticist challenge to 'say it all' almost precipitates itself into an exhibitionism
of a masochistic and anti-erotic nature."
This type of "insensitivity" is likened by Ştefănescu with that of "a cadaver on a dissection table", or "a statue that we can examine from all sides". The critic finds the work more daring than any possible analogy in local letters. He compares it to Miron Radu Paraschivescu's Jurnalul unui cobai ("The Diary of a Guinea Pig"), which is however "unforgiving" only with its author's acquaintances; to Livius Ciocârlie's diaries, which nevertheless "remain with the limits of literary decency"; to Mircea Cărtărescu
's Travesti novel, which discusses transsexualism
in metaphors that make it "less shocking." The same overall comparison was made by critic Ioana Pârvulescu, who found Straja dragonilor to evade the tradition of Romanian autobiographical literature, in that it was freed from "the obsession of the image", without courting the reader's sympathy. She adds: "Approaching death is a guarantee for a sincerity of the best quality. The only danger that stalks among the pages is that of time running out, and this provides [...] chaotic impatience and hastening, like the agglomeration of the last sand grains inside the neck of an hourglass
." The episodes in Negoiţescu's book portray the boy as a seeker of promiscuous sexual experiences, who enjoys the advances of grownup males (such as his father's orderly), but also experiments with girls his own age. In one narrative sequence, the author recounts how, finding himself inside a dark cinema, he satisfied his urges by fondling the genitalia of an unknown man sitting next to him, thus taking a gamble with public condemnation of a homosexual acts. Such experiences, Stan proposes, reveal the protagonist-narrator to have been "hedonistic
", "Dionysian" and "histrionic
", characterized by an unwillingness in taking critical distance from "the object of his contemplation", and displaying "a psychology of the excess".
Alex. Ştefănescu agrees with Negoiţescu's own belief in the book's narrative qualities, arguing that Straja dragonilor is, after Poezia lui Eminescu, "the best of all that this feverish and uneven author has ever written". The same commentator commends the volume it for displaying a form of sincerity that was ultimately "conquered through culture and the experience of writing", resulting in "another level" of a memoir. He writes: "All is beautiful in Ion Negoiţescu's autobiography, even that which is ugly. [...] A reader who is purely spurred on by a prosaic curiosity will find himself disappointed and will abandon it (like the sexually obsessed will abandon a book by Freud
)." In Pârvulescu's view: "Although they break all sorts of taboos, [...] Negoiţescu's memoirs are so well written that they never veer into vulgarity or obscenity." Likewise, Adriana Stan esteemed the book "singular in our literature" and its author's "capital work". Also according to Ştefănescu, readers who follow the account of young Negoiţescu's spontaneous sexual act at the cinema will sympathize with the protagonist, and even "breathe a sigh of relief" to note that his advances were not rejected. The same reviewer finds another outstanding quality of the book in "the vast depiction of emotional states", which he believes comparable to sections of Marcel Proust
's Remembrance of Things Past. In one such fragment, he argues, Negoiţescu presents him child self as "a strange Pygmalion
", helping his own mother get dressed for a ball and obsessing over every detail in her appearance. The "Proustian" nature is also highlighted by Stan, who argues: "the recollection performed by the grownup ego has therefore too little in common with a regular, constructed and directed writer's diary." Additionally, Pârvulescu sees an essential quality of the book in its depiction of Transylvania
as both a prolongation of Austria-Hungary
's "decadent greatness" and an area of Balkan
and Levant
ine echoes, "the Ischler cookies on the same table as the qatayef
." A section of Straja dragonilor is based strictly on an inventory of Negoiţescu's genealogy, with insight into his family history. The segment is however deemed "boring" by Ştefănescu, who notes that the names mentioned "do not mean anything to us", but nevertheless acknowledges the "chill" they evoke: "the writer, alerted by the premonition of death, wishes to save [...] all things that he can remember about his forefathers."
Straja dragonilor also includes first-hand detail on Negoiţescu's fascist episode, including the circumstances of his several contributions to the Iron Guardist press and the joy he experienced in late 1940, when the movement managed to assassinate historian and politician Nicolae Iorga
. 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". Despite this particular frankness, Bogdan Creţu suggests, the book effectively minimized Negoiţescu's involvement with the fascist causes, by making them seem less relevant to his biography than they actually were.
Negoiţescu's other late contribution to the memoir genre was Ora oglinzilor, which groups and rearranges fragments of a diary covering his life between the ages of 16 and 30, as well as autofiction
al pieces (as diaries of fictional characters named Paul and Damian) and intertextual
homages to French modernist author André Gide
. According to philologist Florin Rogojan, the full text "restores Negoiţescu's image as a personality about to be born, reflecting him in his own subjectivity of a being who places all his stakes on creativity." In Rogojan's view, the key element in the volume is its author's confessed ability to "divide himself between the observer and the observed": "I have acquired something that all the people on this Earth ought to be envying. [...] I am at once the modeler and the sheer matter I am modeling." The book records the young author's own hierarchy of his personal projects, based on the manner in which they could impact on the outside world—from "my most important work so far", the diary, to planned (but never written) novels which were meant to celebrate his creative maturity. Rogojan views the introduction of fictionalized elements as a basis for stating the "cruel truths" about Negoiţescu's life (the moral problems posed by his own homosexuality or the fear of losing artistic inspiration).
and the prospect for resuming historical debates, voiced their support for Europeanism
and cosmopolitanism
. In Martin's definition, the diverse group includes others who "had passed through communist prisons" (Adrian Marino, Ovidiu Cotruş, Alexandru Paleologu
), alongside the disillusioned or reformed Romanian Communist Party
militants (Savin Bratu, Vera Călin, Paul Cornea, Ovid Crohmălniceanu, Paul Georgescu
, Silvian Iosifescu) and a significant number of the younger writers who were only then making their debut. 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.
Similarly, Norman Manea placed Negoiţescu's public profile in relation with the aesthetic ideals of his work: "The indestructible attachment toward beauty and aesthetics has fortified the otherwise sober and frail being of the writer through times of Iron Guardist exultation, as well as through times of communist disarray and persecution. [...] The ugliness, barbarity, vulgarity and stupidity into which the great totalitarian
setup quickly crumbles have proved themselves [...] rejected by Beauty." Matei Călinescu mentioned his older friend's "internally proud awareness of his own genius", as manifested against such definitions of genius as were being favored by "communist cultural parochialism". 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." Such views, Ion Vianu adds, transformed Negoiţescu into "the perfect, exemplary victim of communism".
discourse. His articles of the time produced comparisons between the defunct Iron Guard founder Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
and Christ
, or state claims that the movement had symbolic roots in ancient history, with the Dacians
and Thracians
. 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". 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". This critical distance, Manea argues, also helped the grownup writer identify the perils of communist-era "exultation and stupidity", and in particular of "complicity with the bloated and filthy Power". 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."
The Sibiu Circle's advocacy of Lovinescu's program attested the rejection of far right
ideals. 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. 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". In a 1969 letter protesting against marginalization by communists, the author himself argued: "In what concerns the politically unfavorable atmosphere that has been created around my name, it seems curious to me that those who support it will not bear in mind that, in 1943, I was the author of the Sibiu Literary Circle's Manifesto, through which we protested against fascist ideology." He also insisted that his anti-fascist credentials were being recognized by several works of literary history published in the late 1960s. Commenting on the nature of his 1943 letter, Bogdan Creţu nevertheless rated it as an updated version of Lovinescu's lifelong principles, rather than a manifesto of artistic difference. Also according to Creţu, the young critic's affiliations meant that he was not "obtusely disregarding" traditionalist literature in its entirety, noting that Negoiţescu was lenient when it came to poems by traditionalists such as George Coşbuc
, Octavian Goga
and Aron Cotruş.
At the end of his post-fascist transition, Negoiţescu is even alleged to have rallied with Communist Party-led organizations. 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. The red dies are cast. [...] The boys have affiliated with the communists. That is to say Nego, Regman and Doinaş. They were promised a weekly magazine, funds etc. Nego even hopes for a visa and a passport to France." 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.
's movement and the risk this implied with the perceived lack of solidarity, intimidation or indifference displayed by the cultural establishment of the late 1970s. 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." A similar argument, presented by Dorin Tudoran
, was paraphrased by Monica Lovinescu
: the two authors singled out Negoiţescu and Vianu as examples of "solidarity" among Romanian intellectuals, in contrast to the generic pattern of "solitude". The scarcity of such common initiatives, Monica Lovinescu concluded, clashed with the representative civil society
projects of other Eastern Bloc
countries (the Workers' Defense Committee
among them).
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". Himself an author and dissident, Virgil Tănase reflected back on the period: "Corrupted and sagged by a too lengthy and complacent convenience [...], Romanian writers viewed Paul Goma's effort with mistrust. A letter from Ion Negoiţescu and the support of Nicolae Breban
, that is desperately little..." While political scientist Vladimir Tismăneanu
attributes to Goma and Negoiţescu's "quixotic
stances, all the more heroic since [they] could not count on solidarity or support from colleagues", the status of a singular reaction against the local prolongation of Stalinism
, Matei Călinescu's account partly connects this issue with Negoiţescu having "miscalculated the reaction of his friends" by believing his gesture would be reciprocated. In his Scriitori contemporani, Negoiţescu himself compared the attitudes of local intellectuals with those in other communist countries, assessing that Romanians were weaker to react against their regime's demands, and arguing that, when faced with political pressures, Romanian institutions were "the first to yield".
Various commentators have also argued that Negoiţescu's retraction was both the result of pressures and ultimately inconsequential. Gelu Ionescu thus notes that the text on patriotism was circumstantial and not, like some by his fellow writers, "a homage to Nicolae Ceauşescu
." Călinescu also noted (emphasis in the original): "the bad things [Nego] caused by giving in reflected only on himself (he never signed any deal with the devil; he never, and in no way, implicated anyone else into anything) and [...] these bad things were not irreparable."
, Mircea Eliade
, Nae Ionescu
, Constantin Noica
, Petre Ţuţea
, Mircea Vulcănescu
and others. His Straja dragonilor included reflected on the attraction exercised by the Iron Guard and Codreanu on educated young men of the period, despite the fact that Codreanu's own political manifestos were at an "embarrassing level". He linked this phenomenon to the generation's reaction against rationalism
and to its preference for charisma
, explained by him as "a disease that was roaming the world at the time and one that could be better explained by theoretical means such as crowd psychology
." In his interpretation, the measure to which these authors had chosen to emancipate themselves from fascism varied: Eliade, Noica and Ţuţea "never cured", while Cioran, who assimilated a "nihilist
" perspective, was an unclear case. He also believed that theologian and art critic Nicolae Steinhardt
, whose career was related to that of the Trăirists, "carried the germ inside him when he proclaimed fanaticism
as a virtue." Manea interpreted these assessments with caution, arguing that Negoiţescu merged "names and situations that deserved nuancing", but noted that they satisfied the urgency of bringing the episodes in question up for public debate. Beyond these chronological limits, Negoiţescu also proposed that Eminescu's own form of 19th century nationalism, and even the "angel of death" imagery of his posthumous poetry, may have been products of "the same affliction". His pioneering role in discussing the connection between Eminescu's theories and Romanian fascism was subsequently acknowledged by his fellow literary historians.
A special portion of Negoiţescu's essays deals with the meeting point between the currents of Romanian nationalism and the themes recovered by the Nicolae Ceauşescu
regime. During his exile years, he was especially vocal in condemning Constantin Noica's late essays, which communist authorities tolerated for their critique of the Western world
. To Noica's claim that Westerners had been pushed to "hate the world", forgetting their roots and heading for a collective disaster, he replied: "Is there now a place in the world that is more evidently heading for catastrophe than Romania is? [...] Where has the world been tarnished and where is it still tarnished more than in Noica's homeland? Where o where is European culture more degraded at this time than in the country where the very monuments of European significance and value are being more and more systematically torn down or mutilated in every way conceivable?" Deeming his adversary's statements "an offense to liberty itself", Negoiţescu also placed Noica's isolationism
and anti-Europeanism
in connection with a common attitude in post-World War II Romania. According to this claim, the country had been abandoned by Europe: "like Noica, whose writings have no echo in the Occident, [Romanians] feel that they are shouting in the desert and curse the desert which does not hear and does not answer them." He believed to have identified the roots of this mentality in the political and cultural clashes of the Cold War
, extending his earlier comments regarding the continental alignment of Romanian culture: "after 1947 our culture has been forcefully torn from its natural European context."
During the early 1990s, Negoiţescu published several articles which examined the political developments in post-1989 Romania
, focusing on the return to popularity of some far right
themes. Marta Petreu
paraphrased their content as "vocal appeals [warning] that we should not try to build a European Romania on the political ideas of Noica, Eliade, Cioran, Nae Ionescu, Eminescu and Vulcănescu". In tandem, Negoiţescu was also rejecting the political stances of post-communist
leftist
forces, in particular the ruling National Salvation Front (FSN). In a letter cited by Manea, Negoiţescu strongly rejected the claims publicized by FSN member and former Communist Party activist Silviu Brucan
, who had publicly stated that, for lack of "democratic traditions", Romania could expect to undergo two decades of transition from communist institutions to a fully fledged liberal democracy
. He found Brucan's assertion "insulting" for Romania's population as a whole, while noting that, between 1881 and 1938, the Kingdom of Romania
had had democratic institutions, and comparing the overall context of the 1990s with Spain's three-year-long transition
. 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.
. In a 2001 essay, Norman Manea argued that Negoiţescu's condemnation of the Iron Guard's ideology, his criticism of post-1989 nationalist revival and his belonging to a sexual minority made him the target of threats and allegations. He concluded: "To what measure have his aesthetic, existential or political opinions, unavoidably interconnected, bothered and still bother not just part of the Romanian political establishment, but also the cultural one? What significance does the marginalization attempted immediately after 1989 (with its affiliated insults) [...] carry in the Motherland to which he remained painfully and lovingly chained? We do not know who would still have, presently, the patience of picking up on the bitterness of such questions." 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.
Likewise, Negoiţescu's cultural theses, volumes and presence continued to be interpreted by later literature. Ion Simuţ thus sees Euphorionism manifested not just in Negoiţescu's essays, but also in the drama writings of Radu Stanca and the "speculative and meditative" poems by Doinaş. Paul Cernat wrote that Nicolae Manolescu's own 2008 synthesis on Romanian literary history allocated much space to a debate with his deceased colleague over the classification of Eminescu's contributions. During the late years of the 20th century, poet Iustin Panta founded and edited the Sibiu-based magazine Euphorion, which owed partial inspiration to Negoiţescu's project and had Doinaş as its honorary director.
Together with art critic Petru Comarnescu
and writer-filmmaker Petre Sirin, Ion Negoiţescu was listed in an annex to the Romanian edition of Paul Russell's The Gay 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Gay Men and Lesbians, Past and Present (100 Cele mai influente personalităţi gay, Editura Paralela 45, 2004). The writer's articles and essays of the 1938–1947 period were reissued as a single volume in 2007, under the title De la "elanul juvenil" la "visatul Euphorion" ("From the 'Juvenile Impulse' to the 'Dreamed Euphorion'") and edited by critic Lelia Nicolescu. A second edition of Straja dragonilor saw print with Humanitas
in 2009, being edited by Ion Vartic and prefaced by Ioana Pârvulescu. Apostrof
magazine awards an annual Ion Negoiţescu Prize to contributions by Romanian writers.
The writer's will specified that the totality of his diary could only be published in or after 2023. It was assigned by Negoiţescu himself in the care of journalist Emil Hurezeanu
, his Radio Free Europe colleague, who took the liberty of releasing a short fragment (covering the date of January 4, 1949). Pârvulescu, who calls the piece "an exceptional essay on love" and compares it to Plato
's Phaedrus or Symposium
, suggests that the undisclosed volume may prove to be "Ion Negoiţescu's one great work." Much of his personal correspondence was bequeathed to Cornel Regman, and partly republished by his son, researcher Ştefăniţă Regman.
journalist Mirela Corlăţan contributed an article in which the claim according to which Petru Romoşan had been a Securitate
delator was asserted on the basis of archive material kept by the CNSAS government agency. One such document paraphrased Romoşan's alleged claim that Negoiţescu needed to be punished for his "anti-social behavior", alongside personal statement recounting details from Negoiţescu's private life. Also cited was a 1985 statement by Securitate colonel Victor Achim, responsible for reporting on the Writers' Union
, who assessed that Romoşan was "our link on critic Ion Negoiţescu", acknowledging the role played by such information in getting Negoiţescu to "admit his guilt". Another note, issued after Romoşan's own departure for People's Republic of Hungary
(and subsequent defection to the West), told of a plan to make him the target of a negative campaign by leaking information on his relationship with and betrayal of Negoiţescu.
The scandal was enhanced when Cornel Nistorescu
, the newly appointed editor in chief of Cotidianul, decided to postpone the publication of Corlăţan's article and later to terminate her contract. Deeming his friend a victim "of the Romanian appetite for filth, rummages through one's private life and public executions", Nistorescu decided to temporarily remove the article from the newspaper's online archive, prompting accusations of censorship. As a result, several Cotidianul authors, including Ioan T. Morar
, announced that they were ceasing their collaboration with the paper. Soon after these incidents, Corlăţan publicized audio samples of threats she had allegedly received from Romoşan. Cornel Nistorescu himself explained that he had decided not to publish the piece because he considered it superficial. He also claimed that the paper had renounced Corlăţan's services only after she had joined in public criticism of the paper.
Romoşan, who had earlier denied involvement with the Securitate, claimed that Negoiţescu had actually both been recruited as an agent since their release from prison in the 1960s, and had spied for the Securitate's foreign bureau during his time in Germany. Speaking after Corlăţan's article, he admitted having functioned as a Securitate informer, but not before 1987, when his wife, writer Adina Kenereş, was threatened with losing her travel privileges. He indicated that his signature on any other such documents was obtained with the use of violence and intimidation. He argued: "I presently think that I was being used by the Securitate, which destroyed my reputation in order to provide Negoiţescu with a cover", and claims that Negoiţescu himself apologized to him for "all the harm" during a chance meeting in the early 1990s. According to Nistorescu's assessment: "When the threads of Negoiţescu's file will come loose, perhaps I'll understand something from [Romoşan's] adventure." In contrast, Morar and Ştefan Agopian both assessed that Romoşan's own flight abroad was part of a Securitate diversion. Literary critic Dan C. Mihăilescu gave Romoşan's claims the benefit of the doubt and urged for the Negoiţescu file to be publicized in its entirety, but also asserted that Romoşan had lost his credibility.
site
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
n literary historian, critic, poet, novelist and memoir
Memoir
A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...
ist, one of the leading members of the Sibiu Literary Circle
Sibiu Literary Circle
The Sibiu Literary Circle was a literary group created during World War II in Sibiu to promote the modernist liberal ideas of Eugen Lovinescu....
. A rebellious and eccentric figure, Negoiţescu began his career while still an adolescent, and made himself known as a literary ideologue of the 1940s generation. Moving from a youthful affiliation to the fascist
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
Iron Guard
Iron Guard
The Iron Guard is the name most commonly given to a far-right movement and political party in Romania in the period from 1927 into the early part of World War II. The Iron Guard was ultra-nationalist, fascist, anti-communist, and promoted the Orthodox Christian faith...
, which he later came to regret, the author became a disciple of modernist
Modernist literature
Modernist literature is sub-genre of Modernism, a predominantly European movement beginning in the early 20th century that was characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional aesthetic forms...
doyen Eugen Lovinescu
Eugen Lovinescu
Eugen Lovinescu was a Romanian modernist literary historian, literary critic, academic, and novelist, who in 1919 established the Sburătorul literary club. He was the father of Monica Lovinescu, and the uncle of Horia Lovinescu, Vasile Lovinescu, and Anton Holban...
, and, by 1943, rallied the entire Sibiu Circle to the cause of anti-fascism
Anti-fascism
Anti-fascism is the opposition to fascist ideologies, groups and individuals, such as that of the resistance movements during World War II. The related term antifa derives from Antifaschismus, which is German for anti-fascism; it refers to individuals and groups on the left of the political...
. He was also one of the few openly homosexual
Homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...
intellectuals in Romania to have come out
Coming out
Coming out is a figure of speech for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people's disclosure of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity....
before the 1990s—an experience which, like his political commitments, is recorded in his controversial autobiographical writings.
After World War II, Negoiţescu's anti-communism
Anti-communism
Anti-communism is opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed in reaction to the rise of communism, especially after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the beginning of the Cold War in 1947.-Objections to communist theory:...
, dissident
Dissident
A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....
stance and sexual orientation made him an adversary of the Romanian communist regime
Communist Romania
Communist Romania was the period in Romanian history when that country was a Soviet-aligned communist state in the Eastern Bloc, with the dominant role of Romanian Communist Party enshrined in its successive constitutions...
. Marginalized and censored
Censorship in Communist Romania
Censorship in Communist Romania was widespread and virtually every published document, be it a newspaper article or a book, had to pass the censor's approval...
, he spent three years as a political prisoner
Political prisoner
According to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, a political prisoner is ‘someone who is in prison because they have opposed or criticized the government of their own country’....
. Ultimately reinstated during a late 1960s episode of liberalization
Liberalization
In general, liberalization refers to a relaxation of previous government restrictions, usually in areas of social or economic policy. In some contexts this process or concept is often, but not always, referred to as deregulation...
, he continued to speak out against political restrictions, and came to be closely monitored by the Securitate
Securitate
The Securitate was the secret police agency of Communist Romania. Previously, the Romanian secret police was called Siguranţa Statului. Founded on August 30, 1948, with help from the Soviet NKVD, the Securitate was abolished in December 1989, shortly after President Nicolae Ceaușescu was...
secret police
Secret police
Secret police are a police agency which operates in secrecy and beyond the law to protect the political power of an individual dictator or an authoritarian political regime....
. In 1977, he joined Paul Goma
Paul Goma
Paul Goma is a Romanian writer, also known for his activities as a dissident and leading opponent of the communist regime before 1989. Forced into exile by the communist authorities, he became a political refugee and currently resides in France as a stateless person...
and Ion Vianu
Ion Vianu
Ion Vianu is a Romanian writer and psychiatrist, who was exiled to Switzerland in 1977. He is the son of literary critic Tudor Vianu and his wife Elena....
in a civil society
Civil society
Civil society is composed of the totality of many voluntary social relationships, civic and social organizations, and institutions that form the basis of a functioning society, as distinct from the force-backed structures of a state , the commercial institutions of the market, and private criminal...
protest against the rule of Nicolae Ceauşescu
Nicolae Ceausescu
Nicolae Ceaușescu was a Romanian Communist politician. He was General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and as such was the country's second and last Communist leader...
, but was pressured into retracting. Eventually, Negoiţescu defected
Defection
In politics, a defector is a person who gives up allegiance to one state or political entity in exchange for allegiance to another. More broadly, it involves abandoning a person, cause or doctrine to whom or to which one is bound by some tie, as of allegiance or duty.This term is also applied,...
to West Germany
West Germany
West Germany is the common English, but not official, name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG in the period between its creation in May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990....
, where he became a contributor to Radio Free Europe
Radio Free Europe
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a broadcaster funded by the U.S. Congress that provides news, information, and analysis to countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East "where the free flow of information is either banned by government authorities or not fully developed"...
and various other anti-communist outlets, as well as editor of literary magazines for the Romanian diaspora
Romanian diaspora
The Romanian diaspora is the ethnically Romanian population outside Romania and Moldova. The concept does not usually include the ethnic Romanians who live as natives in the states surrounding Romania, chiefly those Romanians who live in Ukraine and Serbia. The diaspora does include the people of...
communities. He died in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
.
Ion Negoiţescu's review of Romanian literature
Literature of Romania
Romanian literature is literature written by Romanian authors, although the term may also be used to refer to all literature written in the Romanian language.Eugène Ionesco is one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd....
and contributions to literary theory generally stood in contrast to the nationalist
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
and national communist
National communism
The term National Communism describes the ethnic minority communist currents that arose in the former Russian Empire after Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik Party seized power in October 1917....
recourse to traditionalism or anti-Europeanism
Anti-Europeanism
Anti-Europeanism refers to rejection of the culture of Europe and Europeanisation, sentiments, opinions and discrimination against European ethnic groups, and criticism of policies of European governments and the European Union...
, and engaged it polemically by advocating the values of Western culture
Western culture
Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...
. His diverse work, although scattered and largely incomplete, drew critical praise for its original takes on various subjects, and primarily for its views on the posthumously published writings of national poet Mihai Eminescu
Mihai Eminescu
Mihai Eminescu was a Romantic poet, novelist and journalist, often regarded as the most famous and influential Romanian poet. Eminescu was an active member of the Junimea literary society and he worked as an editor for the newspaper Timpul , the official newspaper of the Conservative Party...
. In tandem, the implications of Negoiţescu's private life and the various aspects of his biography, such as his relationship to exposed Securitate informant Petru Romoşan and the revelations of his unpublished diary, have remained topics of controversy in the years after his death.
Early life
Born in ClujCluj-Napoca
Cluj-Napoca , commonly known as Cluj, is the fourth most populous city in Romania and the seat of Cluj County in the northwestern part of the country. Geographically, it is roughly equidistant from Bucharest , Budapest and Belgrade...
, Negoiţescu was the son of Ioan, a career officer in the Romanian Land Forces
Romanian Land Forces
The Romanian Land Forces is the army of Romania, and the main component of the Romanian Armed Forces. In recent years, full professionalisation and a major equipment overhaul have transformed the nature of the force.The Romanian Land Forces were founded on...
, and his wife Lucreţia née Cotuţiu. His maternal grandfather, a member of the Romanian Orthodox
Romanian Orthodox Church
The Romanian Orthodox Church is an autocephalous Eastern Orthodox church. It is in full communion with other Eastern Orthodox churches, and is ranked seventh in order of precedence. The Primate of the church has the title of Patriarch...
clergy in Transylvania
Transylvania
Transylvania is a historical region in the central part of Romania. Bounded on the east and south by the Carpathian mountain range, historical Transylvania extended in the west to the Apuseni Mountains; however, the term sometimes encompasses not only Transylvania proper, but also the historical...
, had taken part in the Memorandum
Transylvanian Memorandum
The Transylvanian Memorandum was a petition sent in 1892 by the leaders of the Romanians of Transylvania to the Austro-Hungarian Emperor-King Franz Joseph, asking for equal ethnic rights with the Hungarians, and demanding an end to persecutions and Magyarization attempts.-Status:After the Ausgleich...
movement under Austro-Hungarian
Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary , more formally known as the Kingdoms and Lands Represented in the Imperial Council and the Lands of the Holy Hungarian Crown of Saint Stephen, was a constitutional monarchic union between the crowns of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary in...
rule. In contrast, Negoiţescu's father came from outside Transylvania, being born to parents from the Romanian Old Kingdom
Romanian Old Kingdom
The Romanian Old Kingdom is a colloquial term referring to the territory covered by the first independent Romanian nation state, which was composed of the Danubian Principalities—Wallachia and Moldavia...
. The future author studied at the Angelescu High School in his native city, and debuted in 1937, when he had lyric poetry
Lyric poetry
Lyric poetry is a genre of poetry that expresses personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient world, lyric poems were those which were sung to the lyre. Lyric poems do not have to rhyme, and today do not need to be set to music or a beat...
fragments published in the local newspaper Naţiunea Română. At age sixteen, Negoiţescu also published his first of several reviews in the student magazine Pâlcul, analyzing the Symbolist
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
poetry of Mateiu Caragiale
Mateiu Caragiale
Mateiu Ion Caragiale was a Romanian poet and prose writer, best known for his novel Craii de Curtea-Veche, which portrays the milieu of boyar descendants before and after World War I. Caragiale's style, associated with Symbolism, the Decadent movement of the fin de siècle, and early modernism, was...
. It was as a high school student that he first met poet and thinker Lucian Blaga
Lucian Blaga
-Biography:Lucian Blaga was a commanding personality of the Romanian culture of the interbellum period. He was a philosopher and writer higly acclaimed for his originality, a university professor and a diplomat. He was born on May 9, 1895 in Lancrăm, near Alba Iulia, Romania, his father being an...
. Reputedly, Blaga saw his adolescent disciple as a genius and encouraged him to seek a career in literature. Negoiţescu took his Baccalaureate
Romanian Baccalaureate
The Bacalaureat is an exam held in Romania when one graduates high school .Unlike the French Baccalaureate, the Romanian one has a single degree...
in 1940, and subsequently enlisted at the Cluj University
Babes-Bolyai University
The Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca is an university in Romania. With almost 50,000 students, the university offers 105 specialisations, of which there are 105 in Romanian, 67 in Hungarian, 17 in German, and 5 in English...
's Letters and Philosophy Department, where he studied under Blaga.
Having discovered his sexual inclination early in life, Negoiţescu claimed to have had his first sexual experiences while still a young boy. According to his own testimony, he made his coming out
Coming out
Coming out is a figure of speech for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people's disclosure of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity....
at around age sixteen, when he wrote about his homosexuality in a test paper which he then handed to his supervising teacher. Reportedly, the paper was graded a ten out of ten, without further commentary from its recipient. Negoiţescu later openly assumed his sexual identity and, in contrast to other gay men of 20th century Romania, did not deny it in front of the conservative
Conservatism
Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports, at the most, minimal and gradual change in society. Some conservatives seek to preserve things as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity, while others oppose modernism...
cultural establishment (see LGBT rights in Romania). At the time however, the various ways in which the adolescent Negoiţescu disregarded social conventions caused a rift between him and his parents, resulting in the first of his several suicide attempts. Negoiţescu's subsequent life was marked by successive bouts of clinical depression
Clinical depression
Major depressive disorder is a mental disorder characterized by an all-encompassing low mood accompanied by low self-esteem, and by loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities...
and self-hatred
Self-hatred
Self-hatred refers to an extreme dislike and hatred of oneself, or being angry at or even prejudiced towards oneself. The term is also used to designate a dislike or hatred of a group, family, social class, mental illness, or stereotype to which one belongs and/or has...
.
Fascist episode and the Sibiu Literary Circle
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 GuardIron Guard
The Iron Guard is the name most commonly given to a far-right movement and political party in Romania in the period from 1927 into the early part of World War II. The Iron Guard was ultra-nationalist, fascist, anti-communist, and promoted the Orthodox Christian faith...
, a revolutionary fascist
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
movement which would establish the National Legionary
National Legionary State
The National Legionary State was the Romanian government from September 6, 1940 to January 23, 1941. It was a single-party regime dictatorship dominated by the overtly fascist Iron Guard in uneasy conjunction with the head of government and Conducător Ion Antonescu, the leader of the Romanian...
regime (in existence between 1940 and 1941). As he himself later recalled, he contributed to the group's press and, wearing the green-colored paramilitary
Paramilitary
A paramilitary is a force whose function and organization are similar to those of a professional military, but which is not considered part of a state's formal armed forces....
uniform of the Guardists, took part in National Legionary street parades. This choice intrigued his biographers and reviewers of his work, who generally agree that it clashed with the young man's tolerant nature and individualism
Individualism
Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that stresses "the moral worth of the individual". Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires and so value independence and self-reliance while opposing most external interference upon one's own...
.
In autumn 1940, following the Second Vienna Award
Second Vienna Award
The Second Vienna Award was the second of two Vienna Awards arbitrated by the Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Rendered on August 30, 1940, it re-assigned the territory of Northern Transylvania from Romania to Hungary.-Prelude and historical background :After the World War I, the multi-ethnic...
which granted Northern Transylvania
Northern Transylvania
Northern Transylvania is a region of Transylvania, situated within the territory of Romania. The population is largely composed of both ethnic Romanians and Hungarians, and the region has been part of Romania since 1918 . During World War II, as a consequence of the territorial agreement known as...
to Hungary, Negoiţescu followed the Cluj University's Romanian section as it relocated to the south of the new border, in Sibiu
Sibiu
Sibiu is a city in Transylvania, Romania with a population of 154,548. Located some 282 km north-west of Bucharest, the city straddles the Cibin River, a tributary of the river Olt...
. As a contributor to the student magazine Curţile Dorului, he met and befriended poet Radu Stanca
Radu Stanca
Radu Stanca was a Romanian poet, playwright, theatre director, theatre critic and theoretician. He was born in Sebeş and died in Cluj-Napoca....
. It was also during that interval that he participated in the establishment of the Sibiu Literary Circle
Sibiu Literary Circle
The Sibiu Literary Circle was a literary group created during World War II in Sibiu to promote the modernist liberal ideas of Eugen Lovinescu....
, with other young men who followed Blaga. His colleagues there included Stanca, Nicolae Balotă, Ştefan Augustin Doinaş
Stefan Augustin Doinas
Ştefan Augustin Doinaş was a Romanian Neoclassical poet of the Communist era....
, Cornel Regman and Eugen Todoran. They were joined by Victor Iancu, Ovidiu Cotruş, Ioanichie Olteanu, Ion Dezideriu Sîrbu
Ion Dezideriu Sîrbu
Ion Dezideriu Sîrbu was a Romanian philosopher, novelist, essayist and dramatist. A university associate professor and theater critic, he was a vicitm of the communist regime, spending about 6 years as a political prisoner...
, Deliu Petroiu, Eta Boeriu
Eta Boeriu
Eta Boeriu was a Romanian poet, literary critic and translator...
and Ovidiu Drimba. At the time, Negoiţescu was also acquainted with linguist Ştefan Bezdechi and philosopher Petre Ţuţea
Petre Tutea
- Early years: from Marxism to the Legionary Movement :Petre Ţuţea was born in the village of Boteni, Muscel region . His father, Petre Bădescu, was a Romanian Orthodox priest and his mother, Ana Ţuţea, was of peasant stock. After the First World War, Ţuţea left his village to finish high school in...
.
By that point in his life, Negoiţescu made himself known as the ideologue of his generation, expanding his cultural horizon and familiarizing himself with the Classics
Classics
Classics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean world ; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity Classics (sometimes encompassing Classical Studies or...
, with German philosophy
German philosophy
German philosophy, here taken to mean either philosophy in the German language or philosophy by Germans, has been extremely diverse, and central to both the analytic and continental traditions in philosophy for centuries, from Leibniz through Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger...
, and with the main works of Romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
, while dedicating his efforts to promoting the work of isolated young authors such as Stanca and Mircea Streinul. He had slowly moved into the anti-fascist
Anti-fascism
Anti-fascism is the opposition to fascist ideologies, groups and individuals, such as that of the resistance movements during World War II. The related term antifa derives from Antifaschismus, which is German for anti-fascism; it refers to individuals and groups on the left of the political...
camp, objecting to both the Iron Guard and its partner-rival, the authoritarian
Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism is a form of social organization characterized by submission to authority. It is usually opposed to individualism and democracy...
general and newly appointed Conducător
Conducator
Conducător was the title used officially in two instances by Romanian politicians, and earlier by Carol II.-History:...
Ion Antonescu
Ion Antonescu
Ion Victor Antonescu was a Romanian soldier, authoritarian politician and convicted war criminal. The Prime Minister and Conducător during most of World War II, he presided over two successive wartime dictatorships...
. In 1941, he published Povestea tristă a lui Ramon Ocg ("The Sad Story of Ramon Ocg"), a lengthy prose poem which he presented as a novel. That same year, in autumn, he traveled to the capital city of Bucharest
Bucharest
Bucharest is the capital municipality, cultural, industrial, and financial centre of Romania. It is the largest city in Romania, located in the southeast of the country, at , and lies on the banks of the Dâmbovița River....
, visiting modernist
Modernist literature
Modernist literature is sub-genre of Modernism, a predominantly European movement beginning in the early 20th century that was characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional aesthetic forms...
critic and theorist Eugen Lovinescu
Eugen Lovinescu
Eugen Lovinescu was a Romanian modernist literary historian, literary critic, academic, and novelist, who in 1919 established the Sburătorul literary club. He was the father of Monica Lovinescu, and the uncle of Horia Lovinescu, Vasile Lovinescu, and Anton Holban...
, the doyen of a literary circle known as Sburătorul
Sburatorul
Sburătorul was a Romanian modernist literary magazine and literary society, established in Bucharest in April 1919. Led by Eugen Lovinescu, the circle was instrumental in developing new trends and styles in Romanian literature, ranging from a new wave of Romanian Symbolism to an urban-themed...
. Negoiţescu, who had just purchased himself the new critical synthesis newly published by Lovinescu's rival George Călinescu
George Calinescu
George Călinescu was a Romanian literary critic, historian, novelist, academician and journalist, and a writer of classicist and humanist tendencies...
, commented on its strengths and weaknesses with his host. The meeting left an impression on Lovinescu, whose diary for that day reads: "I have the feeling he is 'different', he is an 'exceptional' young man, who is set to have a singular destiny."
Anti-fascism and Euphorion projects
On March 13, 1943, at a time when Romania had rallied with Nazi GermanyNazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
and the Axis Powers
Axis Powers
The Axis powers , also known as the Axis alliance, Axis nations, Axis countries, or just the Axis, was an alignment of great powers during the mid-20th century that fought World War II against the Allies. It began in 1936 with treaties of friendship between Germany and Italy and between Germany and...
, he defied Antonescu's regime by affiliating the entire Circle with Lovinescu, himself marginalized for supporting liberal democracy
Liberal democracy
Liberal democracy, also known as constitutional democracy, is a common form of representative democracy. According to the principles of liberal democracy, elections should be free and fair, and the political process should be competitive...
and for rejecting the application of ideological censorship
Censorship
thumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...
. Signed with the pseudonym Damian Silvestru and drafted by Negoiţescu, the letter stating this position was published by novelist Liviu Rebreanu
Liviu Rebreanu
Liviu Rebreanu was a Romanian novelist, playwright, short story writer, and journalist.- Life :Born in Târlișua , Transylvania, then part of Austria-Hungary, he was the second of thirteen children born to Vasile Rebreanu, a schoolteacher, and Ludovica Diuganu, descendants of peasants...
's magazine Viaţa. The Sibiu writers' statement ridiculed the officially encouraged traditionalist and nationalist
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
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. These judgments scandalized the far right
Far right
Far-right, extreme right, hard right, radical right, and ultra-right are terms used to discuss the qualitative or quantitative position a group or person occupies within right-wing politics. Far-right politics may involve anti-immigration and anti-integration stances towards groups that are...
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
Patriotism
Patriotism is a devotion to one's country, excluding differences caused by the dependencies of the term's meaning upon context, geography and philosophy...
inscribed with a whip on their sternums". Among the accusations launched by the fascist and antisemitic venues, Negoiţescu found himself explicitly described as a "Bolshevik
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
", "traitor" and "hireling of the Jews". In contrast with such reactions, Lovinescu found himself positively impressed by the group' gesture, and sent the Sibiu writers a letter which acknowledged them as his disciples. His sympathetic portrait of Negoiţescu, published later in the year by Timpul
Timpul
Timpul is a newspaper published in Romania, originally published as the official platform of the defunct Conservative Party....
newspaper, further publicized this special connection. The piece was nevertheless received with noted reserve by Negoiţescu's own friends and colleagues, who did not necessarily share the two theorists' confidence in each other's ideologies.
In early 1945, some months after the King's Coup
King Michael's Coup
King Michael's Coup refers to the coup d'etat led by King Michael of Romania in 1944 against the pro-Nazi Romanian faction of Ion Antonescu, after the Axis front in Northeastern Romania collapsed under the Soviet offensive.-The coup:...
deposed Antonescu and aligned Romania with the Allies
Allies of World War II
The Allies of World War II were the countries that opposed the Axis powers during the Second World War . Former Axis states contributing to the Allied victory are not considered Allied states...
, Ion Negoiţescu also became editor of the newly founded Revista Cercului Literar, a review published by, and named after, the Sibiu group. Alongside members of the Circle, the main contributors included the movement's mentor Blaga and various other established Romanian writers. Negoiţescu's own works of that year included the study Viitorul literaturii române? ("The Future of Romanian Literature?"), in which he expressed a belief that urbanization
Urbanization
Urbanization, urbanisation or urban drift is the physical growth of urban areas as a result of global change. The United Nations projected that half of the world's population would live in urban areas at the end of 2008....
and urban-themed modernist literature had rendered its traditionalist competitor, with its rural subjects, at the same time obsolete and objectionable. By 1945 however, the Sibiu group was breaking up, largely owing to the decline of cultural activity, as well as to the recovery of Northern Transylvania (since the young writers were able to consider returning to their respective homes).
In 1946, Negoiţescu attempted to create a new venue for the Sibiu authors, named Euphorion and based in newly reincorporated Cluj, but had little success in obtaining support. According to Sîrbu, who was at the time detached as a commissioned sergeant in the Romanian Army, his colleagues had been attracted into cooperation with the increasingly powerful Romanian Communist Party
Romanian Communist Party
The Romanian Communist Party was a communist political party in Romania. Successor to the Bolshevik wing of the Socialist Party of Romania, it gave ideological endorsement to communist revolution and the disestablishment of Greater Romania. The PCR was a minor and illegal grouping for much of the...
, but only as a means to preserve their livelihood. Negoiţescu had earlier published the second of his books, Despre mască şi mişcare ("On the Mask and the Movement"). In 1947, one year after his graduation, Romania's official publishing house, Editura Fundaţiilor Regale, granted him its Young Writers prize for the manuscript volume Poeţi români ("Romanian Poets"). With credentials signed by Blaga and French academic Henri Jacquier, and sponsored by the Romanian oil company Titan-Călan-Nădrag, Negoiţescu was again in Bucharest, where he and Stanca both hoped to receive scholarship
Scholarship
A scholarship is an award of financial aid for a student to further education. Scholarships are awarded on various criteria usually reflecting the values and purposes of the donor or founder of the award.-Types:...
s from the Institut de France
Institut de France
The Institut de France is a French learned society, grouping five académies, the most famous of which is the Académie française.The institute, located in Paris, manages approximately 1,000 foundations, as well as museums and chateaux open for visit. It also awards prizes and subsidies, which...
. He was involved in cultural networking: in permanent correspondence with his former Sibiu colleagues, he also established contacts with novelist Dinu Nicodin
Dinu Nicodin
Dinu Nicodin was a Romanian writer affiliated with the modernist venue Sburătorul. Having an aristocratic background, he was an eccentric and adventurous figure who only turned to literature as a hobby, and whose scattered works were generally well received by critics during his lifetime...
, and befriended Lovinescu's daughter Monica
Monica Lovinescu
Monica Lovinescu was a Romanian essayist, short story writer, literary critic, translator, and journalist, noted for her activities as an opponent of the Romanian Communist regime. She published several works under the pseudonyms Monique Saint-Come and Claude Pascal. She is the daughter of...
(later a self-exiled critic and journalist).
In this context, Negoiţescu was made a member of the board granting awards in the memory of Eugen Lovinescu (and named after the theorist), his influence helping in granting such distinctions to Doinaş and Stanca. However, the correspondence of this period also shows aggravated tensions between Circle members such as Doinaş and Sburătorul
Sburatorul
Sburătorul was a Romanian modernist literary magazine and literary society, established in Bucharest in April 1919. Led by Eugen Lovinescu, the circle was instrumental in developing new trends and styles in Romanian literature, ranging from a new wave of Romanian Symbolism to an urban-themed...
affiliates like Felix Aderca
Felix Aderca
Felix Aderca or F. Aderca Aderca, also known as Zelicu Froim Adercu or Froim Aderca; March 13, 1891 – December 12, 1962) was a Romanian novelist, playwright, poet, journalist and critic, noted as a representative of rebellious modernism in the context of Romanian literature...
and Vladimir Streinu (who were both among the Lovinescu Award trustees). In June of the same year, somewhat intimidated by the experience, Negoiţescu returned to his home region, where, in August, he received news that his paper of Paul Valéry
Paul Valéry
Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath...
's poetic style had been rejected by the Institut examiners.
Communist censorship and imprisonment
Negoiţescu's career fluctuated after the 1947–1948 establishment of a local communist regimeCommunist Romania
Communist Romania was the period in Romanian history when that country was a Soviet-aligned communist state in the Eastern Bloc, with the dominant role of Romanian Communist Party enshrined in its successive constitutions...
, when he became exposed to political persecution. Initially, he was employed as a librarian by the Romanian Academy
Romanian Academy
The Romanian Academy is a cultural forum founded in Bucharest, Romania, in 1866. It covers the scientific, artistic and literary domains. The academy has 181 acting members who are elected for life....
's Cluj section (1950–1952). He was in tandem working on a critical analysis of Mihai Eminescu
Mihai Eminescu
Mihai Eminescu was a Romantic poet, novelist and journalist, often regarded as the most famous and influential Romanian poet. Eminescu was an active member of the Junimea literary society and he worked as an editor for the newspaper Timpul , the official newspaper of the Conservative Party...
's work, Poezia lui Eminescu ("Eminescu's Poetry"), completed around 1953 but rejected by the new censorship apparatus
Censorship in Communist Romania
Censorship in Communist Romania was widespread and virtually every published document, be it a newspaper article or a book, had to pass the censor's approval...
. He had befriended the younger journalist and author Constantin Ţoiu, who divided his time between writing for communist-aligned journals such as Gazeta Literară and frequenting marginalized figures; reportedly, it was a consequence of this ambivalence that Gazeta Literară editor Paul Georgescu
Paul Georgescu
Paul Georgescu was a Romanian literary critic, journalist, fiction writer and communist political figure. Remembered as both a main participant in the imposition of Socialist Realism in its Romanian form and a patron of dissenting modernist and postmodern literature, he began his career in...
effectively terminated Ţoiu's employment.
Despite his political dossier and the officially endorsed repression of homosexuality, Negoiţescu had by then been made notorious for his successive amorous relationships with men from all walks of life, and rumors spread that he was also briefly involved with local celebrities. His heterosexual friend Nicolae Balotă also recalled running into Negoiţescu at a 1955 party of "Uranian
Uranian
frame|right|From [[John Addington Symonds]]' 1891 book A Problem in Modern Ethics.Uranian is a 19th century term that referred to a person of a third sex — originally, someone with "a female psyche in a male body" who is sexually attracted to men, and later extended to cover homosexual gender...
s", where writer Mihai Rădulescu
Mihai Radulescu
Mihai Rădulescu is a Romanian novelist, poet, historian and art critic.-External links:**...
and classical pianist Alexandru Demetriad were in attendance, and where Balotă was allegedly the only straight man. Negoiţescu's cultural opposition also touched his friendships: in 1954, he played a part in rescuing Caietul albastru ("The Blue Notebook"), a samizdat
Samizdat
Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader...
work by Balotă, which the latter had discarded in Gara de Nord
Gara de Nord
București Gara de Nord is the main railway station in Bucharest and the largest railway station in Romania...
while pursued by agents of the Securitate
Securitate
The Securitate was the secret police agency of Communist Romania. Previously, the Romanian secret police was called Siguranţa Statului. Founded on August 30, 1948, with help from the Soviet NKVD, the Securitate was abolished in December 1989, shortly after President Nicolae Ceaușescu was...
secret police. In 1955, he was also present at the burial of writer Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu
Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu
-Life:She was born in Iveşti, Galaţi County, the daughter of General Dimitrie Bengescu and of Zoe . She attended high-school in Bucharest and, aged 20, she married the magistrate Nicolae Papadat but her literary career was delayed because her husband was transferred from town to town and because...
, who had been one of the leading Sburătorul figures before being marginalized by communism: in Negoiţescu's own definition, she had been led to her grave "almost a pauper". Also then, just prior to being arrested, Sîrbu made an attempt to group his former university colleagues around his magazine Teatru. His publishing activity at times adapted itself to the exterior requirements of Romanian Socialist Realism
Socialist realism in Romania
After World War II, socialist realism on the Soviet model was imposed on the USSR's new satellites, including Romania. This was accompanied by a series of organisational and repressive moves, for instance the incarceration of numerous poets...
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
Progressivism
Progressivism is an umbrella term for a political ideology advocating or favoring social, political, and economic reform or changes. Progressivism is often viewed by some conservatives, constitutionalists, and libertarians to be in opposition to conservative or reactionary ideologies.The...
social critique of "bourgeois" society.
Beginning 1958, the clash between Negoiţescu and the Socialist Realist cultural mainstream reached new proportions: the Communist Party-controlled media, including Scînteia
Scînteia
Scînteia was the name of two newspapers edited by Communist groups at different intervals in Romanian history...
daily, singled him out for having adopted "aestheticism
Aestheticism
Aestheticism was a 19th century European art movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design...
". In this context, his adversary Paul Georgescu wrote about Negoiţescu's earlier "reactionary
Reactionary
The term reactionary refers to viewpoints that seek to return to a previous state in a society. The term is meant to describe one end of a political spectrum whose opposite pole is "radical". While it has not been generally considered a term of praise it has been adopted as a self-description by...
" stance, and claimed that the author was still failing to adopt "the judicious attitude". Similar condemnation was expressed by other Gazeta Literară contributors: Savin Bratu (who alleged that Negoiţescu was one of those who circulated "names, works and ideas that we find foreign"); Mihai Gafiţa (who held Negoiţescu and his colleague Alexandru Piru responsible for preserving "bourgeois ideology", while urging "the editorial staffs of literary reviews, the publishing houses [and] the Marxist
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
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
Objectivity (philosophy)
Objectivity is a central philosophical concept which has been variously defined by sources. A proposition is generally considered to be objectively true when its truth conditions are met and are "mind-independent"—that is, not met by the judgment of a conscious entity or subject.- Objectivism...
in union with precious, inaccessible language"). In particular, such voices condemned the critic's praise of banned authors, among them Lovinescu, Blaga, Mateiu Caragiale, Ion Barbu
Ion Barbu
Ion Barbu was a distinguished Romanian mathematician and poet.He was born in Câmpulung-Muscel, Argeş County, the son of Constantin Barbilian and Smaranda, born Şoiculescu. He attended Ion Brătianu High School in Piteşti and Gheorghe Lazăr High School in Bucharest...
and Titu Maiorescu
Titu Maiorescu
Titu Liviu Maiorescu was a Romanian literary critic and politician, founder of the Junimea Society. As a literary critic, he was instrumental in the development of Romanian culture in the second half of the 19th century....
. The same year, Negoiţescu was excluded from the Writers' Union
Writers' Union of Romania
The Writers' Union of Romania , founded in March 1949, is a professional association of writers in Romania. It also has a subsidiary in Chişinău, Republic of Moldova...
, and had his right of signature officially withdrawn (meaning that his name could no longer be seen in print). Eventually, in 1961, he became a political prisoner
Political prisoner
According to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, a political prisoner is ‘someone who is in prison because they have opposed or criticized the government of their own country’....
at Jilava penitentiary, and was eventually released though a 1964 amnesty.
Reportedly, the reasons for Negoiţescu's sentencing were his participation in "hostile discussions" dealing with literary topics and his ambition of circulating an anthology of Romanian poetry that included banned authors. However, the actual arrest, concluding a major purge of the intellectual field, is also seen by some as a late ramification in the show trial
Show trial
The term show trial is a pejorative description of a type of highly public trial in which there is a strong connotation that the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant. The actual trial has as its only goal to present the accusation and the verdict to the public as...
targeting intellectuals Dinu Pillat and Constantin Noica
Constantin Noica
Constantin Noica was a Romanian philosopher, essayist and poet. His preoccupations were throughout all philosophy, from epistemology, philosophy of culture, axiology and philosophic anthropology to ontology and logics, from the history of philosophy to systematic philosophy, from ancient to...
. During his interrogation, Negoiţescu made a point of not implicating his friend Ţoiu, by claiming that the activities he had been indicted of were pursued despite Ţoiu's better advice. As he later recalled, his body of published works was kept as evidence of his hostility to the official line, while a court decision led to the expropriation
Nationalization in Romania
The nationalization of the means of production was a measure taken by Romania’s new Communist authorities in order to lay the foundation of socialism. The act that allowed this measure to take place was Law 119, adopted by the Great National Assembly on June 11, 1948...
of his personal items (including his large collection of books, which was assigned to Editura pentru literatură publishers). Alerted by Doinaş, the critic's mother had destroyed all manuscripts he kept in his Cluj home, including his childhood diary (which reportedly opened with the words "I want to be a writer"). Negoiţescu himself recalled that, while in penitentiary, he contemplated suicide for a second time: "I wanted to 'pull one' on my torturers and destroy the object of their sadistic pleasure". According to one account, he had tried to poison himself with meat he had allowed to fester, being unaware that boiled food could not breed deadly bacteria.
Liberalization years and return to literature
Following his release, Negoiţescu was allowed to seek employment in his field, and, moving to Bucharest, became an editor for Luceafărul (1965–1967). It was at this stage that he met and befriended fellow critic Matei CălinescuMatei Calinescu
Matei Călinescu was a Romanian literary critic and professor of comparative literature at Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana....
, who later recounted how, as an employee of Gazeta Literară, he had attempted to find Negoiţescu a full writing job. Negoiţescu's new domicile, a basement room on Bucharest's Ana Ipătescu Boulevard, was a meeting spot for members of the Sibiu Circle and for young literary figures (Călinescu, Virgil Nemoianu
Virgil Nemoianu
Virgil Nemoianu is a Romanian-American essayist, literary critic, and philosopher of culture. He is generally described as a specialist in “comparative literature” but this is a somewhat limiting label, only partially covering the wider range of his activities and accomplishments...
, Toma Pavel). During the liberalization
Liberalization
In general, liberalization refers to a relaxation of previous government restrictions, usually in areas of social or economic policy. In some contexts this process or concept is often, but not always, referred to as deregulation...
episode which coincided with the start of Nicolae Ceauşescu
Nicolae Ceausescu
Nicolae Ceaușescu was a Romanian Communist politician. He was General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and as such was the country's second and last Communist leader...
's communist rule, a relaxation of censorship signified that he was again allowed to publish, producing the volumes Scriitori moderni ("Modern Writers", 1966) and Poezia lui Eminescu (1967). After 1965, he and other Sibiu Circle members were reunited around two new venues: the Transylvanian-based magazine Familia
Familia (literary magazine)
The Romanian-language Familia literary magazine was first published by Iosif Vulcan in Budapest from June 5, 1865 to April 17, 1880. The magazine moved to Oradea and continued publication from April 27, 1880 to December 31, 1906....
and Secolul 20, a cultural periodical edited by Doinaş.
By then, Negoiţescu was working on his synthesis of Romanian literary history. Its summary version was first published in 1968 by Familia, and instantly made its author the center of attention from several milieus. Having decided not to treat his subjects in the conventional Marxist-Leninist
Marxism-Leninism
Marxism–Leninism is a communist ideology, officially based upon the theories of Marxism and Vladimir Lenin, that promotes the development and creation of a international communist society through the leadership of a vanguard party over a revolutionary socialist state that represents a dictatorship...
manner encouraged by the authorities, he stirred polemic passions on the literary scene and became a target for surveillance by the authorities. Negoiţescu's text, which linked Romanian literary history with the development of urban culture, also intrigued the cultural establishment because it seemed to leave out completely all works produced before 1800. Also in 1968, Negoiţescu moved on from Luceafărul to Viaţa Românească
Viata Româneasca
Viaţa Românească, originally Viaţa Romînească , is a monthly literary magazine published in Romania...
, where he was also granted an editorial staff office (a position he kept until 1971). That same year, he was allowed to travel beyond the Iron Curtain
Iron Curtain
The concept of the Iron Curtain symbolized the ideological fighting and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1989...
, but, as he himself recalled, the communist press at home had used the occasion to call him a "defector", "traitor" and "fascist". While in France, Negoiţescu visited Monica Lovinescu
Monica Lovinescu
Monica Lovinescu was a Romanian essayist, short story writer, literary critic, translator, and journalist, noted for her activities as an opponent of the Romanian Communist regime. She published several works under the pseudonyms Monique Saint-Come and Claude Pascal. She is the daughter of...
, who was by then noted as a literary reviewer for the Romanian diaspora
Romanian diaspora
The Romanian diaspora is the ethnically Romanian population outside Romania and Moldova. The concept does not usually include the ethnic Romanians who live as natives in the states surrounding Romania, chiefly those Romanians who live in Ukraine and Serbia. The diaspora does include the people of...
and anti-communist
Anti-communism
Anti-communism is opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed in reaction to the rise of communism, especially after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the beginning of the Cold War in 1947.-Objections to communist theory:...
spokeswoman. Upon his return, Negoiţescu admitted to Romanian officials that the object of this meeting was to reestablish the Eugen Lovinescu Award, which Monica Lovinescu had considered delegating to a panel of young critics living inside Romania (Matei Călinescu, Virgil Nemoianu, Nicolae Manolescu
Nicolae Manolescu
Nicolae Manolescu is a Romanian literary critic. As an editor of România Literară literary magazine, he has reached a record in reviewing books for almost 30 years...
, Eugen Simion, Mihai Ungheanu and Ileana Vrancea); according to his account, the Communist Party structures prevented him from even suggesting this offer to the cultural official Paul Niculescu-Mizil. Later, when he wanted to revisit France and honor the personal invitation of writer Jacques Borel
Jacques Borel
Jacques Borel is a French author best known for his 1965 novel L'Adoration , which won the Prix Goncourt.- Bibliography :* L'Adoration...
, the communist apparatus denied him a new passport. In early 1969, Negoiţescu, newly readmitted into the Writers' Union, was assigned an apartment on Bucharest's Calea Victoriei
Calea Victoriei
Calea Victoriei is a major avenue in central Bucharest. It leads from Splaiul Independenţei to the north and then northwest up to Piaţa Victoriei, where Şoseaua Kiseleff continues north....
. In December of the same year, the authorities threatened to confiscate the Negoiţescu's citing a juridical rationale he viewed as untenable, and, as a result, he initiated a formal gesture of protest.
Despite the rising negative reactions against his work, Negoiţescu continued to publish essays and monograph
Monograph
A monograph is a work of writing upon a single subject, usually by a single author.It is often a scholarly essay or learned treatise, and may be released in the manner of a book or journal article. It is by definition a single document that forms a complete text in itself...
s: Însemnări critice ("Critical Records", 1970), E. Lovinescu (1970), ("Aladdin
Aladdin
Aladdin is a Middle Eastern folk tale. It is one of the tales in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights , and one of the most famous, although it was actually added to the collection by Antoine Galland ....
's Lamp", 1971), ("Engrams
Engram (neuropsychology)
Engrams are a hypothetical means by which memory traces are stored as biophysical or biochemical changes in the brain in response to external stimuli....
", 1975), Analize şi sinteze ("Analyses and Syntheses", 1976). These books occasionally transgressed the limits imposed by communist leaders, and sparked several of his more or less severe clashes with censorship. In one incident of 1971, the entire circulation of Lampa lui Aladin was confiscated and destroyed by the regime's representatives. Such measures caused Negoiţescu distress, and led him to attempt killing himself a third time, on August 23, 1974 (the 1944 Coup's 30th anniversary, and Romania's national holiday during communism). According to his friend, psychiatrist Ion Vianu
Ion Vianu
Ion Vianu is a Romanian writer and psychiatrist, who was exiled to Switzerland in 1977. He is the son of literary critic Tudor Vianu and his wife Elena....
, Negoiţescu was hospitalized in the Bucharest Emergency Hospital
Bucharest Emergency Hospital
Bucharest Emergency Hospital is a public hospital in Bucharest, Romania. It specializes in the main braches of emergency medicine....
for a long period, after having swallowed a large quantity of hypnotic
Hypnotic
Hypnotic drugs are a class of psychoactives whose primary function is to induce sleep and to be used in the treatment of insomnia and in surgical anesthesia...
s. In parallel with these events in his life and career, he published several works of poetry: Sabasios (1968), Poemele lui Balduin de Tyaormin ("Poems by Baldwin of Tyaormin", 1969), Moartea unui contabil ("Death of an Accountant", 1972), Viaţa particulară ("Private Life", 1977).
Goma movement and defection
A seminal event in the writer's life and career occurred in 1977, when he openly rallied with dissidentDissident
A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....
politics. That year, inspired by the Charter 77
Charter 77
Charter 77 was an informal civic initiative in communist Czechoslovakia from 1976 to 1992, named after the document Charter 77 from January 1977. Founding members and architects were Václav Havel, Jan Patočka, Zdeněk Mlynář, Jiří Hájek, and Pavel Kohout. Spreading the text of the document was...
movement in Communist Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic was the official name of Czechoslovakia from 1960 until end of 1989 , a Soviet satellite state of the Eastern Bloc....
, Romanian novelist Paul Goma
Paul Goma
Paul Goma is a Romanian writer, also known for his activities as a dissident and leading opponent of the communist regime before 1989. Forced into exile by the communist authorities, he became a political refugee and currently resides in France as a stateless person...
drafted a collective petition critical of Ceauşescu's cultural and social policies in the post-July Theses
July Theses
The July Theses is a name commonly given to a speech delivered by Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu on July 6, 1971, before the Executive Committee of the Romanian Communist Party...
era. While Goma was being subjected to an inquiry by the Securitate, Negoiţescu signed an open letter
Open letter
An open letter is a letter that is intended to be read by a wide audience, or a letter intended for an individual, but that is nonetheless widely distributed intentionally....
displaying his solidarity with the initiative, and openly rallied with various other forms of protest. The document in question further antagonized the regime when it was broadcast by the diaspora section of Radio Free Europe
Radio Free Europe
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a broadcaster funded by the U.S. Congress that provides news, information, and analysis to countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East "where the free flow of information is either banned by government authorities or not fully developed"...
, an anti-communist and West German
West Germany
West Germany is the common English, but not official, name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG in the period between its creation in May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990....
-based corporation.
Himself arrested shortly afterward, Negoiţescu was made subject to a humiliating and violent interrogation, at the end of which he again contemplated suicide. He was also threatened with prosecution on grounds of breaking Article 200
Article 200
Article 200 was a section of the Penal Code of Romania that criminalised homosexual relationships. It was introduced in 1968, under the communist regime, during the rule Nicolae Ceauşescu, and remained in force until it was repealed by the Năstase government on 22 June 2001...
, a penal code section which criminalized homosexual relationships. The Securitate men were by then interested in the homosexual relationship between Negoiţescu and young poet Petru Romoşan, who was also taken into custody at the time, and whom various commentators of the incidents have since identified as the person secretly furnishing information on the critic's personal life. Several other men were detained as suspects, largely on charges of having had intercourse with Negoiţescu. The group, which Romoşan himself argues included some 30 people, notably included poet Marian Dopcea, at the time a student at the University of Bucharest
University of Bucharest
The University of Bucharest , in Romania, is a university founded in 1864 by decree of Prince Alexander John Cuza to convert the former Saint Sava Academy into the current University of Bucharest.-Presentation:...
. The implications of Negoiţescu's arrest also made him the target of interest in the Western world
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
governments, representatives of which followed the case with concern. At the same time, the communist regime was forcefully expelling Goma and Ion Vianu, the latter of whom had joined the public protest by calling attention to the use of involuntary commitment
Involuntary commitment
Involuntary commitment or civil commitment is a legal process through which an individual with symptoms of severe mental illness is court-ordered into treatment in a hospital or in the community ....
as a political weapon.
As a means of avoiding this penalty, Negoiţescu agreed to draft and sign Despre patriotism ("On Patriotism"), an essay retracting his statements and expressing regret for his action. According to writer Ştefan Agopian, Negoiţescu himself was forced by the regime to accept a marriage of convenience
Marriage of convenience
A marriage of convenience is a marriage contracted for reasons other than the reasons of relationship, family, or love. Instead, such a marriage is orchestrated for personal gain or some other sort of strategic purpose, such as political marriage. The phrase is a calque of - a marriage of...
, while Romoşan's punitive incarceration became notorious in the literary milieu. Still allowed to travel into Western Europe
Western Europe
Western Europe is a loose term for the collection of countries in the western most region of the European continents, though this definition is context-dependent and carries cultural and political connotations. One definition describes Western Europe as a geographic entity—the region lying in the...
, he attended a 1979 poetry festival in Belgium, after which he became the recipient of several scholarship
Scholarship
A scholarship is an award of financial aid for a student to further education. Scholarships are awarded on various criteria usually reflecting the values and purposes of the donor or founder of the award.-Types:...
s and invitations. He published two other Romanian books: his correspondence with Radu Stanca, as Un roman epistolar ("A Novel in Letters"), in 1978, and the collected essays volume Alte însemnări critice ("Some Other Critical Records") in 1980. However, Ion Negoiţescu spent the early 1980s abroad, and, from 1982 to 1983, lived in Cologne
Cologne
Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...
, West Germany, and lectured in Romanian literature at the University of Münster
University of Münster
The University of Münster is a public university located in the city of Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. The WWU is part of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, a society of Germany's leading research universities...
. During his brief returns to Romania, he was a target for attacks in the national communist
National communism
The term National Communism describes the ethnic minority communist currents that arose in the former Russian Empire after Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik Party seized power in October 1917....
press, led at the time by writer Eugen Barbu
Eugen Barbu
Eugen Barbu was a Romanian modern novelist, short story writer, journalist, and correspondent member of the Romanian Academy. The latter position was vehemently criticized by those who contended that he plagiarized in his novel Incognito and for the anti-Semitic campaigns he initiated in the...
and his Săptămîna magazine.
In 1983, Negoiţescu decided to formalize his defection, settling in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
. He became a contributor to Radio Free Europe, as well as to Deutsche Welle
Deutsche Welle
Deutsche Welle or DW, is Germany's international broadcaster. The service is aimed at the overseas market. It broadcasts news and information on shortwave, Internet and satellite radio on 98.7 DZFE in 30 languages . It has a satellite television service , that is available in four languages, and...
, BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
and several diaspora magazines. He was editor of two literary magazines, Caietul de Literatură and the Bad Ditzenbach
Bad Ditzenbach
Bad Ditzenbach is a municipality in the district of Göppingen in Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany.-Notes:...
-based Dialog, as well as Radio Free Europe programmer. Enlisting the collaboration of various exiled co-nationals, Dialog published Negoiţescu's articles on authors in and outside Romania (among them Agopian, Bedros Horasangian, Mircea Nedelciu
Mircea Nedelciu
Mircea Nedelciu was a Romanian short-story writer, novelist, essayist and literary critic, one of the leading exponents of the Optzecişti generation in Romanian letters...
, Radu Petrescu and Dumitru Ţepeneag
Dumitru Tepeneag
Dumitru Ţepeneag is a contemporary Romanian novelist, essayist, short story writer and translator, who currently resides in France...
). 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
Dorin Tudoran
Dorin Tudoran is a Romanian poet, essayist, journalist, and dissident. A resident of the United States since 1985, he has authored more than fifteen books of poetry, essays, and interviews.-Early life:...
with support from the National Endowment for Democracy
National Endowment for Democracy
The National Endowment for Democracy, or NED, is a U.S. non-profit organization that was founded in 1983 to promote US-friendly democracy by providing cash grants funded primarily through an annual allocation from the U.S. Congress...
.
Final years and death
Recognition of Negoiţescu's contribution in Romania was restored by the 1989 RevolutionRomanian Revolution of 1989
The Romanian Revolution of 1989 was a series of riots and clashes in December 1989. These were part of the Revolutions of 1989 that occurred in several Warsaw Pact countries...
. As early as 1990, Editura Dacia
Editura Dacia
Editura Dacia is a publishing house based in Romania, located on Pavel Chinezul Street 2, Cluj-Napoca. Named after the ancient region of Dacia, it was founded in 1969 by a group of Transylvanian intellectuals, and printed works in Romanian, German and Hungarian.According to its official site,...
published his În cunoştinţă de cauză ("With Full Knowledge"), grouping his anti-communist essays written abroad. The literary synthesis he had announced in 1968 was eventually published by Editura Minerva
Editura Minerva
Editura Minerva is one of the largest publishing houses in Romania. Located in Bucharest, it is known, among other things, for publishing classic Romanian literature, children's books, and scientific books.-External links:**...
in 1991. Titled Istoria literaturii române ("The History of Romanian Literature"), it was still incomplete, and only covered the 1800–1945 period. Based in reunified Germany
German reunification
German reunification was the process in 1990 in which the German Democratic Republic joined the Federal Republic of Germany , and when Berlin reunited into a single city, as provided by its then Grundgesetz constitution Article 23. The start of this process is commonly referred by Germans as die...
after 1989, Negoiţescu was writing his volume of memoirs, which he believed would be regarded as his masterpiece, and on which he worked intensely. He maintained contact with the Romanian literary scene, and was notably interviewed by his younger colleague Marta Petreu
Marta Petreu
Marta Petreu is the pen name of Rodica Marta Vartic, née Rodica Crisan , a Romanian philosopher, literary critic, essayist and poet. A professor of Philosophy at the Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, she has published eight books of essays and seven of poetry, and is the editor of the...
. During one such encounter, he confessed his fear of dying before completing work on Straja dragonilor.
Hospitalized for a long interval, the Romanian writer died in Munich at age 71. His body was cremated, and his ashes taken back to Romania, where they buried at a cemetery in central Cluj. He had managed to complete only two chapters of his intended memoirs, published later by Petreu and Ion Vartic as Straja dragonilor ("Guarding the Dragons", Biblioteca Apostrof
Apostrof
Apostrof is a monthly literary magazine published in Cluj-Napoca, Romania under the Romanian Writers' Union patronage. It was founded in 1990 by Babeş-Bolyai University professor Marta Petreu, who is also its editor in chief and main columnist...
, 1994). Three other writings saw print in the period immediately after his death: the postcript to Istoria..., titled Scriitori contemporani ("Contemporary Writers"); the diary and memoir Ora oglinzilor ("The Hour of Mirrors", 1997); and his collected letters to critic Sami Damian, titled Dialoguri după tăcere ("Dialogues after Silence", 1998). His work as an anthologist, dating back to the 1950s, also saw print under Regman's direction: De la Dosoftei la Ştefan Aug. Doinaş ("From Dosoftei
Dosoftei
Dimitrie Barilă, better known under his monastical name Dosoftei , was a Moldavian Metropolitan, scholar, poet and translator....
to Ştefan Aug[ustin] Doinaş", Editura Dacia, 1997).
Style and context
Owing to the political persecutions he was subject to for much of his life, Ion Negoiţescu's literary career mostly resulted in scattered and incomplete works. Literary historian Alex. Ştefănescu compares the overall effect to "a room searched by the Securitate and left a mess." Noting the same defining characteristic of incompleteness, literary critic Bogdan Creţu mentions Negoiţescu's inconsistency as an alternative cause: "he was a man of great projects which, as a rule, he did not manage to complete." Despite finding fault in this tendency, Creţu rates the author as "the most talented" among the Sibiu Circle critics, and "one of the most gifted critics we have ever had." The value of his contribution was linked by various commentators with Negoiţescu's approach to literature and, in particular, his personal appreciation of beauty. Such distinctive traits were first discussed by Lovinescu in his 1943 article. Comparing Negoiţescu to both Eminescu and Percy Bysshe ShelleyPercy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron...
, the Sburătorul theorist insisted on discussing his young disciple's appearance as an exterior sign of literary finesse: "A fine, feminine, androgynous
Androgyny
Androgyny is a term derived from the Greek words ανήρ, stem ανδρ- and γυνή , referring to the combination of masculine and feminine characteristics...
; delicacy, shyness, quickly alarmed by some sort of bashfulness betrayed by discreet shades of carmine
Carmine
Carmine , also called Crimson Lake, Cochineal, Natural Red #4, C.I. 75470, or E120, is a pigment of a bright-red color obtained from the aluminum salt of carminic acid, which is produced by some scale insects, such as the cochineal beetle and the Polish cochineal, and is used as a general term for...
. And over all this appearance, a mask of reverie". Creţu sees Negoiţescu's career as being consumed by "romantic
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
gestures or enthusiastic drives, hardly tempered by the prodigious culture of this oversensitive, never matured, dandy
Dandy
A dandy is a man who places particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and leisurely hobbies, pursued with the appearance of nonchalance in a cult of Self...
." Referring to their collaboration in the Sibiu Circle during the late 1940s, Balotă however noted that Negoiţescu was an outspoken critic of those who valued beauty over message, being as such in line with the group's "ambiguous aestheticism
Aestheticism
Aestheticism was a 19th century European art movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design...
". According to Alex. Ştefănescu, Negoiţescu, a "solitary and misunderstood" figure, approached his mission more as an "accursed poet
Poète maudit
A poète maudit is a poet living a life outside or against society. Abuse of drugs and alcohol, insanity, crime, violence, and in general any societal sin, often resulting in an early death are typical elements of the biography of a poète maudit....
" than a researcher, and found in literature "a drug" to "inject in his veins". In Ştefănescu's view, this fundamental trait, like Negoiţescu's homosexuality, was incompatible with both the "forceful brutishness" of communism and the "prude" nature of Romanian society.
Novelist and critic Norman Manea
Norman Manea
Norman Manea is a Jewish Romanian writer and author of short fiction, novels, and essays about the Holocaust, daily life in a communist state, and exile. He is a Francis Flournoy Professor of European Culture and writer in residence at Bard College...
referred to "the exemplary nature of [Negoiţescu's] case", as evidence that, contrary to popular opinion, the quality of one's literature "does not arrive from the ethic to the aesthetic, but the other way around." In his assessment, Negoiţescu was "a minority member, not just an erotic one, but a chosen person, personifying the burning conditioning, truly intrinsic, [...] between freedom and beauty, not just between liberty and morality". Similarly, Matei Călinescu
Matei Calinescu
Matei Călinescu was a Romanian literary critic and professor of comparative literature at Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana....
recalled being "fascinated" by "his vigorous 'decadent
Decadent movement
The Decadent movement was a late 19th century artistic and literary movement of Western Europe. It flourished in France, but also had devotees in England and throughout Europe, as well as in the United States.-Overview:...
' aestheticism which was however paradoxically doubled by a major moral intransigence in matters of art and artistic truth". He believed Negoiţescu's artistic vision to feature "a hidden moral edge", one occasionally turning back "on himself", and making Negoiţescu "one of the major ethical figures in Romanian culture
Culture of Romania
Romania has a unique culture, which is the product of its geography and of its distinct historical evolution. Like Romanians themselves, it is defined as the meeting point of three regions: Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans, but cannot be truly included in any of them...
." A similar verdict was provided by Ion Vianu
Ion Vianu
Ion Vianu is a Romanian writer and psychiatrist, who was exiled to Switzerland in 1977. He is the son of literary critic Tudor Vianu and his wife Elena....
: "his proud demeanor, the rigorous aestheticism he professed were the expression of an extreme exigence, as expanded on the artistic level as it was on the moral one." 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
Histrionic personality disorder
Histrionic personality disorder is defined by the American Psychiatric Association as a personality disorder characterized by a pattern of excessive emotionality and attention-seeking, including an excessive need for approval and inappropriately seductive behavior, usually beginning in early...
": "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."
As negative consequences of Negoiţescu's aestheticism, Ştefănescu cites his "excess of solemnity" and the "excessive shyness" of his critical essays, as well as a lack of determination and a tendency toward "autosuggestion
Autosuggestion
Autosuggestion is a psychological technique that was developed by apothecary Émile Coué from the late 19th century to the early 20th century.-Origins:...
". Likewise, writer Andrei Terian saw Negoiţescu as lacking a critic's "literary head", being instead an "avid consumer of art" with "an immense sensual appetite". In reference to the issue of critic versus artist, Ştefănescu argues: "He would provide contradictory verdicts. He would most often allow himself to be guided by the will to experience a moment of aesthetic beatitude. Whenever he lacked literary heroin, he would settle for a weak text [...]. He loved depths so much that he invented them." He and other commentators assess that Negoiţescu's self-avowed love for literature and books as objects was almost physical in nature.
Early works and Euphorion ideals
A substantial and precocious element of Negoiţescu's critical work was constituted by his focus on Mateiu CaragialeMateiu Caragiale
Mateiu Ion Caragiale was a Romanian poet and prose writer, best known for his novel Craii de Curtea-Veche, which portrays the milieu of boyar descendants before and after World War I. Caragiale's style, associated with Symbolism, the Decadent movement of the fin de siècle, and early modernism, was...
. Bogdan Creţu, who notes the enthusiastic reception Negoiţescu granted to Caragiale's poetic work in his very first published essay, believes there is an intrinsic connection between the two figures at the level of aestheticism. According to Ion Vianu, the "beautiful, pale and distant" Negoiţescu brought to mind Aubrey de Vere, the "morbid aristocrat" in Caragiale's novella Remember. Negoiţescu's lifelong appreciation of Caragiale's work, specifically his claim that Craii de Curtea-Veche
Craii de Curtea-Veche
Craii de Curtea-Veche is a novel by the inter-war Romanian author Mateiu Caragiale...
novel was a masterpiece formed around a "secret architecture", was contested by literary critic and Anglicist
English studies
English studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language , English linguistics English studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language (including literatures from the U.K., U.S.,...
Mircea Mihăieş. Mihăieş described Craii... a sample of "pretentious kitsch
Kitsch
Kitsch is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons while making cheap mass-produced objects that...
", and accused his various colleagues of having artificially increased Caragiale's cultural rating.
By 1945, Creţu argues, Negoiţescu had reached his creative maturity, primarily by perfecting the "deconstruction
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...
" of texts making the object of his reviews. In particular, Creţu sees as outstanding the young critic's verdicts on George Călinescu's novel Enigma Otiliei (where Negoiţescu had identified, probably ahead of all other commentators, a level of parody
Parody
A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...
running underneath the formal borrowings from Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
) and on the poems of George Bacovia
George Bacovia
George Bacovia was a Romanian symbolist poet. While he initially belonged to the local Symbolist movement, his poetry came to be seen as a precursor of Romanian Modernism and eventually established him in critical esteem alongside Tudor Arghezi, Lucian Blaga and Ion Barbu as one of the most...
(compared by Negoiţescu to the overall artistic standards of the local Symbolist circles
Symbolist movement in Romania
The Symbolist movement in Romania, active during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, marked the development of Romanian culture in both literature and visual arts...
, with which Bacovia had been formally affiliated). Written in parallel, Povestea tristă a lui Ramon Ocg, described by Ştefănescu as marking Negoiţescu's brief affiliation with Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
, romanticizes the life of Mexican film star Ramón Novarro
Ramón Novarro
Ramón Novarro was a Mexican leading man actor in Hollywood in the early 20th century. He was the next male "Sex Symbol" after the death of Rudolph Valentino...
, with emphasis on Navarro's homosexuality. In Bogdan Creţu's definition, the book shows Negoiţescu's commitment to anti-fascism, and especially his use of satire
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
against "the fascist ideology, with all its abuses." Creţu also notes that the printing of Povestea tristă... was financed with money Negoiţescu had made by selling his leather boots, part of a Guardist's paramilitary
Paramilitary
A paramilitary is a force whose function and organization are similar to those of a professional military, but which is not considered part of a state's formal armed forces....
attire.
Euphorion, Negoiţescu's failed project for a literary magazine, was also his stated attempt at producing a modernist
Modernist literature
Modernist literature is sub-genre of Modernism, a predominantly European movement beginning in the early 20th century that was characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional aesthetic forms...
literary manifesto. Placing his references in German Romanticism
German Romanticism
For the general context, see Romanticism.In the philosophy, art, and culture of German-speaking countries, German Romanticism was the dominant movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. German Romanticism developed relatively late compared to its English counterpart, coinciding in its...
and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath. He is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature. His works span the fields of poetry, drama, prose, philosophy, and science. His Faust has been called the greatest long...
's Faust
Goethe's Faust
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust is a tragic play in two parts: and . Although written as a closet drama, it is the play with the largest audience numbers on German-language stages...
, the critic found the tragic figure of Euphorion (in Faust: Part Two) as an ideal image of "all things new on a spiritual level". The core idea, occasionally paraphrased as Euphorionism, was defined by Negoiţescu himself in terms of an Apollonian and Dionysian
Apollonian and Dionysian
The Apollonian and Dionysian is a philosophical and literary concept, or dichotomy, based on certain features of ancient Greek mythology. Several Western philosophical and literary figures have invoked this dichotomy in critical and creative works....
opposition, with a preference for the former term, and in combination with "modern Faustianism, that is to say dynamism, imprudent haste." Seeing in Euphorion a victim of preference for the chaotically modern elements of his own dual nature, and indicating that Goethe had initially intended to give his character a happier and more balanced existence, the theorist stated: "I shall propose as a goal that initial Euphorion [...]. All contemporary Romantic decadence, the signs of crisis and disaster, such as Naturalism
Naturalism (literature)
Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character...
and Surrealism etc., are consequences of that tear within Euphorion's being. We ought to propose the Goethian restoration."
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." Simuţ writes that, unlike the Circle's ideological tenets, the newer program was "ambiguous, idealistic, likely to be approximated, not clearly defined of made concrete". Overall, Negoiţescu's subsequent work of the time was divided between the influences of Lovinescu and George Călinescu: commenting on this verdict and paraphrasing a statement made by Ştefan Augustin Doinaş
Stefan Augustin Doinas
Ştefan Augustin Doinaş was a Romanian Neoclassical poet of the Communist era....
, Terian argued that the two mentors had become (respectively) "the cherished maestro" and "the hated maestro" to Negoiţescu. Also according to Terian, this stance echoed Lovinescu's own ambiguous pronouncements about his rival Călinescu's work. Identifying Viitorul literaturii române? as a watershed moment, at which Negoiţescu found himself disagreeing with both his mentors' core beliefs: on one hand, Călinescu's argument that Romanian literature rested on a peasant culture; on the other, Lovinescu's conclusion that Romania's cultural tendencies did not suggest any stylistic traits that were not also spread among similar civilizations.
Poezia lui Eminescu and Istoria literaturii române
Seen by Alex. Ştefănescu as both Negoiţescu's only complete work and "a sort of critical poem", Poezia lui Eminescu became one of the most celebrated writings of its author's entire career. Literary historian and columnist Mircea Iorgulescu described the work as a "crucial moment in Eminescian exegesis", equaled only by George Călinescu's 1932 study Viaţa lui Mihai Eminescu ("The Life of Mihai Eminescu") and Ilina Gregori's 2002 Studii literare ("Literary Studies"). Iorgulescu argues that, although structured as "a meager pamphlet of a little more than two hundred pages", the book "radically changed the understanding of Eminescu and his poetry". Overall, the text neglected Eminescu's anthumous poetry and focused on poems only published after the subject's death. It discussed their somber sleep-related imagery, in particular the presence of androgynousAndrogyny
Androgyny is a term derived from the Greek words ανήρ, stem ανδρ- and γυνή , referring to the combination of masculine and feminine characteristics...
angels, their recurring references to darkness, and their various allusions to the temptation of sin. These themes, commonly ignored by Negoiţescu's critical predecessors, were argued to have revealed in Eminescu a "Plutonian
Pluto (mythology)
In ancient Greek religion and myth, Pluto was a name for the ruler of the underworld; the god was also known as Hades, a name for the underworld itself...
" artist. Ştefănescu believes that Negoiţescu had intended to elude that part of Eminescu's work that had become widely accessible to a "motley" public, and instead focused the remaining secrets. The result of such studies, Ştefănescu proposes, has "the flickering—and blinding—unity of magnesium
Magnesium
Magnesium is a chemical element with the symbol Mg, atomic number 12, and common oxidation number +2. It is an alkaline earth metal and the eighth most abundant element in the Earth's crust and ninth in the known universe as a whole...
flames", its intensity evoking "a maddening experience, leaving the experimenter to reemerge with his hair all white." In Ştefănescu's view, the passion felt by the exegete is the homoerotic
Homoeroticism
Homoeroticism refers to the erotic attraction between members of the same sex, either male–male or female–female , most especially as it is depicted or manifested in the visual arts and literature. It can also be found in performative forms; from theatre to the theatricality of uniformed movements...
equivalent of a physical affair. He writes: "Nobody, not even Veronica Micle
Veronica Micle
Veronica Micle was an Imperial Austrian-born Romanian poet, whose work was influenced by Romanticism. She is best known for her love affair with the poet Mihai Eminescu, one of the most important Romanian writers.-Biography:Born in Năsăud, Micle was the second child of the shoemaker Ilie Câmpeanu...
, has loved [Eminescu] as intensely and as tragically as Ion Negoiţescu." This dissenting and highly personal view clashed with both critical orthodoxy and other contemporary reevaluations of Eminescu. Negoiţescu's text clashed with the conclusions drawn by Matei Călinescu's in his 1964 book on Eminescu's late poetry (which had mainly focused on the relative impact of Schopenhauerian aesthetics). Negoiţescu's concentration on Eminescu's posthumous pieces was intensely disputed in later years by literary historian Nicolae Manolescu
Nicolae Manolescu
Nicolae Manolescu is a Romanian literary critic. As an editor of România Literară literary magazine, he has reached a record in reviewing books for almost 30 years...
, who regarded this approach as exclusivist.
Istoria literaturii române is seen by Ştefănescu as "not just unfinished, but also never started": Negoiţescu had only published what was supposed to be its middle part (planning to discuss post-1800 literature in an addenda to a second volume, alongside 20th century works). Written earlier, was cited by the same critic as an example of Negoiţescu's inconsistency and lack of structure, given that it dealt with "authors who are unlinked to each other": Doinaş, Dan Botta, Mircea Ciobanu, Florin Gabrea, Mircea Ivănescu
Mircea Ivanescu
Mircea Ivanescu was an Romanian poet, writer and translator, forerunner of Romanian postmodernism, notably for the '80s generation. His translations from universal literature into Romanian include James Joyce, Franz Kafka, F...
, Marin Mincu, Virgil Nemoianu
Virgil Nemoianu
Virgil Nemoianu is a Romanian-American essayist, literary critic, and philosopher of culture. He is generally described as a specialist in “comparative literature” but this is a somewhat limiting label, only partially covering the wider range of his activities and accomplishments...
, Toma Pavel, Sebastian Reichmann, Sorin Titel, Daniel Turcea and Tudor Vasiliu. Ştefănescu added: "Ion Negoiţescu had the negligence to promise that he would write a history of literature and then, up to the end of his life, felt himself harassed by the interrogative expectation of those around him, as if in the presence of hungry wolf mouths. He sought justifications for delaying work [...] and ultimately fashioned, out of scattered texts (some of exceptional value as essays), something that resembles a history of literature". Himself a literary historian, Paul Cernat deemed Negoiţescu's writing a "rough sketch", also noting that it follows the subjective and "impressionistic
Impressionism (literature)
Influenced by the Impressionist art movement, many writers adopted a style that relied on associations. The Dutch Tachtigers explicitly tried to incorporate impressionism into their prose, poems, and other literary works...
" tradition of mainstream Romanian literary criticism. This trend, Cernat believes, linked Negoiţescu to the interwar
Interwar period
Interwar period can refer to any period between two wars. The Interbellum is understood to be the period between the end of the Great War or First World War and the beginning of the Second World War in Europe....
authors of critical syntheses (George Călinescu and Eugen Lovinescu), as well as with his junior Manolescu. In this definition, the approach, which Cernat found debatable, rests on its partisans' belief that criticism "does not represent a 'science', but a form of creation in the vicinity of art, which does not reject rigor and erudition". Cernat contends that the application of an "impressionistic" approach in Negoiţescu's 1967 book produced "extravagant" results. A similar point of view is held by Andrei Terian. He calls the work a "semi-failure", and, rejecting the notion that such problems were practical, arising from Negoiţescu's lack of access to the primary sources, finds Istoria... as symptomatic for its author's inconsistencies. In support of this interpretation, Terian cites Negoiţescu's decision to grant the lesser-known novelist Dinu Nicodin
Dinu Nicodin
Dinu Nicodin was a Romanian writer affiliated with the modernist venue Sburătorul. Having an aristocratic background, he was an eccentric and adventurous figure who only turned to literature as a hobby, and whose scattered works were generally well received by critics during his lifetime...
a prominent entry in the book.
One of the main purposes of Istoria literaturii române, as stated by Negoiţescu's preface to his work, was to uncover the connections between the specificity of Romanian culture
Culture of Romania
Romania has a unique culture, which is the product of its geography and of its distinct historical evolution. Like Romanians themselves, it is defined as the meeting point of three regions: Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans, but cannot be truly included in any of them...
("what we Romanians are and how we stand our ground when confronting history") and the wider European
Culture of Europe
The culture of Europe might better be described as a series of overlapping cultures. Whether it is a question of North as opposed to South; West as opposed to East; Orthodoxism as opposed to Protestantism as opposed to Catholicism as opposed to Secularism; many have claimed to identify cultural...
or Western context
Western culture
Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...
. The final version was also a statement against the tenets of national communism
National communism
The term National Communism describes the ethnic minority communist currents that arose in the former Russian Empire after Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik Party seized power in October 1917....
, asserting Negoiţescu's belief that Romanian literature did not precede the birth of modern literature
Modern literature
Modern literature can either refer to*modernist literature *modern literature ....
, and that it had developed as an "imitation of Western literature
Western literature
Western literature refers to the literature written in the languages of Europe, including the ones belonging to the Indo-European language family as well as several geographically or historically related languages such as Basque, Hungarian, and so forth...
". Negoiţescu therefore acknowledged that such a project could only be brought to its completion outside Romania, in a land touched by "the dawn of liberty".
Although incomplete, the book opened various new paths in critical commentary. It investigated the early history of Romania's erotic literature
Erotic literature
Erotic literature comprises fictional and factual stories and accounts of human sexual relationships which have the power to or are intended to arouse the reader sexually. Such erotica takes the form of novels, short stories, poetry, true-life memoirs, and sex manuals...
, and included a hypothesis that the erotic poems of Costache Conachi imitated Ode à Priape, a work by the Frenchman
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
Alexis Piron
Alexis Piron
Alexis Piron was a French epigrammatist and dramatist.He was born at Dijon, where his father, Aimé Piron, was an apothecary. Piron senior wrote verse in the Burgundian language. Alexis began life as clerk and secretary to a banker, and then studied law...
. The postscript Scriitori contemporani was designed to complete his global analysis of Romanian literature, and gave ample coverage to the Romanian diaspora
Romanian diaspora
The Romanian diaspora is the ethnically Romanian population outside Romania and Moldova. The concept does not usually include the ethnic Romanians who live as natives in the states surrounding Romania, chiefly those Romanians who live in Ukraine and Serbia. The diaspora does include the people of...
authors (although, critic Mihaela Albu notes, it failed to include authors from the regions of Bessarabia
Bessarabia
Bessarabia is a historical term for the geographic region in Eastern Europe bounded by the Dniester River on the east and the Prut River on the west....
and Northern Bukovina). Elaborating on his assessment of "impressionist" criticism, Cernat insisted on Negoiţescu's habit of structuring the chapters around only select parts of an author's contribution, the results of which, he believed, were uneven in scientific value.
Straja dragonilor and Ora oglinzilor
Negoiţescu's main memoir, Straja dragonilor, has drawn attention for its frank depiction of precocious sexuality in general and homosexual experimentation in particular. Researcher Michaela Mudure argues that, by openly defining masculinity in non-heterosexual terms, the text is one of the "few and notable" exceptions within the "androcentricAndrocentrism
Androcentrism is the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing male human beings or the masculine point of view at the center of one's view of the world and its culture and history...
" literature of Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
an cultures. According to Alex. Ştefănescu's assessment of the book: "It is for the first time that a Romanian author analyzes himself with a soberness taken to its last consequences, with even a sort of cruelty, producing confessions that others would not produce even under torture." A similar verdict is suggested by literary critic Adriana Stan: "The calm of extracting moral senses lacks [in Negoiţescu], and his authenticist challenge to 'say it all' almost precipitates itself into an exhibitionism
Exhibitionism
Exhibitionism refers to a desire or compulsion to expose parts of one's body – specifically the genitals or buttocks of a man or woman, or the breasts of a woman – in a public or semi-public circumstance, in crowds or groups of friends or acquaintances, or to strangers...
of a masochistic and anti-erotic nature."
This type of "insensitivity" is likened by Ştefănescu with that of "a cadaver on a dissection table", or "a statue that we can examine from all sides". The critic finds the work more daring than any possible analogy in local letters. He compares it to Miron Radu Paraschivescu's Jurnalul unui cobai ("The Diary of a Guinea Pig"), which is however "unforgiving" only with its author's acquaintances; to Livius Ciocârlie's diaries, which nevertheless "remain with the limits of literary decency"; to Mircea Cărtărescu
Mircea Cartarescu
Mircea Cărtărescu is a Romanian poet, novelist and essayist.Born in Bucharest, he graduated from the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Letters, Department of Romanian Language And Literature, in 1980. Between 1980 and 1989 he worked as a Romanian language teacher, then he worked at the Writers'...
's Travesti novel, which discusses transsexualism
Transsexualism
Transsexualism is an individual's identification with a gender inconsistent or not culturally associated with their biological sex. Simply put, it defines a person whose biological birth sex conflicts with their psychological gender...
in metaphors that make it "less shocking." The same overall comparison was made by critic Ioana Pârvulescu, who found Straja dragonilor to evade the tradition of Romanian autobiographical literature, in that it was freed from "the obsession of the image", without courting the reader's sympathy. She adds: "Approaching death is a guarantee for a sincerity of the best quality. The only danger that stalks among the pages is that of time running out, and this provides [...] chaotic impatience and hastening, like the agglomeration of the last sand grains inside the neck of an hourglass
Hourglass
An hourglass measures the passage of a few minutes or an hour of time. It has two connected vertical glass bulbs allowing a regulated trickle of material from the top to the bottom. Once the top bulb is empty, it can be inverted to begin timing again. The name hourglass comes from historically...
." The episodes in Negoiţescu's book portray the boy as a seeker of promiscuous sexual experiences, who enjoys the advances of grownup males (such as his father's orderly), but also experiments with girls his own age. In one narrative sequence, the author recounts how, finding himself inside a dark cinema, he satisfied his urges by fondling the genitalia of an unknown man sitting next to him, thus taking a gamble with public condemnation of a homosexual acts. Such experiences, Stan proposes, reveal the protagonist-narrator to have been "hedonistic
Hedonism
Hedonism is a school of thought which argues that pleasure is the only intrinsic good. In very simple terms, a hedonist strives to maximize net pleasure .-Etymology:The name derives from the Greek word for "delight" ....
", "Dionysian" and "histrionic
Histrionic personality disorder
Histrionic personality disorder is defined by the American Psychiatric Association as a personality disorder characterized by a pattern of excessive emotionality and attention-seeking, including an excessive need for approval and inappropriately seductive behavior, usually beginning in early...
", characterized by an unwillingness in taking critical distance from "the object of his contemplation", and displaying "a psychology of the excess".
Alex. Ştefănescu agrees with Negoiţescu's own belief in the book's narrative qualities, arguing that Straja dragonilor is, after Poezia lui Eminescu, "the best of all that this feverish and uneven author has ever written". The same commentator commends the volume it for displaying a form of sincerity that was ultimately "conquered through culture and the experience of writing", resulting in "another level" of a memoir. He writes: "All is beautiful in Ion Negoiţescu's autobiography, even that which is ugly. [...] A reader who is purely spurred on by a prosaic curiosity will find himself disappointed and will abandon it (like the sexually obsessed will abandon a book by Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
)." In Pârvulescu's view: "Although they break all sorts of taboos, [...] Negoiţescu's memoirs are so well written that they never veer into vulgarity or obscenity." Likewise, Adriana Stan esteemed the book "singular in our literature" and its author's "capital work". Also according to Ştefănescu, readers who follow the account of young Negoiţescu's spontaneous sexual act at the cinema will sympathize with the protagonist, and even "breathe a sigh of relief" to note that his advances were not rejected. The same reviewer finds another outstanding quality of the book in "the vast depiction of emotional states", which he believes comparable to sections of Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
's Remembrance of Things Past. In one such fragment, he argues, Negoiţescu presents him child self as "a strange Pygmalion
Pygmalion (mythology)
Pygmalion is a legendary figure of Cyprus. Though Pygmalion is the Greek version of the Phoenician royal name Pumayyaton, he is most familiar from Ovid's Metamorphoses, X, in which Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved.-In Ovid:In Ovid's narrative, Pygmalion was a...
", helping his own mother get dressed for a ball and obsessing over every detail in her appearance. The "Proustian" nature is also highlighted by Stan, who argues: "the recollection performed by the grownup ego has therefore too little in common with a regular, constructed and directed writer's diary." Additionally, Pârvulescu sees an essential quality of the book in its depiction of Transylvania
Transylvania
Transylvania is a historical region in the central part of Romania. Bounded on the east and south by the Carpathian mountain range, historical Transylvania extended in the west to the Apuseni Mountains; however, the term sometimes encompasses not only Transylvania proper, but also the historical...
as both a prolongation of Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary , more formally known as the Kingdoms and Lands Represented in the Imperial Council and the Lands of the Holy Hungarian Crown of Saint Stephen, was a constitutional monarchic union between the crowns of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary in...
's "decadent greatness" and an area of Balkan
Balkans
The Balkans is a geopolitical and cultural region of southeastern Europe...
and Levant
Levant
The Levant or ) is the geographic region and culture zone of the "eastern Mediterranean littoral between Anatolia and Egypt" . The Levant includes most of modern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and sometimes parts of Turkey and Iraq, and corresponds roughly to the...
ine echoes, "the Ischler cookies on the same table as the qatayef
Qatayef
Qatayef is an Arab dessert commonly served during the month of Ramadan, a sort of sweet dumpling filled with cream or nuts.- Origin :...
." A section of Straja dragonilor is based strictly on an inventory of Negoiţescu's genealogy, with insight into his family history. The segment is however deemed "boring" by Ştefănescu, who notes that the names mentioned "do not mean anything to us", but nevertheless acknowledges the "chill" they evoke: "the writer, alerted by the premonition of death, wishes to save [...] all things that he can remember about his forefathers."
Straja dragonilor also includes first-hand detail on Negoiţescu's fascist episode, including the circumstances of his several contributions to the Iron Guardist press and the joy he experienced in late 1940, when the movement managed to assassinate historian and politician Nicolae Iorga
Nicolae Iorga
Nicolae Iorga was a Romanian historian, politician, literary critic, memoirist, poet and playwright. Co-founder of the Democratic Nationalist Party , he served as a member of Parliament, President of the Deputies' Assembly and Senate, cabinet minister and briefly as Prime Minister...
. The interval is explained by the memoirist as being related to his identity crisis
Identity crisis (psychology)
"Identity crisis is the failure to achieve ego identity during adolescence." The term was coined by the psychologist Erik Erikson. The stage of psychosocial development in which identity crisis may occur is called the Identity Cohesion versus Role Confusion stage...
: "I was being driven by a terrible vital demon, an unprecedented impulse for affirmation, an acute individualism
Individualism
Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that stresses "the moral worth of the individual". Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires and so value independence and self-reliance while opposing most external interference upon one's own...
, 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". Despite this particular frankness, Bogdan Creţu suggests, the book effectively minimized Negoiţescu's involvement with the fascist causes, by making them seem less relevant to his biography than they actually were.
Negoiţescu's other late contribution to the memoir genre was Ora oglinzilor, which groups and rearranges fragments of a diary covering his life between the ages of 16 and 30, as well as autofiction
Autofiction
Autofiction is a term used in literary criticism to refer to a form of fictionalized autobiography.Serge Doubrovsky coined the term in 1977 with reference to his novel Fils. Autofiction combines two paradoxically contradictory styles: that of autobiography, and fiction...
al pieces (as diaries of fictional characters named Paul and Damian) and intertextual
Intertextuality
Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can include an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. The term “intertextuality” has, itself, been borrowed and transformed many times since it was coined...
homages to French modernist author André Gide
André Gide
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...
. According to philologist Florin Rogojan, the full text "restores Negoiţescu's image as a personality about to be born, reflecting him in his own subjectivity of a being who places all his stakes on creativity." In Rogojan's view, the key element in the volume is its author's confessed ability to "divide himself between the observer and the observed": "I have acquired something that all the people on this Earth ought to be envying. [...] I am at once the modeler and the sheer matter I am modeling." The book records the young author's own hierarchy of his personal projects, based on the manner in which they could impact on the outside world—from "my most important work so far", the diary, to planned (but never written) novels which were meant to celebrate his creative maturity. Rogojan views the introduction of fictionalized elements as a basis for stating the "cruel truths" about Negoiţescu's life (the moral problems posed by his own homosexuality or the fear of losing artistic inspiration).
General characteristics
According to literary historian Mircea Martin, Ion Negoiţescu and his Sibiu Circle colleagues represented a larger faction of intellectuals who, once empowered by 1960s liberalizationLiberalization
In general, liberalization refers to a relaxation of previous government restrictions, usually in areas of social or economic policy. In some contexts this process or concept is often, but not always, referred to as deregulation...
and the prospect for resuming historical debates, voiced their support for Europeanism
Pan-European identity
Pan-European identity refers to the sense of personal identification with Europe. The most concrete examples of pan-europeanism are the European Union and the older Council of Europe...
and cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism is the ideology that all human ethnic groups belong to a single community based on a shared morality. This is contrasted with communitarian and particularistic theories, especially the ideas of patriotism and nationalism...
. In Martin's definition, the diverse group includes others who "had passed through communist prisons" (Adrian Marino, Ovidiu Cotruş, Alexandru Paleologu
Alexandru Paleologu
Alexandru Paleologu was a Romanian essayist, literary critic, diplomat and politician. He is the father of historian Theodor Paleologu.-Biography:...
), alongside the disillusioned or reformed Romanian Communist Party
Romanian Communist Party
The Romanian Communist Party was a communist political party in Romania. Successor to the Bolshevik wing of the Socialist Party of Romania, it gave ideological endorsement to communist revolution and the disestablishment of Greater Romania. The PCR was a minor and illegal grouping for much of the...
militants (Savin Bratu, Vera Călin, Paul Cornea, Ovid Crohmălniceanu, Paul Georgescu
Paul Georgescu
Paul Georgescu was a Romanian literary critic, journalist, fiction writer and communist political figure. Remembered as both a main participant in the imposition of Socialist Realism in its Romanian form and a patron of dissenting modernist and postmodern literature, he began his career in...
, Silvian Iosifescu) and a significant number of the younger writers who were only then making their debut. This community, he noted, was primarily reacting against the ethnic nationalist
Ethnic nationalism
Ethnic nationalism is a form of nationalism wherein the "nation" is defined in terms of ethnicity. Whatever specific ethnicity is involved, ethnic nationalism always includes some element of descent from previous generations and the implied claim of ethnic essentialism, i.e...
and Protochronist
Protochronism
Protochronism is a Romanian term describing the tendency to ascribe, largely relying on questionable data and subjective interpretations, an idealised past to the country as a whole...
ideologies promoted, within the limits defined by the communist regime, by such figures as Paul Anghel, Eugen Barbu
Eugen Barbu
Eugen Barbu was a Romanian modern novelist, short story writer, journalist, and correspondent member of the Romanian Academy. The latter position was vehemently criticized by those who contended that he plagiarized in his novel Incognito and for the anti-Semitic campaigns he initiated in the...
, Edgar Papu, Mihai Ungheanu or Dan Zamfirescu.
Similarly, Norman Manea placed Negoiţescu's public profile in relation with the aesthetic ideals of his work: "The indestructible attachment toward beauty and aesthetics has fortified the otherwise sober and frail being of the writer through times of Iron Guardist exultation, as well as through times of communist disarray and persecution. [...] The ugliness, barbarity, vulgarity and stupidity into which the great totalitarian
Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible...
setup quickly crumbles have proved themselves [...] rejected by Beauty." Matei Călinescu mentioned his older friend's "internally proud awareness of his own genius", as manifested against such definitions of genius as were being favored by "communist cultural parochialism". Contrasting Negoiţescu's "aestheticism", "individualism" and "quasi-anarchism
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
" 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." Such views, Ion Vianu adds, transformed Negoiţescu into "the perfect, exemplary victim of communism".
1940s transition
Before becoming a disciple of Lovinescu, the adolescent Negoiţescu viewed nationalism as a neutral quality, and even rated works he reviewed in accordance with their patrioticPatriotism
Patriotism is a devotion to one's country, excluding differences caused by the dependencies of the term's meaning upon context, geography and philosophy...
discourse. His articles of the time produced comparisons between the defunct Iron Guard founder Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu was a Romanian politician of the far right, the founder and charismatic leader of the Iron Guard or The Legion of the Archangel Michael , an ultra-nationalist and violently antisemitic organization active throughout most of the interwar period...
and Christ
Christ
Christ is the English term for the Greek meaning "the anointed one". It is a translation of the Hebrew , usually transliterated into English as Messiah or Mashiach...
, or state claims that the movement had symbolic roots in ancient history, with the Dacians
Dacians
The Dacians were an Indo-European people, very close or part of the Thracians. Dacians were the ancient inhabitants of Dacia...
and Thracians
Thracians
The ancient Thracians were a group of Indo-European tribes inhabiting areas including Thrace in Southeastern Europe. They spoke the Thracian language – a scarcely attested branch of the Indo-European language family...
. After the National Legionary State
National Legionary State
The National Legionary State was the Romanian government from September 6, 1940 to January 23, 1941. It was a single-party regime dictatorship dominated by the overtly fascist Iron Guard in uneasy conjunction with the head of government and Conducător Ion Antonescu, the leader of the Romanian...
was replaced with Ion Antonescu
Ion Antonescu
Ion Victor Antonescu was a Romanian soldier, authoritarian politician and convicted war criminal. The Prime Minister and Conducător during most of World War II, he presided over two successive wartime dictatorships...
's regime, the critic expressed his support for the country's alliance with Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
, for Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a front., the largest invasion in the history of warfare...
and war on the Eastern Front
Eastern Front (World War II)
The Eastern Front of World War II was a theatre of World War II between the European Axis powers and co-belligerent Finland against the Soviet Union, Poland, and some other Allies which encompassed Northern, Southern and Eastern Europe from 22 June 1941 to 9 May 1945...
, describing the promise of a "great future". 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". This critical distance, Manea argues, also helped the grownup writer identify the perils of communist-era "exultation and stupidity", and in particular of "complicity with the bloated and filthy Power". 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."
The Sibiu Circle's advocacy of Lovinescu's program attested the rejection of far right
Far right
Far-right, extreme right, hard right, radical right, and ultra-right are terms used to discuss the qualitative or quantitative position a group or person occupies within right-wing politics. Far-right politics may involve anti-immigration and anti-integration stances towards groups that are...
ideals. While acknowledging that the political context of the Second Vienna Award
Second Vienna Award
The Second Vienna Award was the second of two Vienna Awards arbitrated by the Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Rendered on August 30, 1940, it re-assigned the territory of Northern Transylvania from Romania to Hungary.-Prelude and historical background :After the World War I, the multi-ethnic...
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
Sămănătorul
Sămănătorul or Semănătorul was a literary and political magazine published in Romania between 1901 and 1910. Founded by poets Alexandru Vlahuţă and George Coşbuc, it is primarily remembered as a tribune for early 20th century traditionalism, neoromanticism and ethnic nationalism...
review. Negoiţescu had designed a portion of the letter as a lampoon targeting "neo-Sămănătorists", whom he portrayed as demagogues
Demagogy
Demagogy or demagoguery is a strategy for gaining political power by appealing to the prejudices, emotions, fears, vanities and expectations of the public—typically via impassioned rhetoric and propaganda, and often using nationalist, populist or religious themes...
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". In a 1969 letter protesting against marginalization by communists, the author himself argued: "In what concerns the politically unfavorable atmosphere that has been created around my name, it seems curious to me that those who support it will not bear in mind that, in 1943, I was the author of the Sibiu Literary Circle's Manifesto, through which we protested against fascist ideology." He also insisted that his anti-fascist credentials were being recognized by several works of literary history published in the late 1960s. Commenting on the nature of his 1943 letter, Bogdan Creţu nevertheless rated it as an updated version of Lovinescu's lifelong principles, rather than a manifesto of artistic difference. Also according to Creţu, the young critic's affiliations meant that he was not "obtusely disregarding" traditionalist literature in its entirety, noting that Negoiţescu was lenient when it came to poems by traditionalists such as George Coşbuc
George Cosbuc
George Coşbuc was a Romanian poet, translator, teacher, and journalist, best remembered for his verses describing, praising and eulogizing rural life, its many travails but also its occasions for joy....
, Octavian Goga
Octavian Goga
Octavian Goga was a Romanian politician, poet, playwright, journalist, and translator.-Life:Born in Răşinari, nearby Sibiu, he was an active member in the Romanian nationalistic movement in Transylvania and of its leading group, the Romanian National Party in Austria-Hungary. Before World War I,...
and Aron Cotruş.
At the end of his post-fascist transition, Negoiţescu is even alleged to have rallied with Communist Party-led organizations. Discussing this rumor in his 1946 correspondence with Deliu Petroiu, Ion Dezideriu Sîrbu
Ion Dezideriu Sîrbu
Ion Dezideriu Sîrbu was a Romanian philosopher, novelist, essayist and dramatist. A university associate professor and theater critic, he was a vicitm of the communist regime, spending about 6 years as a political prisoner...
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. The red dies are cast. [...] The boys have affiliated with the communists. That is to say Nego, Regman and Doinaş. They were promised a weekly magazine, funds etc. Nego even hopes for a visa and a passport to France." 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
Arad County
Arad is an administrative division of Romania roughly translated into county in the western part of the country on the border with Hungary, mostly in the region of Crişana and few villages in Banat. The administrative center of the county lies in the city of Arad...
, to a Western Allied
Western Allies
The Western Allies were a political and geographic grouping among the Allied Powers of the Second World War. It generally includes the United Kingdom and British Commonwealth, the United States, France and various other European and Latin American countries, but excludes China, the Soviet Union,...
-controlled territory.
Opposition to communism
Commentators have often contrasted Negoiţescu's public support for Paul GomaPaul Goma
Paul Goma is a Romanian writer, also known for his activities as a dissident and leading opponent of the communist regime before 1989. Forced into exile by the communist authorities, he became a political refugee and currently resides in France as a stateless person...
's movement and the risk this implied with the perceived lack of solidarity, intimidation or indifference displayed by the cultural establishment of the late 1970s. Discussing the context for the incident, British historian and political analyst Tom Gallagher
Thomas Gerard Gallagher
-Education and career:Tom Gallagher is holder of the chair of ethnic peace and conflict at the department of peace studies, University of Bradford. Ironically it has been alleged that he has been known to vocally support the INLA, who carried out a twenty-four year campaign of terror including the...
assessed: "Privileges and carefully modulated intimidation encouraged intellectuals to stay quiet and sometimes even police their professions on behalf of the regime." A similar argument, presented by Dorin Tudoran
Dorin Tudoran
Dorin Tudoran is a Romanian poet, essayist, journalist, and dissident. A resident of the United States since 1985, he has authored more than fifteen books of poetry, essays, and interviews.-Early life:...
, was paraphrased by Monica Lovinescu
Monica Lovinescu
Monica Lovinescu was a Romanian essayist, short story writer, literary critic, translator, and journalist, noted for her activities as an opponent of the Romanian Communist regime. She published several works under the pseudonyms Monique Saint-Come and Claude Pascal. She is the daughter of...
: the two authors singled out Negoiţescu and Vianu as examples of "solidarity" among Romanian intellectuals, in contrast to the generic pattern of "solitude". The scarcity of such common initiatives, Monica Lovinescu concluded, clashed with the representative civil society
Civil society
Civil society is composed of the totality of many voluntary social relationships, civic and social organizations, and institutions that form the basis of a functioning society, as distinct from the force-backed structures of a state , the commercial institutions of the market, and private criminal...
projects of other Eastern Bloc
Eastern bloc
The term Eastern Bloc or Communist Bloc refers to the former communist states of Eastern and Central Europe, generally the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact...
countries (the Workers' Defense Committee
Workers' Defence Committee
The Workers’ Defense Committee was a Polish civil society group that emerged under communist rule to give aid to prisoners & their families after the June 1976 protests & government crackdown...
among them).
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". Himself an author and dissident, Virgil Tănase reflected back on the period: "Corrupted and sagged by a too lengthy and complacent convenience [...], Romanian writers viewed Paul Goma's effort with mistrust. A letter from Ion Negoiţescu and the support of Nicolae Breban
Nicolae Breban
Nicolae Breban is a Romanian novelist and essayist.-Biography:He is the son of Vasile Breban, a Greek Catholic priest in the village of Recea, Maramureş County. His mother, Olga Constanţa Esthera Breban, born Böhmler, descended from a family of German merchants who emigrated from Alsace Lorraine...
, that is desperately little..." While political scientist Vladimir Tismăneanu
Vladimir Tismaneanu
Vladimir Tismăneanu is a Romanian and American political scientist, political analyst, sociologist, and professor at the University of Maryland, College Park...
attributes to Goma and Negoiţescu's "quixotic
Quixotism
Quixotism is impracticality in pursuit of ideals, especially those ideals manifested by rash, lofty and romantic ideas or extravagantly chivalrous action. It also serves to describe an idealism without regard to practicality...
stances, all the more heroic since [they] could not count on solidarity or support from colleagues", the status of a singular reaction against the local prolongation of Stalinism
Stalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
, Matei Călinescu's account partly connects this issue with Negoiţescu having "miscalculated the reaction of his friends" by believing his gesture would be reciprocated. In his Scriitori contemporani, Negoiţescu himself compared the attitudes of local intellectuals with those in other communist countries, assessing that Romanians were weaker to react against their regime's demands, and arguing that, when faced with political pressures, Romanian institutions were "the first to yield".
Various commentators have also argued that Negoiţescu's retraction was both the result of pressures and ultimately inconsequential. Gelu Ionescu thus notes that the text on patriotism was circumstantial and not, like some by his fellow writers, "a homage to Nicolae Ceauşescu
Nicolae Ceausescu
Nicolae Ceaușescu was a Romanian Communist politician. He was General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and as such was the country's second and last Communist leader...
." Călinescu also noted (emphasis in the original): "the bad things [Nego] caused by giving in reflected only on himself (he never signed any deal with the devil; he never, and in no way, implicated anyone else into anything) and [...] these bad things were not irreparable."
Other causes
A significant portion of Negoiţescu's political writings provided a critical retrospective on interwar far right and its appeal among intellectuals of the Trăirist group of philosophers, academics and writers: Emil CioranEmil Cioran
-Early life:Emil M. Cioran was born in Răşinari, Sibiu County, which was part of Austria-Hungary at the time. His father, Emilian Cioran, was a Romanian Orthodox priest, while his mother, Elvira Cioran , was originally from Veneţia de Jos, a commune near Făgăraş.After studying humanities at the...
, Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day...
, Nae Ionescu
Nae Ionescu
Nae Ionescu was a Romanian philosopher, logician, mathematician, professor, and journalist. Near the end of his career, he became known for his antisemitism and devotion to far right politics, in the years leading up to World War II.-Life:...
, Constantin Noica
Constantin Noica
Constantin Noica was a Romanian philosopher, essayist and poet. His preoccupations were throughout all philosophy, from epistemology, philosophy of culture, axiology and philosophic anthropology to ontology and logics, from the history of philosophy to systematic philosophy, from ancient to...
, Petre Ţuţea
Petre Tutea
- Early years: from Marxism to the Legionary Movement :Petre Ţuţea was born in the village of Boteni, Muscel region . His father, Petre Bădescu, was a Romanian Orthodox priest and his mother, Ana Ţuţea, was of peasant stock. After the First World War, Ţuţea left his village to finish high school in...
, Mircea Vulcănescu
Mircea Vulcanescu
Mircea Vulcănescu was a prominent Romanian philosopher, economist, ethics teacher and sociologist.-Biography:He studied philosophy and law at the University of Bucharest, graduating in 1925...
and others. His Straja dragonilor included reflected on the attraction exercised by the Iron Guard and Codreanu on educated young men of the period, despite the fact that Codreanu's own political manifestos were at an "embarrassing level". He linked this phenomenon to the generation's reaction against rationalism
Rationalism
In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...
and to its preference for charisma
Charisma
The term charisma has two senses: 1) compelling attractiveness or charm that can inspire devotion in others, 2) a divinely conferred power or talent. For some theological usages the term is rendered charism, with a meaning the same as sense 2...
, explained by him as "a disease that was roaming the world at the time and one that could be better explained by theoretical means such as crowd psychology
Crowd psychology
Crowd psychology is a branch of social psychology. Ordinary people can typically gain direct power by acting collectively. Historically, because large groups of people have been able to bring about dramatic and sudden social change in a manner that bypasses established due process, they have also...
." In his interpretation, the measure to which these authors had chosen to emancipate themselves from fascism varied: Eliade, Noica and Ţuţea "never cured", while Cioran, who assimilated a "nihilist
Nihilism
Nihilism is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value...
" perspective, was an unclear case. He also believed that theologian and art critic Nicolae Steinhardt
Nicolae Steinhardt
Nicolae Steinhardt was a Romanian writer, Orthodox hermit and father confessor.-Early life:...
, whose career was related to that of the Trăirists, "carried the germ inside him when he proclaimed fanaticism
Fanaticism
Fanaticism is a belief or behavior involving uncritical zeal, particularly for an extreme religious or political cause or in some cases sports, or with an obsessive enthusiasm for a pastime or hobby...
as a virtue." Manea interpreted these assessments with caution, arguing that Negoiţescu merged "names and situations that deserved nuancing", but noted that they satisfied the urgency of bringing the episodes in question up for public debate. Beyond these chronological limits, Negoiţescu also proposed that Eminescu's own form of 19th century nationalism, and even the "angel of death" imagery of his posthumous poetry, may have been products of "the same affliction". His pioneering role in discussing the connection between Eminescu's theories and Romanian fascism was subsequently acknowledged by his fellow literary historians.
A special portion of Negoiţescu's essays deals with the meeting point between the currents of Romanian nationalism and the themes recovered by the Nicolae Ceauşescu
Nicolae Ceausescu
Nicolae Ceaușescu was a Romanian Communist politician. He was General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and as such was the country's second and last Communist leader...
regime. During his exile years, he was especially vocal in condemning Constantin Noica's late essays, which communist authorities tolerated for their critique of the Western world
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
. To Noica's claim that Westerners had been pushed to "hate the world", forgetting their roots and heading for a collective disaster, he replied: "Is there now a place in the world that is more evidently heading for catastrophe than Romania is? [...] Where has the world been tarnished and where is it still tarnished more than in Noica's homeland? Where o where is European culture more degraded at this time than in the country where the very monuments of European significance and value are being more and more systematically torn down or mutilated in every way conceivable?" Deeming his adversary's statements "an offense to liberty itself", Negoiţescu also placed Noica's isolationism
Isolationism
Isolationism is the policy or doctrine of isolating one's country from the affairs of other nations by declining to enter into alliances, foreign economic commitments, international agreements, etc., seeking to devote the entire efforts of one's country to its own advancement and remain at peace by...
and anti-Europeanism
Anti-Europeanism
Anti-Europeanism refers to rejection of the culture of Europe and Europeanisation, sentiments, opinions and discrimination against European ethnic groups, and criticism of policies of European governments and the European Union...
in connection with a common attitude in post-World War II Romania. According to this claim, the country had been abandoned by Europe: "like Noica, whose writings have no echo in the Occident, [Romanians] feel that they are shouting in the desert and curse the desert which does not hear and does not answer them." He believed to have identified the roots of this mentality in the political and cultural clashes of the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
, extending his earlier comments regarding the continental alignment of Romanian culture: "after 1947 our culture has been forcefully torn from its natural European context."
During the early 1990s, Negoiţescu published several articles which examined the political developments in post-1989 Romania
History of Romania since 1989
- 1989 revolution :1989 marked the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. A mid-December protest in Timişoara against the eviction of a Hungarian minister grew into a country-wide protest against the Ceauşescu régime, sweeping the dictator from power....
, focusing on the return to popularity of some far right
Far right
Far-right, extreme right, hard right, radical right, and ultra-right are terms used to discuss the qualitative or quantitative position a group or person occupies within right-wing politics. Far-right politics may involve anti-immigration and anti-integration stances towards groups that are...
themes. Marta Petreu
Marta Petreu
Marta Petreu is the pen name of Rodica Marta Vartic, née Rodica Crisan , a Romanian philosopher, literary critic, essayist and poet. A professor of Philosophy at the Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, she has published eight books of essays and seven of poetry, and is the editor of the...
paraphrased their content as "vocal appeals [warning] that we should not try to build a European Romania on the political ideas of Noica, Eliade, Cioran, Nae Ionescu, Eminescu and Vulcănescu". In tandem, Negoiţescu was also rejecting the political stances of post-communist
Post-Communism
Post-communism is a name sometimes given to the period of political and economic transformation or "transition" in former Communist states located in parts of Europe and Asia, in which new governments aimed to create free market-oriented capitalist economies with some form of parliamentary...
leftist
Left-wing politics
In politics, Left, left-wing and leftist generally refer to support for social change to create a more egalitarian society...
forces, in particular the ruling National Salvation Front (FSN). In a letter cited by Manea, Negoiţescu strongly rejected the claims publicized by FSN member and former Communist Party activist Silviu Brucan
Silviu Brucan
Silviu Brucan was a Romanian communist politician. Though he disagreed with Nicolae Ceauşescu's policies, he never gave up his communist beliefs and did not oppose communist ideology...
, who had publicly stated that, for lack of "democratic traditions", Romania could expect to undergo two decades of transition from communist institutions to a fully fledged liberal democracy
Liberal democracy
Liberal democracy, also known as constitutional democracy, is a common form of representative democracy. According to the principles of liberal democracy, elections should be free and fair, and the political process should be competitive...
. He found Brucan's assertion "insulting" for Romania's population as a whole, while noting that, between 1881 and 1938, the Kingdom of Romania
Kingdom of Romania
The Kingdom of Romania was the Romanian state based on a form of parliamentary monarchy between 13 March 1881 and 30 December 1947, specified by the first three Constitutions of Romania...
had had democratic institutions, and comparing the overall context of the 1990s with Spain's three-year-long transition
Spanish transition to democracy
The Spanish transition to democracy was the era when Spain moved from the dictatorship of Francisco Franco to a liberal democratic state. The transition is usually said to have begun with Franco’s death on 20 November 1975, while its completion has been variously said to be marked by the Spanish...
. 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
Subtext
Subtext or undertone is content of a book, play, musical work, film, video game, or television series which is not announced explicitly by the characters but is implicit or becomes something understood by the observer of the work as the production unfolds. Subtext can also refer to the thoughts...
had come to lose their importance, and called for a reevaluation.
Influence
Negoiţescu's contribution left a mark on the cultural environment of post-1989 periodHistory of Romania since 1989
- 1989 revolution :1989 marked the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. A mid-December protest in Timişoara against the eviction of a Hungarian minister grew into a country-wide protest against the Ceauşescu régime, sweeping the dictator from power....
. In a 2001 essay, Norman Manea argued that Negoiţescu's condemnation of the Iron Guard's ideology, his criticism of post-1989 nationalist revival and his belonging to a sexual minority made him the target of threats and allegations. He concluded: "To what measure have his aesthetic, existential or political opinions, unavoidably interconnected, bothered and still bother not just part of the Romanian political establishment, but also the cultural one? What significance does the marginalization attempted immediately after 1989 (with its affiliated insults) [...] carry in the Motherland to which he remained painfully and lovingly chained? We do not know who would still have, presently, the patience of picking up on the bitterness of such questions." 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.
Likewise, Negoiţescu's cultural theses, volumes and presence continued to be interpreted by later literature. Ion Simuţ thus sees Euphorionism manifested not just in Negoiţescu's essays, but also in the drama writings of Radu Stanca and the "speculative and meditative" poems by Doinaş. Paul Cernat wrote that Nicolae Manolescu's own 2008 synthesis on Romanian literary history allocated much space to a debate with his deceased colleague over the classification of Eminescu's contributions. During the late years of the 20th century, poet Iustin Panta founded and edited the Sibiu-based magazine Euphorion, which owed partial inspiration to Negoiţescu's project and had Doinaş as its honorary director.
Together with art critic Petru Comarnescu
Petru Comarnescu
Petru Comarnescu was a Romanian literary and art critic and translator.Born in Iași into a family that was related to the metropolitan bishop Veniamin Costache, he studied at the University of Bucharest law , philosophy and philology before going in 1931 on a two-year scholarship to the United...
and writer-filmmaker Petre Sirin, Ion Negoiţescu was listed in an annex to the Romanian edition of Paul Russell's The Gay 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Gay Men and Lesbians, Past and Present (100 Cele mai influente personalităţi gay, Editura Paralela 45, 2004). The writer's articles and essays of the 1938–1947 period were reissued as a single volume in 2007, under the title De la "elanul juvenil" la "visatul Euphorion" ("From the 'Juvenile Impulse' to the 'Dreamed Euphorion'") and edited by critic Lelia Nicolescu. A second edition of Straja dragonilor saw print with Humanitas
Humanitas publishing house
Humanitas is an independent Romanian publishing house, founded on February 1, 1990 in Bucharest by the philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu...
in 2009, being edited by Ion Vartic and prefaced by Ioana Pârvulescu. Apostrof
Apostrof
Apostrof is a monthly literary magazine published in Cluj-Napoca, Romania under the Romanian Writers' Union patronage. It was founded in 1990 by Babeş-Bolyai University professor Marta Petreu, who is also its editor in chief and main columnist...
magazine awards an annual Ion Negoiţescu Prize to contributions by Romanian writers.
The writer's will specified that the totality of his diary could only be published in or after 2023. It was assigned by Negoiţescu himself in the care of journalist Emil Hurezeanu
Emil Hurezeanu
Emil Horaţiu Hurezeanu is a Romanian journalist and writer.- Education :He attended the law faculty at Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca . Then, he worked as jurist in Alba County and Mediaş and at Eminescu Bookshop in Sibiu...
, his Radio Free Europe colleague, who took the liberty of releasing a short fragment (covering the date of January 4, 1949). Pârvulescu, who calls the piece "an exceptional essay on love" and compares it to Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
's Phaedrus or Symposium
Symposium (Plato)
The Symposium is a philosophical text by Plato dated c. 385–380 BCE. It concerns itself at one level with the genesis, purpose and nature of love....
, suggests that the undisclosed volume may prove to be "Ion Negoiţescu's one great work." Much of his personal correspondence was bequeathed to Cornel Regman, and partly republished by his son, researcher Ştefăniţă Regman.
Securitate archives and related controversy
In 2009, CotidianulCotidianul
thumb|right|Old logo of Cotidianul newspaper, used in the [[inter-war period]], and in the early 1990sthumb|right|The logo used between 2003 and 2007...
journalist Mirela Corlăţan contributed an article in which the claim according to which Petru Romoşan had been a Securitate
Securitate
The Securitate was the secret police agency of Communist Romania. Previously, the Romanian secret police was called Siguranţa Statului. Founded on August 30, 1948, with help from the Soviet NKVD, the Securitate was abolished in December 1989, shortly after President Nicolae Ceaușescu was...
delator was asserted on the basis of archive material kept by the CNSAS government agency. One such document paraphrased Romoşan's alleged claim that Negoiţescu needed to be punished for his "anti-social behavior", alongside personal statement recounting details from Negoiţescu's private life. Also cited was a 1985 statement by Securitate colonel Victor Achim, responsible for reporting on the Writers' Union
Writers' Union of Romania
The Writers' Union of Romania , founded in March 1949, is a professional association of writers in Romania. It also has a subsidiary in Chişinău, Republic of Moldova...
, who assessed that Romoşan was "our link on critic Ion Negoiţescu", acknowledging the role played by such information in getting Negoiţescu to "admit his guilt". Another note, issued after Romoşan's own departure for People's Republic of Hungary
People's Republic of Hungary
The People's Republic of Hungary or Hungarian People's Republic was the official state name of Hungary from 1949 to 1989 during its Communist period under the guidance of the Soviet Union. The state remained in existence until 1989 when opposition forces consolidated in forcing the regime to...
(and subsequent defection to the West), told of a plan to make him the target of a negative campaign by leaking information on his relationship with and betrayal of Negoiţescu.
The scandal was enhanced when Cornel Nistorescu
Cornel Nistorescu
Cornel Nistorescu is a Romanian journalist, best known as the editor of Evenimentul Zilei daily. He is known in the United States for an editorial he wrote entitled Cîntarea Americii regarding the American response to the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001.Nistorescu graduated from the...
, the newly appointed editor in chief of Cotidianul, decided to postpone the publication of Corlăţan's article and later to terminate her contract. Deeming his friend a victim "of the Romanian appetite for filth, rummages through one's private life and public executions", Nistorescu decided to temporarily remove the article from the newspaper's online archive, prompting accusations of censorship. As a result, several Cotidianul authors, including Ioan T. Morar
Ioan T. Morar
Ioan T. Morar is a Romanian journalist, poet, dramatist, novelist, literary and art critic, and civil society activist. He is a founding member of the satirical magazine Academia Caţavencu and, since 2004, a senior editor for Cotidianul...
, announced that they were ceasing their collaboration with the paper. Soon after these incidents, Corlăţan publicized audio samples of threats she had allegedly received from Romoşan. Cornel Nistorescu himself explained that he had decided not to publish the piece because he considered it superficial. He also claimed that the paper had renounced Corlăţan's services only after she had joined in public criticism of the paper.
Romoşan, who had earlier denied involvement with the Securitate, claimed that Negoiţescu had actually both been recruited as an agent since their release from prison in the 1960s, and had spied for the Securitate's foreign bureau during his time in Germany. Speaking after Corlăţan's article, he admitted having functioned as a Securitate informer, but not before 1987, when his wife, writer Adina Kenereş, was threatened with losing her travel privileges. He indicated that his signature on any other such documents was obtained with the use of violence and intimidation. He argued: "I presently think that I was being used by the Securitate, which destroyed my reputation in order to provide Negoiţescu with a cover", and claims that Negoiţescu himself apologized to him for "all the harm" during a chance meeting in the early 1990s. According to Nistorescu's assessment: "When the threads of Negoiţescu's file will come loose, perhaps I'll understand something from [Romoşan's] adventure." In contrast, Morar and Ştefan Agopian both assessed that Romoşan's own flight abroad was part of a Securitate diversion. Literary critic Dan C. Mihăilescu gave Romoşan's claims the benefit of the doubt and urged for the Negoiţescu file to be publicized in its entirety, but also asserted that Romoşan had lost his credibility.
External links
Straja dragonilor (fragment), at the HumanitasHumanitas publishing house
Humanitas is an independent Romanian publishing house, founded on February 1, 1990 in Bucharest by the philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu...
site