Urmuz
Encyclopedia
Urmuz was a Romania
n writer, lawyer and civil servant, who became a cult hero in Romania's avant-garde
scene. His scattered work, consisting of absurdist
short prose and poetry, opened a new genre in Romanian letters and humor, and captured the imagination of modernists
for several generations. Urmuz's Bizarre (or Weird) Pages were largely independent of European modernism, even though some may have been triggered by Futurism
; their valorization of nonsense verse
, black comedy
, nihilistic
tendencies and exploration into the unconscious mind
have repeatedly been cited as influential for the development of Dada
ism and the Theatre of the Absurd
. Individual pieces such as "The Funnel and Stamate", "Ismaïl and Turnavitu", "Algazy & Grummer" or "The Fuchsiad" are parody
fragments, dealing with monstrous and shapeshifting
creatures in mundane settings, and announcing techniques later taken up by Surrealism
.
Urmuz's biography between his high school eccentricity and his public suicide remains largely mysterious, and some of the sympathetic accounts have been described as purposefully deceptive. The abstruse imagery of his work has produced a large corpus of diverging interpretations. He has notably been read as a satirist of public life in the 1910s, an unlikely conservative and nostalgic, or an emotionally distant esotericist
.
In Urmuz's lifetime, his stories were only acted out by his thespian friend George Ciprian
and published as samples by Cuget Românesc newspaper, with support from modernist writer Tudor Arghezi
. Ciprian and Arghezi were together responsible for creating the link between Urmuz and the emerging avant-garde, their activity as Urmuz promoters being later enhanced by such figures as Ion Vinea, Geo Bogza
, Lucian Boz, Saşa Pană
and Eugène Ionesco
. Beginning in the late 1930s, Urmuz also became the focus interest for the elite critics, who either welcomed him into 20th-century literature
or dismissed him as a buffoonish impostor. By then, his activity also inspired an eponymous avant-garde magazine edited by Bogza, as well as Ciprian's drama The Drake's Head.
, using the -escu suffix: his father was known as Dimitrie (Demetru, Dumitru) Ionescu-Buzău. The attached particle Buzău, originally Buzeu, confirms that the family traced its roots to the eponymous town
. According to George Ciprian, the names Ciriviş (variation of cerviş, Romanian
for "melted grease") and Mitică
(pet form of Dumitru) were coined while the writer was still in school, whereas Urmuz came "later".
The name under which the writer is universally known did not actually originate from his own wishes, but was selected and imposed on the public by Arghezi, only one year before Urmuz committed suicide. The spelling Hurmuz, when used in reference to the writer, was popular in the 1920s, but has since been described as erroneous. The variant Ormuz, sometimes rendered as Urmuz, was also used as a pen name by Arghezi's brother in law, the activist and novelist Al. L. Zissu.
The word [h]urmuz, explained by linguists as a curious addition to the Romanian lexis
, generally means "glass bead", "precious stone" or "snowberry
". It has entered the language through oriental channels, and these meanings ultimately refer to the international trade in beads centered on Hormuz Island
, Iran. Anthropologist and essayist Vasile Andru highlights a secondary, scatological, meaning: in the Romani language
, a source of Romanian slang
, urmuz, "bead", has mutated to mean "feces". An alternative etymology, exclusive to the author's pseudonym, was advanced by writer and scholar Ioana Pârvulescu. It suggests the combination of two contradictory terms: ursuz ("surly") and amuz ("I amuse").
. His wife, the writer's mother, was Eliza née Paşcani, sister of the doctor, chemist and University of Paris
professor Cristien Pascani. Urmuz had numerous other siblings ("a multitude", according to Ciprian), of whom most were daughters. One of Urmuz's sisters, Eliza (married Vorvoreanu) was later a main source of information on the author's childhood and adolescence.
The future Urmuz was born in the northern Muntenia
n town of Curtea de Argeş
, and, at age five, spent one year in Paris with his parents. The family eventually settled in Romania's capital, Bucharest
, where his father was hygiene teacher at Matei Basarab National College, later city health inspector
, and rented houses in Antim Monastery
quarter. Young Mitică was described by his sister as mainly unpretentious and introverted, fascinated by scientific discovery and, in his childhood years, a passionate reader of Jules Verne
's science fiction books. At a later stage, he was also possibly familiarized with and influenced by German idealism
and by the philosophical views of 19th-century poet Mihai Eminescu
. A more evident influence on the future writer was Ion Luca Caragiale
, the main figure in early 20th-century Romanian comediography.
Ionescu-Buzău's family had artistic interests, and Urmuz grew up with a fascination for classical music and fine art
, learning to play the piano and taking up amateur oil painting
. He got along best with his mother, who was also a pianist. The devout daughter of an Orthodox
priest, she was unable to instill in her young son the same respect for the Church.
Urmuz's arrival to literary history took place in the atmosphere of Bucharest gymnasia
. It was at this junction that he became a mate of Ciprian, who later described their encounter as momentous: "I don't much believe in destiny. [...] Yet I find it such an odd incident that my bench mate, from my failing grade year through to my high school graduation, was [...] this tiny man of a rare originality, who had a massive say on how my life would turn up." Ciprian describes what follows as his own "initiation in artistic matters": he recalls conversations with "Ciriviş" where they debated the "perfection" of Ancient Greek sculpture
, and mentions that young Urmuz, unlike himself, regarded theater as a "minor art". Instead, Urmuz preferred to attend concerts at the Romanian Atheneum, and, Ciprian writes, had an advanced understanding of absolute music
even at age thirteen. Reportedly, the young man was also in the attendance at lectures given by Titu Maiorescu
, a philosopher and aesthete who had influenced both Eminescu and Caragiale.
Some years later, while enrolled at the Gheorghe Lazăr National College, Urmuz turned his interest toward mocking the severity of his teachers and challenging the dominance of artistic traditionalism. One such early episode is attested by Ciprian: amused by the creation of a Vivat Dacia ("Long Live Dacia
") association of nationalist students, Urmuz subverted its meetings, and, with deadpan
snark, suggested that membership fees should be paid in duck heads. Also according to Ciprian, these events soon lost their shock value, leading him and Urmuz to "take to the streets", where they began their activity as pranksters. Their initial experiment was to pressure law-abiding and credulous passers-by into presenting their identity papers for inspection, and the apparent success earned Urmuz an unexpected following in school (his fans even heckled Vivat Dacia into accepting poultry heads as means of payment, before the society dissolved itself with ceremony). Another colleague, future traditionalist poet Vasile Voiculescu
, recalled young Urmuz as "genially knavish", his humor being "cerebral, harder to detect and appreciate".
The core group of Urmuzian disciples, organized as a secret society
, comprised Ciprian (nicknamed "Macferlan" by Urmuz), Alexandru "Bălălău" Bujoreanu and Costică "Pentagon" Grigorescu, together known as the pahuci. Allegedly, the obscure word originated from the Hebrew
for "yawns". Their activity centered on daring pranks: Urmuz and the other three young men once made an impromptu visit to the isolated Căldăruşani Monastery, in Ilfov County
, where the deposed and disgraced Metropolitan Ghenadie
was living in banishment. Passing themselves off as newspaper editors, they demanded (and received) honored guest treatment, tested the monks' patience, and were later introduced to a well-disposed Ghenadie. Ciprian also recalls that Urmuz's philosophical musings or deadpan surreal humor were a direct inspiration for other pranks and experiments. He describes how Ciriviş acted out sadness for the plight of a screechy sledge (declaring "my heart is at one with all things in existence"), but then duped onlookers into believing that the squeaks came from a woman somehow trapped under the vehicle. Reportedly, Urmuz also approached his seniors training at seminaries
or other traditionalist institutions, earned their attention by claiming to share the nationalist agenda, and then began reciting them nonsense lyrics such as an evolving draft of his mock-fable
"The Chroniclers".
Outside school, the young man was still introverted, and, Sandqvist notes, "extremely shy, especially with girls." Ciprian recalls Ciriviş's engrossing pick-up line
s: he acted familiar to the any young woman who caught his eye, assuring her that they had met once before, and, having stirred her curiosity, falsely recounting how they both used to kill flesh-flies
for sport.
The pahuci welcomed their graduation with one final act of defiance against the school principal, whom they visited in his office, where they began hopping about in circles. Even though their group did not survive once its members took different career paths, they had regular reunions at the Spiru Godelea tavern
, where they earned notoriety for their rude and unconventional behavior. Urmuz enrolled at the Bucharest Medical School
, allegedly after pressures from his stern father. According to Ciprian, this training did not agree with his friend, who would complain of being "unable to make himself understood by the cadavers." This was probably a sign that the young man could not bear to witness dissection
. He eventually entered the University of Bucharest
Faculty of Law, which was to be his alma mater, while also taking lectures in composition and counterpoint
at the Music and Declamation Conservatory
. Additionally, he completed his first service term in the Romanian Infantry
.
Urmuz became head of his family in 1907. That year, his father and two younger brothers died, and his sister Eliza was married. He also continued to take the initiative in daring acts of épater le bourgeois. Ciprian recalls the two of them renting a carriage which Urmuz would order around, making a right at every junction, and effectively going around in circles around the Palace of Justice
. Urmuz then proceeded to pester the street vendors, stopping over to buy a random assortment of useless items: pretzel
s, a pile of charcoal, and an old hen which he impaled on his walking cane.
, in Argeş County
. It is probable that at around this stage (ca. 1908), he was committing to paper the first fragments in his collection Bizarre Pages, some of which were reportedly written during a family reunion in Cocu. According to Eliza Vorvoreanu, he was doing this mainly to entertain his mother and sisters, but Urmuz also amused local potentates, one of whom even offered his daughter's hand in marriage (Urmuz refused). At the time, Mitică also discovered his passion for modern art
: he was an admirer of primitivist
sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi
, fascinated by his 1907 work The Wisdom of the Earth.
Eventually, Urmuz was made a justice of the peace
in the remote Dobruja
region: for a while, he was in Casimcea
village. Later, he was dispatched closer to Bucharest, at Ghergani
, Dâmboviţa County
. These assignments were interrupted in 1913, when Urmuz was called under arms, in the Second Balkan War
against Bulgaria
.
Ciprian mentions having lost touch with his friend "for a long time", before receiving a letter in which the latter complained about the provincial apathy and the lack of musical entertainment; attached was a draft of the "Algazy & Grummer" story, which Ciprian was supposed to read to the "seminary brethren", informing them "about the progresses registered in young literature". Ciprian tells of having discovered the writer in Urmuz, and popularizing this and other stories in his own circle of intellectuals. He also mentions that, in his budding acting career, he was basing some of his performances at Blanduzia Garden on Urmuz's letters.
These developments coincided with the outbreak of World War I. Between 1914 and summer 1916, when Romania was still neutral territory, Ciprian's efforts of circulating the Bizarre Pages may have reached a peak. Urmuz's texts were probably spread around in handwritten copies, becoming somewhat familiar to Bucharest's bohemian society, but Urmuz himself was still an anonymous figure. Both Ciprian and fellow actor Grigore Mărculescu are said to have given public readings from the Bizarre Pages at Casa Capşa
restaurant. According to literary historian Paul Cernat, if rumors about Ciprian's early performances of Urmuz's texts are true, it would constitute one of the first samples of avant-garde shows
in Romanian theatrical tradition.
Around 1916, Urmuz had obtained a relocation, as judge in the Muntenian town of Alexandria
. It was there that he met with poet and schoolteacher Mihail Cruceanu, also on assignment. As Cruceanu later recalled, Urmuz was captivated by the artistic revolt carried out in Italy
by the Futurist
group, and in particular by the poetry of Futurist leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
. According to literary historian Tom Sandqvist, Urmuz may have first read about the Italian intitiatives in the local newspaper Democraţia, which had covered them in early 1909. As a result of this or another encounter, he decided to include, as a subtitle to one of his manuscripts, the words: Schiţe şi nuvele... aproape futuriste ("Sketches
and Novellas... almost Futuristic").
Having reached the rank of Lieutenant, Demetrescu-Buzău was again called under arms when Romania joined the Entente Powers
. In one account, he saw action against the Central Powers
in Moldavia
, following the Army's northward retreat. However, this is partly contradicted by his correspondence from Moldavia, which shows that his new office was as a quartermaster
, and which records his frustration at not having been allowed to fight in the trenches. According to another account, he was mostly bedridden with malaria
, and therefore unable to perform any military duty.
) at the High Court of Cassation and Justice
; sources disagree on whether this appointment dated from 1918 or earlier. Reportedly, this was a well paid employment with special perks, which may have made Urmuz uncomfortable about his other life as a bohemian hero. A photograph portrait taken in that period, one of the few to survive, was read as an additional clue that Urmuz had become melancholy and anxious. Sandqvist also sees him as a "catastrophically lonely" and insomnia
c customer of the brothel
s, adding: "To all appearances as a result of disgusting experiences during the wars, returning home to Bucharest Demetru Demetrescu-Buzău chose to live an extremely ascetic and isolated life with long night walks." Urmuz's feats and pranks were nonetheless attracting more public attention, and he himself allegedly read his work to a bohemian public, in places such as Gabroveni Inn
; at least some of these were free exercises in oral literature
, and as such entirely lost.
The year 1922 brought Urmuz's debut in print. Fascinated by the (then unnamed) Bizarre Pages, poet and journalist Tudor Arghezi
included two of them in Cuget Românesc newspaper. Arghezi reportedly made efforts to persuade his more serious fellow editors of Cuget, and possibly intended to undermine their attempt of putting out a newspaper of record
. The gazette had also published a manifesto by Arghezi, in which he had outlined the goal of combating "sterile literature", and his intention of cultivating the "will to power
" in post-war literary culture. Urmuz was thus the first avant-garde writer popularized by Arghezi, in a list which, by 1940, also came to include a large section of the younger Romanian modernists.
Arghezi later wrote that his relationship with Urmuz was difficult, especially since the grefier panicked that the establishment would discover his other career: "he feared that the Cassation Court would better detect him as Urmuz than under his own name". The memoirist refers to Demetrescu-Buzău's perfectionism and unease, enhanced in the week before publication: "He would wake up in the middle of the night and would send a very urgent letter, asking me if the comma after a 'that' should be moved before. I found him wandering around my house at night, shy, restless, fainthearted or in a hopeful trance, that something of substance may or may not be found in his prose, that perhaps there's an error, asking me to publish it, and then again to destroy it; to publish it together with an eulogistic note, and then again to curse him. He bribed [the printers] to change phrases and words that I had to put back into place, as previous editorial interventions were for sure better than his." The letters they exchanged show that the grefier was not enthusiastic about even seeing his texts and his pseudonym in print, to which Arghezi was replying: "from among the few we'll be cooperating with, you were my first choice".
By May 1922, Urmuz had grown more confident in his strength as a writer. He sent Arghezi a copy of the "Algazy & Grummer" story, which, he joked, needed to be published for "the nation's benefit". He also proposed headlining it with the additional title Bizarre Pages. The work was never published by Cuget, probably because of a change in priorities: around that date, the paper hosted traditionalist editorials by culture critic Nicolae Iorga
, which were incompatible with Arghezi's fronde.
in northern Bucharest. Some early sources suggest that he may have been suffering from an incurable disease, but he is also argued to have been fascinated with guns and their destructive potential. In 1914 for instance, he wrote down in his papers a homage to revolvers, crediting them with a magical power over the suicidal brain. Reports also show that he was theorizing the purposelessness and hollowness of life, addressing his fears on the subject to family members during the funeral of his brother Constantin (also in 1914). Researcher Geo Şerban wrote about Demetrescu-Buzău's well-hidden disappointment, assessing that, during his final year, the writer continued to act cheerful and relaxed, but that a "devastating" tension was building up inside him. At around that time, Urmuz took his one real trip as an adult civilian, visiting the Budaki Lagoon
in Bessarabia
.
Writing in 1927, Arghezi publicized his regret at not having cultivated the friendship: "I never saw him again and I am weighed down by the irreparable grief of never seeking him out. I believe my optimism could have rekindled in his cerebral chaos those candid and pure things that were beginning to die." Several Urmuz exegetes have traditionally seen the suicide intrinsically linked to Urmuz's artistic attitude. For scholar Carmen Blaga, it was the "dissolution of [his] faith" in Romania's intellectual class, along with economic decline and "an existential void", that prompted the writer to opt himself out. This resonates with claims by the first-generation followers of Urmuz: Geo Bogza
suggests that his mentor killed himself once the deconstructive process, performed by his "sharp intellect", reached a natural conclusion; Saşa Pană
claims that Urmuz was tired of merely amusing the "cretins" and "profiteers" who held sway over Bucharest's literary scene, and, determined to turn his literary persona into "stardust", took the risk of destroying his physical self. Additionally, academic George Călinescu
argued that there was a philosophical rationale "very in tune with his century": "he wanted to die in some original way, 'without any cause'."
Kept at the city morgue, the body was assigned to Urmuz's brother-in-law and fellow clerk C. Stoicescu, who stated that the writer had been suffering from neurosis
. Urmuz was buried on November 26, in his family plot at Bellu cemetery. On the day, the event was publicized by a small obituary in Dimineaţa daily, signed with the initial C (presumably, for Ciprian). Both this and other press notices failed to mention that the grefier and the published author were one and the same, and the general public was for long unaware of any such connection. Story goes that an anonymous woman visited the family shortly after the burial, inquiring as to whether the deceased had left any letters.
In its manuscript form, Urmuz's definitive corpus of works covers only 40 pages, 50 at most. Various other manuscripts survive, including diaries and hundreds of aphorism
s, but have for long been unknown to researchers.
" of Romanian avant-garde literature. A literary critic and modernist enthusiast, Lucian Boz, assessed that Urmuz, like Arthur Rimbaud
before him, embodied the "lyrical nihilism
" of avant-garde currents. In the 1960s, literary historian Ovid Crohmălniceanu wrote of his being "the world's first pre-Dada
exercises". In 2002 however, scholar Adrian Lăcătuş revised this thesis, arguing that it had created a "blockage" in critical reception, and that the actual Urmuz had more complex views on the avant-garde. Others have emphasized that Urmuz's unusual revolt ran contemporary with the revival of intense traditionalism of Romanian literature (the Sămănătorul
moment), which would make his pre-Dada inspiration a moment of special significance.
The contact with Futurism
, although acknowledged by Urmuz, is judged by many of his commentators as superficial and delayed. Literary historian Nicolae Balotă first proposed that the Romanian had merely wanted to show his sympathy for (and not a like-mindedness with) Futurism; that the works in question date back before the Futurist Manifesto
, to the Cocu
period; and that the Bizarre Pages have more in common with Expressionism
than with Marinetti. According to Cernat: "By the looks of it, [the Bizarre Pages] were completed largely independent of influence from the European avant-garde movements [...]. We do not know, however, how many of these were already completed in 1909, the year when European Futurism was 'invented'." Emilia Drogoreanu, a researcher of Romanian Futurism, stresses: "The values and representations of [the] world celebrated through Futurism exist within the Urmuzian text, but are entirely uprooted from the significance offered them by [the Futurists]". Although she finds various similarities between Urmuz and Marinetti, Carmen Blaga notes that the former's jadedness was no match for the latter's militancy.
Various authors have also suggested that Urmuz was actually a radical conservative, whose vehemence against platitude in art only camouflaged a basic conventionalism. This perspective found its voice with Lăcătuş, who sees Urmuz as a conservative heretic, equally annoyed by bourgeois and anti-bourgeois discourses. Writing in 1958, Ciprian also reflected on the possibility that Ciriviş was actually "teasing" the avant-garde tendencies emerging in his day, but concluded: "I would rather assume that under these various experiments was smoldering the lust for shaking the individual out of his skin, of tearing him away from himself, of disassembling him, of making him doubt the authenticity of accumulated knowledge." He writes that Urmuz's work lashed out at "human nature in its most intimate creases." Accordingly, some authors have even considered Urmuz the inheritor of late-19th-century Decadence
or of a matured alexandrine
purity. In other such readings, Urmuz appears to lend his backing to the sexist
or antisemitic viewpoints of his contemporaries. Crohmălniceanu also writes: "the musings comprised in his manuscript notebooks [...] are restrained, flat, commonplace, as if the work of a different man."
Much debate surrounds the issue of Urmuz's connection to an absurdist
streak in earlier Romanian literature and folklore
. In the 1940s, George Călinescu
discussed in detail an Urmuzian tradition, of as being characteristic for the literary culture of Romania's southern, Wallachia
n, cities. He noted that Urmuz was one of "the great grimacing sensitive" Wallachians, a "Balkan
" succession which also includes Hristache the Baker, Anton Pann
, Ion Minulescu
, Mateiu Caragiale
, Ion Barbu
and Arghezi. In his definition, the source of Arghezi and Urmuz is in the folkloric tradition of self-parody
, where the doina
songs degenerate into spells or "grotesque whines". The image of a folkloric Urmuz was soon after taken up by other critics, including Eugenio Coşeriu
and Crohmălniceanu.
, who also believed that Urmuz was a satirist of automatic behavior
, and fundamentally a sarcastic realist. More severe in tone, Pompiliu Constantinescu
assessed that Urmuz was superficial, chaotic and amateurish, interesting to researchers only because of defying "the bourgeois platitude". Contrarily, another interwar exegete, Perpessicius
, made ample efforts to rehabilitate Urmuz as a thoughtful literary figure with "great creative verve", on the same level as Arghezi and poet Adrian Maniu.
Ciprian noted that Urmuz was unlike the "cheeky, daring, disorganized" pranksters whom he superficially resembled, that nothing in Urmuz's exterior gave the impression that he was in any way "spoiled". Time, he suggests, did not alter Urumuz's "attitude on life": "Only now the about-turns were more daring and the tightrope acts was much more savvy." In 1925, commenting on Urmuz's flair for depicting the "overall pointlessness of [human] existence", Ciprian also argued: "For the mediocre mindset, [Urmuz] may seem incoherent and unbalanced—which is why his work is not addressed to the masses." Critic Adrian G. Romilă writes that the new "paradigm" in Urmuz's literary universe appears significant and laborious, but adds: "That which we do not know is if the writer [...] wasn't purely and simply playing around." However, Ioana Pârvulescu assessed that Urmuz, an author of "extreme originality", "put his own life into play and games [...] and that is why his work is more tragic than comedic or is nested in that no man's land where tragedy and comedy overlap."
Crohmălniceanu sees in the Bizarre Pages indication of a "singular" and tragic experience, while Geo Şerban argues that Urmuz's "verve" comes from destructive pressures on his own psychology. Reviewer Simona Vasilache also suggests that the Bizarre Pages hide a "long digested" rage, with serious and even dramatic undertones. Other essayists have spoken about Urmuz's "cruelty" in depicting anguishing situations, in criticizing social life and in using language stripped of its metaphor
s; they call him "one of the cruelest authors I ever did read" (Eugène Ionesco
) and "cruel in a primitive sense" (Irina Ungureanu). As Ciprian reports, Urmuz was also self-deprecatory, amused by the others' attention, and claiming that his own elucubraţii ("phantasmagorias") could only still be used to "trip the seminary brethren". One of his aphorisms hints to his internal drama and its role in creation: "There are cases when God can only help you by giving you more and more suffering."
. In the decades after his death, Romanian reviewers started comparing him to Czechoslovakia's Franz Kafka
, a parallel which was still being supported in the 21st century. According to Romilă, Urmuzian and Kafkaesque literature are both about dehumanization
, in Urmuz's case with a predilection for mechanical oddities which colonize and modify human existence. Other frequent analogies rank Urmuz together with Alfred Jarry
, the French proto-Dadaist and inventor of 'Pataphysics. He was also described as an equivalent of Anglophone nonsense writers (Edward Lear
, Lewis Caroll). Elsewhere, he is paralleled with Russia
's Daniil Kharms
, or modernist Poles
from Bruno Schulz
to Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. Those who speak about his fundamental conservatism or his humorist's talent have also likened Urmuz and the Bizarre Pages to Gustave Flaubert
and his sarcastic Dictionary of Received Ideas
. At the other end, those who focus on Urmuz's bizarre and sad metamorphoses have paralleled his work to Tim Burton
's Oyster Boy stories.
A major disagreement among critics relates to Urmuz's ambiguous positioning, between literature, antiliterature
and metafiction
. In reference to the Bizarre Pages, Crohmălniceanu introduced the term "antiprose". In Crohmălniceanu's view, the antiliterary "device" Urmuz invented is impersonal and regulated, in the manner of Dada "readymades
", but as such ingenious and therefore inimitable. Authors such as Adrian Marino, Eugen Negrici, Lucian Raicu and Mircea Scarlat have spoken about Urmuz as a revolutionist of language, who liberated texts from coherence and even semantics
; whereas others—Livius Ciocârlie, Radu Petrescu, Ion Pop, Nicolae Manolescu
, Marin Mincu, Mihai Zamfir—have regarded him as mainly a textualist, interested in reusing and redefining the limits of poetry or narration, but creating a coherent, if personal, universe. According to Vasile Andru, Urmuzian literature is by definition open to all these associations, its antiliterary aspects illustrating the modern gap between "nature and nurture
". Critic C. Trandafir, who sees Urmuz's apparent textualism as canceled out by deeper meanings in his prose, writes: "The man who wrote the 'bizarre pages' had a clear critical awareness of the transformations needed within literary discourse."
recalls, Urmuz had was genuinely "tormented by metaphysical
matters". Some of Urmuz's commentators therefore discussed him as a reader of the unconscious mind
or propagator of esoteric
knowledge, suggesting that a hidden layer of mystical symbolism can be discerned in all his activities. According to Perpessicius, the Bizarre Pages as a whole carry a subtext
of mythopoeia, or "fragments of a new mythology
". Boz also drew a comparison between Urmuz and the morose poems of George Bacovia
, arguing that they both send the reader on "tragic explorations" and "journeys to the underworld". In Boz's interpretation, Urmuz was not at all a humorist, but rather one who issued a solitary "call to order" and, creating a "magical phenomenon", elevated his reader above the realities of the flesh. He first discussed the connection between the Bizarre Pages and 1930s Surrealism
, which likewise turned its attention to the abnormal psychology
, to "psychosis
" and "dementia
". The theoretical proto-Surrealism of such works, which places less importance on their topical humor, has generated a long debate between scholars later in the 20th century: some have denied Urmuzian Surrealism, whereas others have continued to identify him as the earliest Romanian Surrealist.
Simona Popescu, the poet-essayist, presumes that Urmuz's inner motivation was his "psycho-mania", which holds no respect for either convention or posterity, but only for committing one's own "abyssal obsessions" to paper: "death, the Eros, creation, and destruction." Adrian Lăcătuş also makes note of Urmuz's ambiguous allusions to autoeroticism
, incest
, bisexuality
or paraphilia
. Additionally, various commentators suggest that Urmuz's creative spark hides an unresolved conflict with his father. According to Cernat, Urmuz was in conflict with "paternal authority" and more attached to his mother, an "Oedipus complex
" also found in some other literary figures of the pre-modernist generation. Others too see in Ciriviş's pranks a planned revenge against parental and social pressures. His sister Eliza credited such accounts, by noting: "You can tell he failed in life because he obeyed his parents blindly, and perhaps also in part due to his lack of will, his shyness, his fear of the public."
Urmuz the aphorist genuinely trusted that the "Soul" of the world was a unity of opposites
, and, inspired by the philosophy of Henri Bergson
, also spoke of a "universal vital flux
". Lăcătuş and others suggest that Urmuz's worldview is the modern correspondent of Gnosticism
and Manichaeism
: in one of the manuscripts he left behind, Urmuz speculates about there being two Gods, one good and one evil. A distinct, and disputed, interpretation was put forth by researcher Radu Cernătescu, who believes that Urmuz's life and work reflected the doctrine of Freemasonry
. Cernătescu reads indications of Masonic "awakening" throughout Urmuz's stories, and notes that the pahuci brotherhood was probably the junior or parody version of a Romanian Masonic Lodge
.
works, which are prose-like in content. Ciprian simply assessed that Urmuz's pieces "do not belong to any literary genre." In line with his comments about the mythological layer of Urmuz's work, Perpessicius suggested that Urmuz created "new fairy tale
s" and "fantasy
sketches". This intuition was given endorsement by other scholars, who included the Bizarre Pages in anthologies of Romanian fantasy literature. Contrarily, Boz found that Urmuz was "the poet of transcendental absurdity", "the reformer of Romanian poetry", and the counterpart of Romania's national poet, Mihai Eminescu
. The Eminescu-Urmuz comparison, which put aside all their differences in style and vision, was a favorite of avant-garde authors, and, late in the century, served to inspire sympathetic academics such as Marin Mincu.
According to Ciprian, one of Urmuz's earliest prose fragments was composed, with "The Chroniclers", during pahuci escapades. Its opening words, Ciprian recalls, were: "The deputy arrived in a brick and tile cart. He was bringing no news, but offered his friends, upon arrival, a few Leclanché
batteries". The same author suggests that these drafts were much inferior to Urmuz's published works, beginning with "Algazy & Grummer".
In its definitive version, the Algazy piece offers a glimpse into the strange life and cannibalistic
death of its storekeeper characters: Algazy, "a nice old man" with his beard "neatly laid out on a grill [...] surrounded by barbed wire", "does not speak any European languages
" and feeds on municipal waste; Grummer, who has "a bilious temper
" and "a beak of aromatic wood", spends most time lying under the counter, but sometimes assaults customers in the middle of conversations about sports or literature. When Algazy discovers that his associate has digested, without giving a thought to sharing, "all that was good in literature", he takes his revenge by consuming Grummer's rubbery bladder. A race begins as to who can eat the other first. Their few remains are later discovered by the authorities, and one of Algazy's many wives sweeps them up into oblivion. A different, early variant is quoted "from memory" and commented in Ciprian. In this account, Algazy the storekeeper is persuaded by his domineering wife to make their only son a magistrate. Grummer prepares the boy for his unexpected novitiate
, strapping him down to the floor of a cave that must have the scent of colts
.
From its very title, "Algazy & Grummer" references a defunct firm of suitcase manufacturers. Urmuz's own note to the text apologizes for this, explaining that the names' "musicality" is more suited to the two fictional characters than to their real-life models, and suggesting that the company should change name (or that its patrons must adapt their physical shape accordingly). The narrative may hint to the everyday tensions between these entrepreneurs, and perhaps to the boredom of a career in sales; according to philologist Simona Constantinovici, it is also the confrontation of an entrepreneurial Turk
(Algazy) and an intellectual Jew
(Grummer), represented as a fight between the ostrich
and the platypus
. Beyond the mundane pretext, the story was often described as Urmuz's manifesto against any literary technique
, and even a witty meditation on the signified and signifier
. Carmen Blaga further proposes that Urmuz philosophic intent is to show the gap between universe, in which all things are possible and random, and man, who demands familiarity and structure.
? the same people? the same beards?" The result, Sandqvist writes, is "breakneck, absurd, and inordinately grotesque." Călinescu singled out the work: "The best of his absurd pieces is 'Ismaïl and Turnavitu', the solemnly academic portraiture and parody of bourgeois mannerisms, where there's always a confusion being made between the three kingdoms, the animal, the vegetal and the mineral".
Ismaïl "is made up of eyes, sideburns, and a dress", tied with rope to a badger and stumbling down Arionoaia Street. Protected from "legal responsibility" in the country ("a seed-bed at the bottom of a hole in Dobruja
"), the creature raises an entire badger colony: some he eats raw, with lemon; the others, once they have turned sixteen, he rapes "without the smallest qualm of conscience." The seed-bed is where Ismaïl also interviews job applicants, received on the condition that they hatch him "four eggs each". The process is supported by his "chamberlain
" Turnavitu, who exchanges love letters with the applicants. Ismaïl's actual residence is kept a secret, but it is presumed that he lives, sequestered from "the corruption of electoral mores", in an attic above the home of his grotesquely disfigured father, only to emerge in a ball gown
for the yearly celebration of plaster
. He then offers his body to the workers, in hopes of thus resolving "the labor issue". Whereas Ismaïl has once worked as an air fan for "dirty Greek coffee houses" in the Lipscani
quarter, Turnavitu has a past in "politics": he was for long the government-appointed air fan at the fire precinct kitchen. Ismaïl has spared Turnavitu a life of near constant rotation, remunerating his services: the seed-bed interviews, the ritualized apologizes to the leashed badgers, the praise of Ismaïl's fashion sense, and the swabbing of canola
over Ismaïl's gowns. Their relationship breaks down as Turnavitu, returning from the Balearic Islands
in the form of a jerrycan
, passes the common cold
to Ismaïl's badgers. Sacked from his job, he contemplates suicide ("not before seeing to the extraction of four canines
in his mouth"), and hurls himself into a pyre made up of Ismaïl's dresses; the patron falls into depression and "decrepitude", retreating to his seed-bed for the rest of his own life.
Like "Algazy & Grummer", "Ismaïl and Turnavitu" probably has a skeletal structure borrowed from real life: Turnavitu was a distinguished clan within Bucharest's Greek nobility, tracing its origin back to the Phanariote era. The semi-fictional world is populated by other symbols of Romania's connection to the Orient, that are meant to evoke "the banality of a distinctively Balkan scenery" (Carmen Blaga). Other interpretations have seen in the two protagonists caricatures of political corruption and parvenu
morals.
, the statue of a Transylvania
n priest and grammarian, and two humans always "in the process of descending from the ape
". The second room, decorated in "Turkish style" and "eastern luxury", is painted once a day and carefully measured, by compass, to prevent shrinkage. A third section, under the "Turkish" room, houses a limitless canal, a tiny room and a stake "to which the entire Stamate family is tethered." The "dignified" and "elliptical
" head of the clan spits chewed-up celluloid
on his fat boy Bufty, who "pretends not to notice". For relaxation, the Stamates contemplate Nirvana
, located over the canal and "in the same precinct" as them. Old Stamate's musings are interrupted by the provocative intrusion of a siren
, who lures him into the deep by presenting him with "an innocent and too decent looking funnel." Stamate returns "a better and more tolerant man", deciding to use the funnel for both the pleasures of sex and those of science. Neglecting his family duties, he goes on nightly expeditions into the funnel, until he discovers in horror that Bufty uses the funnel for a similar purpose. Stamate then decides to part with his wife (sewing her in a bag, to "preserve the cultural traditions of his family") and with Bufty: trapped in the funnel, the boy is sent over to Nirvana, where Stamate makes sure he becomes a "bureau sub-chief". Stamate is left alone to contemplate his plight, wandering to and fro at great speed, and submerging "into micro-infinity."
As an early supporter of Urmuz, Ciprian spoke of "The Funnel and Stamate" as "without parallel" in its satire of family life, suggesting that the scene were all the Stamates are tied to a single stake is "more evocative than hundreds of pages from a novel" (part of the story has also been read as a sexist joke on fashionable androgyny
, since Stamate has a "tonsured and legitimate wife"). Urmuz's original version in fact carries the subtitle "A Four-Part Novel", in which Paul Cernat reads the intention of parodying the staple genres of traditional literature; according to Ioana Pârvulescu, the definition needs to be taken seriously, and makes the text ("perhaps the shortest [novel] in European literature
") a "microscopic" Romanian equivalent of modernist works by James Joyce
. Linguist Anca Davidoiu-Roman notes: "Urmuz's antinovel
[...] apparently preserves the structures of the novelistic genre, but undermines them from the inside, cultivating the absurd, the black humor, [...] the nonsensical and the zeugma
." The core theme is believed to be sexual: a paraphrase of Romeo and Juliet
, with Stamate as the ridiculously abstract thinker falling for the debased stand-in of femininity
; or even the detailed creation of "an aberrant mechanism for erotic gratification." Stamate himself is also described as standing in for "the unimaginative bourgeois".
was first to argue that the subtext here is a direct reference to Greek mythology
and Norse paganism
, re-contextualized "with the sadistic pleasure of children who take apart their dolls". The protagonist Fuchs is an eminently musical creature, who came into the world not out of his mother's womb, but through his grandmother's ear. At the conservatory, he turns into "the perfect chord
", but out of modesty spends most of his education hiding at the bottom of a piano. Puberty comes and he grows "some kind of genitalia"—in fact a "fig leaf
" which keeps rejuvenating. The actual story begins on the one night Fuchs spends in the open air: under the spell of its mysteries, the composer finds his way into Traian Street (Bucharest's red-light district
).
There, a group of "vestals
" whisks him away, praying to be shown the beauty of "immaterial love" and begging him to play a sonata
. His music is heard by the goddess Venus
, and she is instantly "defeated by passion", asking Fuchs to join her on Mount Olympus
. The act of lovemaking between clueless, overanxious Fuchs and the giant goddess is a disaster, particularly after the former decides to enter his whole body into Venus' ear. The embarrassed and angered audience humiliates the guest and banishes him to the planet Venus
; merciful Athena
allows him to return home, but on condition he does not reproduce. However, Fuchs still decides to spend some of his time practicing his lovemaking on Traian Street, hoping that Venus will grant him a second chance, and believing that he and the goddess could breed a race of Supermen
. In the end, the prostitutes also reject his advances, deeming him a "dirty satyr
", no longer capable of immaterial love. The story ends with Fuchs' flight to into "boundless nature", whence his music "has been beaming away with equal force in all directions", fulfilling his destiny as an enemy of inferior art.
Urmuz's story has been variously described as his praise of artistic freedom
, and more precisely as an ironic take on his own biography as a failed musician. On a more transparent level, it references classical composer Theodor Fuchs, depicted by posterity as a "puberal" and "clumsy" man, and known as a disgraced favorite of Romanian Queen-Consort Elisabeth of Wied
. "The Fuchsiad" may also contain intertextual
nods to A Midsummer Night's Dream
.
but otherwise wears only a festoon
ed drape, swims about in just one direction ("for fear of coming out of his neutrality") and gets inspired by the military muses. His career is in foreign relations, which he revolutionizes with such novel ideas as the negotiated annexation of a unidimensional
, arrow-like, territory at Năsăud
—pointed toward Luxembourg
, in memory of the 1914 invasion
. Gayk has an adoptive daughter, educated on his behalf by waiters, who makes her home in the fields and eventually demands access to the sea. Angered by this claim, Gayk begins a large-scale war against her; the conflict ends in a stalemate, as Gayk can no longer accessorize his marshal's uniform, and the girl has lost her supplies of gasoline and beans. The father is placated with regular gifts of feed grain
, whereas the daughter is allowed a two-centimeter-wide littoral.
In its subtext, "Emil Gayk" teases the irredentist
ambitions of the interventionist camp, in respect to Transylvania
province. Urmuz quotes a humorous slogan, circulated as a lampoon of nationalist attitudes: "Transylvania without the Transylvanians". This probably references the fact that, although Romanian by culture or ethnicity, many Transylvanian intellectuals were primarily the loyal subjects of the Habsburg Monarchy
. According to Crohmălniceanu, the actual purpose is to overturn "ossified" constructs, as in the case of territorial demands which cover no real surface. Similarly, Şerban speaks about "Emil Gayk" as a piece in which magnified "paltry aspects" and "anomalies" are supposed to send the reader into a "state of vigil".
The plot of "Going Abroad" depicts someone's convoluted attempt to leave the country for good. The unnamed seven-year-old "he" in the story settles his scores with the assistance of "two old ducks" and embarks for the voyage, only to be pulled back in by "paternal feelings"; he consequently isolates himself in a tiny room, where he converts to Judaism, punishes his servants, celebrates his Silver Jubilee
, and rethinks his escape. His wife, jealous of his contacts with a seal, decides against it, but offers him various parting gifts: flatbread
, a kite
, and a sketchbook by art teacher Borgovanu. This results in a quarrel, and the protagonist finds himself tied by the cheekbones, "delivered unceremoniously on dry land." For a third attempt at leaving, the husband relinquishes wealth and titles, strips down and, bound with a bark rope, gallops to another town, joining the bar association
. The story ends with a rhyming "moral":
"Going Abroad" is possibly about Urmuz's own difficulties in deciding his own fate, transposed into a faux sample of travel literature
, an example of what Balotă calls the failed homo viator ("human pilgrim") in Urmuz.
make efforts to confiscate his tree, but the protagonist is still able to squat on one of the branches after he gives proof of naturalization
, and then—by taking a swim through the "infected pond nearby"—shames his adversaries into leaving. Strengthened by cynicism and his affection for the hen, he heads back to his "native village", where he is to train folks in the "art of midwifery
." According to critics, "After the Storm" should be seen as a caricature of minor Romanticism
and conventional fantasy or travel literature. Simona Vasilache also finds it "an Odyssey
covering some twenty lines", "a misalliance of heroism and pilferage" with echoes from Urmuz's hero Ion Luca Caragiale
.
"A Little Metaphysics and Astronomy", which is structured like a treatise, opens with a pun on the creation narrative, postulating that God created fingerspelling
before "the Word", and venturing to suggest that "the heavenly bodies", like abandoned children, are in fact nobody's creation, that their spin is really a form of attention seeking
. Here, Urmuz questions the possibility of a single cause in the universe, since God's interest is in unnecessary duplications or multitudes in stars, men and fish species. Beyond the jokes on scientific pretense, Vasilache reads "A Little Metaphysics..." as a clue to Urmuz's own disillusioned worldview, which she traces back to the suicidal warnings in Urmuz's notebooks. She argues that such a melancholy and lonely diarist is in contrast with Urmuz's literary persona, as known from the Bizarre Pages. Likewise, Carmen Blaga describes the text as a sober meditation on "the tragic sense of history" and "the fall into temporality
".
Among the last Urmuzian works to be discovered is "Cotadi and Dragomir". The first in the duo is a muscular but short and insect-like merchant, who wears dandruff, tortoiseshell
combs, a lath
armor which greatly hiders his movements, and a piano lid screwed to his buttocks. The descendant of Macedonian
nobility, Cotadi feeds on ant eggs and excretes soda water
, except when he corks himself to solve the "agrarian question
". For fun, he lures his clients into angry conversations—these end with him banging the piano lid, which is also a urinating wall, on the shop's floor. Dragomir is long, crooked, brownish and kind-hearted; he intervenes in the disputes between Cotadi and the more stubborn customers, intimidating the latter with a cardboard contraption that extends upwards from his neck. His friend rewards such attentions with meals of octopus, sorb-pears or paint, and Dragomir earns the right to sleep inside the gate wall. They are to be buried together, "in the same hole", with a daily supply of French oil. From such a grave, Cotadi hopes, an olive tree plantation may spring up, for the benefit of his descendants. Like "Algazy & Grummer", "Cotadi and Dragomir" was interpreted as an allusion to the stillness of a life in commerce.
s, but lacking any directly interpretable message, Urmuz's "The Chroniclers" referenced Aristotle
, Galileo Galilei
and the turn-of-the-century Balkan
insurgent Boris Sarafov
(Sarafoff). Its opening lines suggest that the eponymous chroniclers, for lack of baggy pants, approach someone with the surname "Rapaport" and demand to be issued passports. The lyrical convention breaks down toward the end, which states:
Ciprian simply discussed the piece as "Urmuz's idiotic lyrics", while Călinescu found it a "pure fable, on the classical canon, but nonsensical". Cernat also described its "moral" as "empty" and "tautological
", but other critics see as hidden layer of meaning in the seemingly random cultural imagery. Ion Pop, commenting on Urmuz's hypertextuality
, assumes that the "pelican and pouchbill" motif comes from a book once used as teaching aid. He also suggests that the passion and hunger which ties together the various characters is in fact the thirst for freedom, for movement and for exotic settings: "Rapaport" is the Wandering Jew
, Aristotle is the mentor of a great conqueror, and Galilei is invoked for his remark "And yet it moves
". The mention of "Sarafoff" has been read as an indirect homage to Caragiale—who had first referred to the insurgent in some of his humorous sketches.
, Jules Laforgue
, Edward Lear
and others were just as important in its formative process. He concludes that the avant-garde "apologetes" were projecting their own expectations into the Bizarre Pages, in which they read the antithesis of "High Romanticism", and into the writer, who became Romanian version of a poète maudit
. Ion Pop also suggests: "In [Urmuz's] human destiny, and in his writing too, [the avant-garde writers] find issues which trouble them as well in prefiguring their own destinies. He satisfies the pride of those who carry on with an uncertain and anxious existence, endlessly in conflict with the world..." According to Andru: "Enthusiastic, ingenious, skeptical, rhetorical, or indecent words have been uttered about [the Bizarre Pages]. People used terms having to do with the literary revolutions of the 20th century [...]. In his pages people found themes present in all the innovating actions that gained momentum especially since 1922–1924".
Cernat describes the growth of Urmuz's myth as similar to Early Christianity
: Ciprian as a "prophet", Arghezi as a "baptist", the modernist aficionados as "apostles" and "converts". Over time, various exegetes have noted that the modernist aspects of Arghezi's prose, written after 1923, show his debt to Urmuz's absurdism and nonsense humor
. Arghezi's Bilete de Papagal
review was also a promotional instrument for the Bizarre Pages: in 1928, continuing the Cuget Românesc project, it circulated "Algazy & Grummer".
While his role as a pre-Dadaist is up for debate, Urmuz is thought by many to have been a considerable influence on a Romanian founder of Dada, Tristan Tzara
. During its first years, the Romanian avant-garde would generally not mention Urmuz outside Arghezi's circle, but a surge in popularity came in stages after the European-wide impact of Dadaism, and especially after Tzara alienated some of his Romanian partners. This was the case of poet Ion Vinea and painter Marcel Janco
, who together founded a modernist art magazine called Contimporanul
. Late in 1924, Contimporanul teamed up with Ciprian, who gave a public reading from Urmuz during the Contimporanul International Art Exhibit.
The following year, Ciprian's eponymous text "Hurmuz", published in Contimporanul, listed the main claims about Urmuz's pioneering role. Also then, the Futurist journal Punct
, a close ally of Vinea and Janco, gave exposure to various unknown Urmuzian pages. In December 1926, a Contimporanul editorial signed by Vinea announced to the world that Urmuz was "the discreet revolutionist" responsible for the reshaping of Europe's literary landscape: "Urmuz-Dada-Surrealism, these three words create a bridge, decipher a parentage, clarify the origins of the world's literary revolution in the year 1918." In its coverage of the international scene, the journal continued to suggest that the suicidal author had anticipated the literary fronde, for instance calling Michel Seuphor a writer "à la Urmuz". In addition to republishing some of the Bizarre Pages in its own issues, it took the initiative in making Urmuz known to an international audience: the Berlin-based magazine Der Sturm
included samples from Urmuz in its special issue Romania (August–September 1930), reflecting a Contimporanul who's who list. At around the same time, poet Jenő Dsida completed the integral translation of the Bizarre Pages into Hungarian
.
In his Contimporanul stage, Janco drew a notorious ink portrait of Urmuz. In old age, the same artist completed several cycle of engravings and paintings that alluded to the Bizarre Pages. Vinea's own prose of the 1920s was borrowing from Urmuz's style, which it merged with newer techniques from the avant-garde groups of Europe. He followed Urmuz's deceptive "novel" genre of "The Funnel and Stamate", which also became a characteristic of works by other Contimporanul writers: Felix Aderca
, F. Brunea-Fox, Filip Corsa, Sergiu Dan
and Romulus Dianu. In addition, Jacques G. Costin, who moved between Contimporanul and the international Dada scene, was for long thought an imitator of Urmuz's style. Several critics have nevertheless revised this verdict, noting that Costin's work builds on distinct sources, Urmuz being just one.
. Its main contributors, including Pană, Geo Bogza
, Ilarie Voronca
, Ion Călugăru
, Moldov and Stephan Roll, were all Urmuz enthusiasts from the far left. In 1930, Pană collected and published as a volume the complete works of Urmuz: titled Algazy & Grummer, it notably included "The Fuchsiad". Pană and Bogza visited the unpublished archive, which gave them a chance to acknowledge, but also to silence, the more conventional and antisemitic Urmuz revealed through the aphorisms. These manuscripts were kept in possession by the Pană family, and exhibited in 2009.
Bogza was previously editor of a short-lived magazine named Urmuz, published in Câmpina
with support from poet Alexandru Tudor-Miu, and keeping contact with other Urmuzian circles: it was saluted by Arghezi and published a drawing portrait of Urmuz (probably Marcel Janco's). Bogza's first editorial piece proclaimed: "Urmuz lives. His presence among us whips to lash our consciousness." Later, in unus inaugural art manifesto
, Bogza described his suicidal mentor as "The Forerunner". Others in this group incorporated "Urmuzian" metamorphoses into their technique and, at that stage, the Bizarre Pages were also imitated in style by Pană's sister, Magdalena "Madda Holda" Binder, influencing stories by Pană's young follower Sesto Pals and novels by the isolated Surrealist H. Bonciu
. In the mid 1930s, unu illustrator Jules Perahim drew his own version of Urmuz's portrait.
After the Contimporanul group split and a young generation reassimilated modernism into a spiritualistic framework (Trăirism), critic Lucian Boz was the first professional to find no fault with the Bizarre Pages, and made Urmuz interesting for mainstream and elitist criticism. Between the unu Surrealists and Boz's version of modernism were figures such as Ion Biberi (who popularized Urmuz in France) and Marcel Avramescu. Avramescu (better known then as Ionathan X. Uranus) was notably inspired by Urmuz's pre-Dadaist prose, which he sometimes imitated. Other authors in this succession were Grigore "Apunake" Cugler
, widely credited as a 1930s Urmuz, and Constantin Fântâneru. The early 1930s also brought the publication of several new works of memoirs mentioning Demetrescu-Buzău, including texts by Cruceanu and Vasile Voiculescu
—the latter was also the first to mention Urmuz on Romanian Radio (January 1932); another such Radio homage was later authored by Pană.
The channels of communication once opened, Urmuz came to be discussed with unexpected sympathy by Perpessicius, Călinescu and other noted cultural critics, consolidating his reputation as a writer. Călinescu's attitude was particularly relevant: the condescending but popularizing portrayal of Urmuz, which became part of Călinescu's 1941 companion to Romanian literature (Urmuz's earliest mention in such a synthesis), was first sketched in his literary magazine Capricorn (December 1930) and his 1938 university lectures. Although he confessed an inability to view Demetrescu-Buzău as a real writer, Călinescu preferred him over traditionalism, and, critics note, even allowed the Bizarre Pages to influence his own work as novelist. Meanwhile, a blunt negation of Urmuz's contribution was restated by the academic figure Pompiliu Constantinescu
, who nevertheless commented favorably on the writer's "ingeniousness". Eugen Lovinescu
, another mainstream literary theorist, angered the avant-garde by generally ignoring Urmuz, but made note of Ciprian's readings "from Hurmuz's repertoire" at the Sburătorul
literary sessions.
Urmuz may have acted as a direct or indirect influence of mainstream authors of fiction, one case being that of satirist Tudor Muşatescu
. Similar observations were made regarding the work of modern novelists Anişoara Odeanu or Anton Holban
.
of his dead friend's writings. This claim was traced back to Arghezi, and was probably a publicity stunt
meant to increase Urmuz's exposure, but taken with seriousness by another opinion maker, journalist Constantin Beldie. The ensuing scandal was amplified by the young Dadaists and Surrealists, who took the rumor to be true: Avramescu-Uranus, himself accused of plagiarizing Urmuz, made an ironic reference to this fact in a 1929 contribution to Bilete de Papagal. Unwittingly, Arghezi's allegations cast a shadow of doubt on Ciprian's overall work for the stage.
The Drake's Head was Ciprian's personal homage to the pahuci: it shows a grown-up Ciriviş, the main protagonist, returning from a trip abroad and reuniting with his cronies during an overnight party. The Drake's Head brotherhood spends the small hours of the morning bullying passers-by, chasing them "like birds of prey" and pestering them with absurd proposals. Quite jaded and interested in wrecking the very "pillars of logic", Ciriviş convinces his friends to follow him on a more daring stunt: trespassing private property, they take over an apple tree and treat it as a new home. Claiming that land ownership only covers the actual horizontal plane, they even strike out an agreement with the stupefied owner. Nevertheless, a pompous and indignant "Bearded Gentleman" takes up the cause of propriety and incites the Romanian Police
to intervene. The play premiered in early 1940. The original cast included Nicolae Băltăţeanu as Ciriviş and Ion Finteşteanu as Macferlan, with additional appearances by Ion Manu, Eugenia Popovici, Chiril Economu.
Cernat sees The Drake's Head as a sample of Urmuzian mythology: "Ciriviş [...] is shown as a quasi-mythological figure, the boss of a parodic-subversive fellowship which seeks to rehabilitate a poetic, innocent, apparently absurd freedom". According to Cernat, it remains Ciprian's only truly "nonconformist" play, particularly since it is indebted to "the absurd Urmuzian comedy". Some have identified the "Bearded Gentleman" as Nicolae Iorga
, the traditionalist culture critic—the claim was later dismissed as mere "innuendo" by Ciprian, who explained that his creation stood for all "demagogue" politicians of the day.
, and a purge of interwar modernist values followed: Urmuz's works were among the many denied imprimatur by the 1950s. Before communist censorship
became complete, Urmuz still found disciples in the last wave of the avant-garde. Cited examples include Geo Dumitrescu, Dimitrie Stelaru and Constant Tonegaru
. Also at the time, writer Dinu Pillat donated a batch of Urmuz's manuscripts to the Romanian Academy Library.
The anti-Urmuzian current, part of a larger anti-modernist campaign
, found an unexpected backer in George Călinescu, who became a fellow traveler of communism. In his new interpretation, the Bizarre Pages were depicted as farcical and entirely worthless. For a while, the Bizarre Pages were only cultivated by the Romanian diaspora
. Having discovered the book in interwar Romania, the dramatist and culture critic Eugène Ionesco
made it his mission to highlight the connections between Urmuz and European modernism. Ionesco's work for the stage, a major contribution to the international Theater of the Absurd movement, consciously drew upon various sources, including the Romanians Ion Luca Caragiale
and Urmuz. The contextual importance of such influences, which remain relatively unknown to Ionesco's international audience, has been assessed differently by the various exegetes, as Ionesco himself once stated: "Nothing in Romanian literature has ever truly influenced me." Thanks to Ionesco's intervention, Urmuz's works saw print in Les Lettres Nouvelles journal. Allegedly, his attempt to publish Urmuz's work with Éditions Gallimard
was sabotaged by Tristan Tzara, who may have feared that previous claims about his absolute originality would come under revision.
The entirety of Urmuz's work was republished in English by writer Miron Grindea
and his wife Carola, in ADAM Review (1967, the same year when new German translations were published in Munich
's Akzente journal). From his new home in Hawaii, Romanian writer Ştefan Baciu
, whose own poetry borrows from Urmuz, further popularized the Bizarre Pages with Boz's assistance. Another figure of the anti-communist diaspora, Monica Lovinescu
, adopted Urmuzian aesthetics in some of her satirical essays. The diaspora community was later joined by Andrei Codrescu
, who became a neo-Dadaist and wrote stories he calls "à la Urmuz".
and autofiction
al group known as the Târgovişte School, Urmuz's style was mainly perpetuated by Mircea Horia Simionescu. The Bizarre Pages also inspired some other writers in the same group: Radu Petrescu, Costache Olăreanu and the Bessarabia
n-born Tudor Ţopa
. Elsewhere, Urmuz's work rekindled Romania's new poetry and prose, influencing some of the Onirist
and post-Surrealist writers—from Leonid Dimov
, Vintilă Ivănceanu and Dumitru Ţepeneag
to Iordan Chimet
and Emil Brumaru
. An icon of neo-modernist poetry was Nichita Stănescu
, whose contributions include tributes to Urmuz and pastiche
s of his writings, hosted by Manuscriptum in 1983. Between 1960 and 1980, the Bizarre Pages also stimulated the work of isolated modernist authors, such as Marin Sorescu
, Marius Tupan, Mihai Ursachi and, especially, Şerban Foarţă
.
Although the ban on Urmuz was still in place, George Ciprian made a daring (and possibly subversive) gesture by publishing his affectionate memoirs in 1958. A few years later, the episodic relaxation of communist censorship allowed for the republication of the Bizarre Pages, mistakenly included in a complete edition of Ciprian's literary works (1965). Such events heralded a revival of scholarly interest in proto-Dadaism, beginning with a 1970 monograph on Urmuz, by the Sibiu Literary Circle
member Nicolae Balotă. Also then, Pană was free to circulate a new revised edition of his interwar anthology, reissued in collaboration with Editura Minerva
. It was later completed by an Urmuz corpus, which notably hosted the scattered diaries, as recovered by critic Gheorghe Glodeanu. In 1972, Iordan Chimet also included "The Chroniclers" in a nonconformist anthology of youth literature
. In those years, the Bizarre Pages also inspired critically acclaimed illustrations by Nestor Ignat
and Ion Mincu, and the multimedia event Cumpănă ("Watershed") by composer Anatol Vieru
.
With the 1960s, a national-communist
ideology was officially established in Romania, and this encouraged the rise of "Protochronism
" as a cultural phenomenon. The Protochronists exaggerated past Romanian achievements, and magnified previous claims about the folkloric roots of Urmuz's literature. Some Protochronists also described a positive, jocular, "village idiot
" Urmuz, more presentable than Europe's misanthropic avant-garde. A leading representative of this trend was literary theorist Edgar Papu, who exaggerated Vinea and Ionesco's homage to Urmuz and Caragiale to argue that Romania was the actual origin of Europe's avant-garde movements. The idea proved popular beyond Protochronism, and was arguably found in essays by Nichita Stănescu and Marin Mincu. The Europeanist
reaction rejected Protochronism, but, in its bid of making Urmuz palatable to cultural officials, often interpreted him through the grid of Marxist humanism
(Balotă, Matei Călinescu
, Nicolae Manolescu
). Some more or less vehement opponents of Urmuz became party to the debate after 1970; they include Alexandru George, Gelu Ionescu, Alexandru Piru and Marin Niţescu.
At roughly the same time, Romania witnessed the birth of the Optzecişti generation, whose interest was in recovering Caragiale, Urmuz and the 1930s avant-garde as its models to follow, and who reactivated corrosive humor. Among the individual Optzecişti who took inspiration from the Bizarre Pages are Mircea Cărtărescu
, Nichita Danilov
, Florin Iaru, Ion Stratan and "the sentimental Urmuz" Florin Toma. Dissident
poet Mircea Dinescu
also paid homage to Urmuz, imitating his style in one of his addresses to the communist censors.
With that, the influence of Urmuz again radiated outside the Romanian-speaking circles: while poet Oskar Pastior
translated the Bizarre Pages into German, Herta Müller
, a German Romanian
novelist and dissident, is thought to have been influenced by some of Urmuz's writing techniques. Marin Mincu and Marco Cugno also introduced Urmuz's literature to the Italophone
public, with a 1980 collection. In Romania, as part of centennial celebrations, scattered translations old and new were issued by Minerva as a hexalingual album, with noted contributions from Ionesco, Voronca, Mincu, Cugno, Leopold Kosch, Andrei Bantaş
etc. Other translations from Urmuz were pioneered in English by Stavros Deligiorgis (standard bilingual edition, 1985) and later by Julian Semilian. The same effort was undertaken in Dutch
by Jan Willem Bos and in Swedish
by Dan Shafran.
. In 2011, a poll among Romanian literati, organized by Observator Cultural
review, listed "The Funnel and Stamate" as the 22nd-best Romanian novel; this rekindled polemics about whether the work should even be considered a novel. With the appearance of new "alternative" schoolbooks during the 1990s, Urmuz earned more exposure as an optional addition to the standard curriculum
. New editions of his various works were published at a fast rate, in both Romania and neighboring Moldova
: in just two years (2008–2009), there were three separate print versions of his collected texts, academic as well as paperback, and two audiobooks. These texts provided visual inspiration for Dan Perjovschi
, whose tribute "pictogram
s" were included in the 2009 Editura Cartier reprint of the Bizarre Pages. In March 2006, Curtea de Argeş
city honored the writer with a series of special events and displays.
The literary currents of postmodernism
often appropriated Urmuz as their guide. This tendency was illustrated by the writings of new figures in Romanian literature: the minimalists
and neo-naturalists
(Sorin Gherguţ, Andrei Mocuţa, Călin Torsan), the neo-Surrealists (Cristian Popescu
, Iulia Militaru, Cosmin Perţa, Iulian Tănase, Stelian Tănase
), the feminists
(Catrinel Popa, Iaromira Popovici), the political satirists (Dumitru Augustin Doman, Pavel Şuşară) and the electronic literature
writers (Cătălin Lazurcă).
There were also loose stage or multimedia adaptations of the Bizarre Pages, including ones by Mona Chirilă (2000), Gábor Tompa
(2002), Radu Macrinici (2005), Pro Contemporania ensemble (2006), Christian Fex and Ramona Dumitrean (both 2007); Urmuz's work has also been cited as an influence by the Romanian-born dramaturge David Esrig, who has used it in workshops. A theatrical company with Urmuz's name existed for a while in Casimcea
, home of the Zilele Urmuz Festival. In 2011, two separate operatic renditions of Urmuz's work were showcased by Bucharest's SIMN Festival.
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 writer, lawyer and civil servant, who became a cult hero in Romania's avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
scene. His scattered work, consisting of absurdist
Absurdism
In philosophy, "The Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any...
short prose and poetry, opened a new genre in Romanian letters and humor, and captured the imagination of modernists
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...
for several generations. Urmuz's Bizarre (or Weird) Pages were largely independent of European modernism, even though some may have been triggered by Futurism
Futurism
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century.Futurism or futurist may refer to:* Afrofuturism, an African-American and African diaspora subculture* Cubo-Futurism* Ego-Futurism...
; their valorization of nonsense verse
Nonsense verse
Nonsense verse is a form of light, often rhythmical verse, usually for children, depicting peculiar characters in amusing and fantastical situations. It is whimsical and humorous in tone and tends to employ fanciful phrases and meaningless made-up words. Nonsense verse is closely related to...
, black comedy
Black comedy
A black comedy, or dark comedy, is a comic work that employs black humor or gallows humor. The definition of black humor is problematic; it has been argued that it corresponds to the earlier concept of gallows humor; and that, as humor has been defined since Freud as a comedic act that anesthetizes...
, nihilistic
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...
tendencies and exploration into the unconscious mind
Unconscious mind
The unconscious mind is a term coined by the 18th century German romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge...
have repeatedly been cited as influential for the development of Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
ism and the Theatre of the Absurd
Theatre of the Absurd
The Theatre of the Absurd is a designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction, written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, as well as to the style of theatre which has evolved from their work...
. Individual pieces such as "The Funnel and Stamate", "Ismaïl and Turnavitu", "Algazy & Grummer" or "The Fuchsiad" are 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...
fragments, dealing with monstrous and shapeshifting
Shapeshifting
Shapeshifting is a common theme in mythology, folklore, and fairy tales. It is also found in epic poems, science fiction literature, fantasy literature, children's literature, Shakespearean comedy, ballet, film, television, comics, and video games...
creatures in mundane settings, and announcing techniques later taken up by 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....
.
Urmuz's biography between his high school eccentricity and his public suicide remains largely mysterious, and some of the sympathetic accounts have been described as purposefully deceptive. The abstruse imagery of his work has produced a large corpus of diverging interpretations. He has notably been read as a satirist of public life in the 1910s, an unlikely conservative and nostalgic, or an emotionally distant esotericist
Esotericism
Esotericism or Esoterism signifies the holding of esoteric opinions or beliefs, that is, ideas preserved or understood by a small group or those specially initiated, or of rare or unusual interest. The term derives from the Greek , a compound of : "within", thus "pertaining to the more inward",...
.
In Urmuz's lifetime, his stories were only acted out by his thespian friend George Ciprian
George Ciprian
George Ciprian was a Romanian actor and playwright. His writings make him a precursor of the Theatre of the Absurd.-Biography:...
and published as samples by Cuget Românesc newspaper, with support from modernist writer Tudor Arghezi
Tudor Arghezi
Tudor Arghezi was a Romanian writer, best known for his contribution to poetry and children's literature. Born Ion N. Theodorescu in Bucharest , he explained that his pen name was related to Argesis, the Latin name for the Argeş River.-Early life:Along with Mihai Eminescu, Mateiu Caragiale, and...
. Ciprian and Arghezi were together responsible for creating the link between Urmuz and the emerging avant-garde, their activity as Urmuz promoters being later enhanced by such figures as Ion Vinea, Geo Bogza
Geo Bogza
Geo Bogza was a Romanian avant-garde theorist, poet, and journalist, known for his left-wing and communist political convictions. As a young man in the interwar period, he was known as a rebel and was one of the most influential Romanian Surrealists...
, Lucian Boz, Saşa Pană
Sasa Pana
Saşa Pană was a Romanian avant-garde poet, novelist, and short story writer.-Biography:...
and Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian and French playwright and dramatist, and one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd...
. Beginning in the late 1930s, Urmuz also became the focus interest for the elite critics, who either welcomed him into 20th-century literature
20th century in literature
See also: 20th century in poetry, 19th century in literature, other events of the 20th century, 21st century in literature, list of years in literature.Literature of the 20th century refers to world literature produced during the 20th century...
or dismissed him as a buffoonish impostor. By then, his activity also inspired an eponymous avant-garde magazine edited by Bogza, as well as Ciprian's drama The Drake's Head.
Name
Urmuz's birth name was, in full, Dimitrie Dim. Ionescu-Buzeu (or Buzău), changed to Dimitrie Dim. Dumitrescu-Buzeu when he was still a child, and later settled as Demetru Dem. Demetrescu-Buzău. The Demetrescu surname was in effect a Romanian patronymicPatronymic
A patronym, or patronymic, is a component of a personal name based on the name of one's father, grandfather or an even earlier male ancestor. A component of a name based on the name of one's mother or a female ancestor is a matronymic. Each is a means of conveying lineage.In many areas patronyms...
, using the -escu suffix: his father was known as Dimitrie (Demetru, Dumitru) Ionescu-Buzău. The attached particle Buzău, originally Buzeu, confirms that the family traced its roots to the eponymous town
Buzau
The city of Buzău is the county seat of Buzău County, Romania, in the historical region of Wallachia. It lies near the right bank of the Buzău River, between the south-eastern curvature of the Carpathian Mountains and the lowlands of Bărăgan Plain.The city's name dates back to 376 AD when the name...
. According to George Ciprian, the names Ciriviş (variation of cerviş, Romanian
Romanian language
Romanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...
for "melted grease") and Mitică
Mitica
Mitică is a fictional character who appears in several sketch stories by Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale, and whose name is a common hypocoristic form of Dumitru or Dimitrie...
(pet form of Dumitru) were coined while the writer was still in school, whereas Urmuz came "later".
The name under which the writer is universally known did not actually originate from his own wishes, but was selected and imposed on the public by Arghezi, only one year before Urmuz committed suicide. The spelling Hurmuz, when used in reference to the writer, was popular in the 1920s, but has since been described as erroneous. The variant Ormuz, sometimes rendered as Urmuz, was also used as a pen name by Arghezi's brother in law, the activist and novelist Al. L. Zissu.
The word [h]urmuz, explained by linguists as a curious addition to the Romanian lexis
Romanian lexis
The lexis of the Romanian language , a Romance language, has changed over the centuries as the language evolved from Vulgar Latin, to Proto-Romanian, to medieval, modern and contemporary Romanian.-Medieval Romanian:...
, generally means "glass bead", "precious stone" or "snowberry
Symphoricarpos
Symphoricarpos, with common names in English of Snowberry, Waxberry or Ghostberry, is a small genus of about 15 species of deciduous shrubs in the honeysuckle family, Caprifoliaceae. All species are natives of North and Central America, except one native to western China...
". It has entered the language through oriental channels, and these meanings ultimately refer to the international trade in beads centered on Hormuz Island
Hormuz Island
Hormuz Island , also spelled Hormoz, is an Iranian island in the Persian Gulf. It is located in the Strait of Hormuz and is part of the Hormozgān Province.-Geography:...
, Iran. Anthropologist and essayist Vasile Andru highlights a secondary, scatological, meaning: in the Romani language
Romani language
Romani or Romany, Gypsy or Gipsy is any of several languages of the Romani people. They are Indic, sometimes classified in the "Central" or "Northwestern" zone, and sometimes treated as a branch of their own....
, a source of Romanian slang
Romanian profanity
Romanian profanity refers to a set of words considered blasphemous or inflammatory in the Romanian language.Romanian is considered to have a huge set of inflammatory terms and phrases...
, urmuz, "bead", has mutated to mean "feces". An alternative etymology, exclusive to the author's pseudonym, was advanced by writer and scholar Ioana Pârvulescu. It suggests the combination of two contradictory terms: ursuz ("surly") and amuz ("I amuse").
Childhood
Mitică was the eldest son of a middle class nuclear family: his father, described by Ciprian as "short and mean" (om scund şi ciufut), worked as a physician. In his spare time, Ionescu-Buzeu Sr. was a classical scholar, folklorist and active FreemasonFreemasonry in Romania
The beginnings of Freemasonry in the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia date to the 18th century and the activities of the humanist scholar Anton Maria del Chiaro, secretary to voivodes Constantin Brâncoveanu and Constantine Mavrocordatos...
. His wife, the writer's mother, was Eliza née Paşcani, sister of the doctor, chemist and University of Paris
University of Paris
The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...
professor Cristien Pascani. Urmuz had numerous other siblings ("a multitude", according to Ciprian), of whom most were daughters. One of Urmuz's sisters, Eliza (married Vorvoreanu) was later a main source of information on the author's childhood and adolescence.
The future Urmuz was born in the northern Muntenia
Muntenia
Muntenia is a historical province of Romania, usually considered Wallachia-proper . It is situated between the Danube , the Carpathian Mountains and Moldavia , and the Olt River to the west...
n town of Curtea de Argeş
Curtea de Arges
Curtea de Argeș is a city in Romania on the right bank of the Argeş River, where it flows through a valley of the lower Carpathians , on the railway from Pitești to the Turnu Roşu Pass. It is part of Argeș County. The city administers one village, Noapteș...
, and, at age five, spent one year in Paris with his parents. The family eventually settled in Romania's capital, 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....
, where his father was hygiene teacher at Matei Basarab National College, later city health inspector
Health inspector
A health inspector is a public employee who investigates health hazards in a wide variety of locations, then will take action to mitigate or eliminate the hazards...
, and rented houses in Antim Monastery
Antim Monastery
The Antim Monastery is located in Bucharest, Romania on Mitropolit Antim Ivireanu Street, no. 29. It was built between 1713 and 1715 by Saint Antim Ivireanu, at that time a Metropolitan Bishop of Romania. The buildings were restored by Patriarch Justinian Marina in the 1950s. As of 2005, there are...
quarter. Young Mitică was described by his sister as mainly unpretentious and introverted, fascinated by scientific discovery and, in his childhood years, a passionate reader of Jules Verne
Jules Verne
Jules Gabriel Verne was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and Around the World in Eighty Days...
's science fiction books. At a later stage, he was also possibly familiarized with and influenced by German idealism
German idealism
German idealism was a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment...
and by the philosophical views of 19th-century 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...
. A more evident influence on the future writer was Ion Luca Caragiale
Ion Luca Caragiale
Ion Luca Caragiale was a Wallachian-born Romanian playwright, short story writer, poet, theater manager, political commentator and journalist...
, the main figure in early 20th-century Romanian comediography.
Ionescu-Buzău's family had artistic interests, and Urmuz grew up with a fascination for classical music and fine art
Fine art
Fine art or the fine arts encompass art forms developed primarily for aesthetics and/or concept rather than practical application. Art is often a synonym for fine art, as employed in the term "art gallery"....
, learning to play the piano and taking up amateur oil painting
Oil painting
Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil—especially in early modern Europe, linseed oil. Often an oil such as linseed was boiled with a resin such as pine resin or even frankincense; these were called 'varnishes' and were prized for their body...
. He got along best with his mother, who was also a pianist. The devout daughter of an 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...
priest, she was unable to instill in her young son the same respect for the Church.
Urmuz's arrival to literary history took place in the atmosphere of Bucharest gymnasia
Gymnasium (school)
A gymnasium is a type of school providing secondary education in some parts of Europe, comparable to English grammar schools or sixth form colleges and U.S. college preparatory high schools. The word γυμνάσιον was used in Ancient Greece, meaning a locality for both physical and intellectual...
. It was at this junction that he became a mate of Ciprian, who later described their encounter as momentous: "I don't much believe in destiny. [...] Yet I find it such an odd incident that my bench mate, from my failing grade year through to my high school graduation, was [...] this tiny man of a rare originality, who had a massive say on how my life would turn up." Ciprian describes what follows as his own "initiation in artistic matters": he recalls conversations with "Ciriviş" where they debated the "perfection" of Ancient Greek sculpture
Ancient Greek sculpture
Ancient Greek sculpture is the sculpture of Ancient Greece. Modern scholarship identifies three major stages. They were used to depict the battles, mythology, and rulers of the land known as Ancient Greece.-Geometric:...
, and mentions that young Urmuz, unlike himself, regarded theater as a "minor art". Instead, Urmuz preferred to attend concerts at the Romanian Atheneum, and, Ciprian writes, had an advanced understanding of absolute music
Absolute music
Absolute music is a concept in music that describes music as an art form separated from formalisms or other considerations; it is not explicitly about anything; it is non-representational. In contrast to program music, absolute music makes sense without accompanying words, images, drama, or...
even at age thirteen. Reportedly, the young man was also in the attendance at lectures given by 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....
, a philosopher and aesthete who had influenced both Eminescu and Caragiale.
Pahuci brotherhood
Dacia
In ancient geography, especially in Roman sources, Dacia was the land inhabited by the Dacians or Getae as they were known by the Greeks—the branch of the Thracians north of the Haemus range...
") association of nationalist students, Urmuz subverted its meetings, and, with deadpan
Deadpan
Deadpan is a form of comic delivery in which humor is presented without a change in emotion or body language, usually speaking in a casual, monotone, solemn, blunt, disgusted or matter-of-fact voice and expressing an unflappably calm, archly insincere or artificially grave demeanor...
snark, suggested that membership fees should be paid in duck heads. Also according to Ciprian, these events soon lost their shock value, leading him and Urmuz to "take to the streets", where they began their activity as pranksters. Their initial experiment was to pressure law-abiding and credulous passers-by into presenting their identity papers for inspection, and the apparent success earned Urmuz an unexpected following in school (his fans even heckled Vivat Dacia into accepting poultry heads as means of payment, before the society dissolved itself with ceremony). Another colleague, future traditionalist poet Vasile Voiculescu
Vasile Voiculescu
Vasile Voiculescu was a Romanian poet, short-story writer, playwright, and physician.-Early life and education:Voiculescu was born in Pârscov, Buzău County, Romania, to a family of wealthy peasants. He attended primary school in Pleşcoi, a village near his home, for a year, after which he was sent...
, recalled young Urmuz as "genially knavish", his humor being "cerebral, harder to detect and appreciate".
The core group of Urmuzian disciples, organized as a secret society
Secret society
A secret society is a club or organization whose activities and inner functioning are concealed from non-members. The society may or may not attempt to conceal its existence. The term usually excludes covert groups, such as intelligence agencies or guerrilla insurgencies, which hide their...
, comprised Ciprian (nicknamed "Macferlan" by Urmuz), Alexandru "Bălălău" Bujoreanu and Costică "Pentagon" Grigorescu, together known as the pahuci. Allegedly, the obscure word originated from the Hebrew
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
for "yawns". Their activity centered on daring pranks: Urmuz and the other three young men once made an impromptu visit to the isolated Căldăruşani Monastery, in Ilfov County
Ilfov County
Ilfov is the county that surrounds Bucharest, the capital of Romania. It used to be largely rural, but after the fall of communism, many of the county's villages and communes developed into high-income commuter towns, which act like suburbs or satellites of Bucharest...
, where the deposed and disgraced Metropolitan Ghenadie
Ghenadie Petrescu
Ghenadie Petrescu was a Wallachian-born Romanian priest of the national Orthodox church, who served as Metropolitan-Primate of Romania from 1893 to 1896. Ghenadie was a monk and hieromonk steadily progressing through church ranks, and becoming Bishop of Argeş in 1875...
was living in banishment. Passing themselves off as newspaper editors, they demanded (and received) honored guest treatment, tested the monks' patience, and were later introduced to a well-disposed Ghenadie. Ciprian also recalls that Urmuz's philosophical musings or deadpan surreal humor were a direct inspiration for other pranks and experiments. He describes how Ciriviş acted out sadness for the plight of a screechy sledge (declaring "my heart is at one with all things in existence"), but then duped onlookers into believing that the squeaks came from a woman somehow trapped under the vehicle. Reportedly, Urmuz also approached his seniors training at seminaries
Seminary
A seminary, theological college, or divinity school is an institution of secondary or post-secondary education for educating students in theology, generally to prepare them for ordination as clergy or for other ministry...
or other traditionalist institutions, earned their attention by claiming to share the nationalist agenda, and then began reciting them nonsense lyrics such as an evolving draft of his mock-fable
Fable
A fable is a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, mythical creatures, plants, inanimate objects or forces of nature which are anthropomorphized , and that illustrates a moral lesson , which may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy maxim.A fable differs from...
"The Chroniclers".
Outside school, the young man was still introverted, and, Sandqvist notes, "extremely shy, especially with girls." Ciprian recalls Ciriviş's engrossing pick-up line
Pick-up line
A pick-up line is a conversation opener with the intent of engaging an unfamiliar person for romance, or dating. Overt and sometimes humorous displays of romantic interest, pick-up lines advertise the wit of their speakers to their target listeners....
s: he acted familiar to the any young woman who caught his eye, assuring her that they had met once before, and, having stirred her curiosity, falsely recounting how they both used to kill flesh-flies
Flesh-fly
Flies of the Diptera family Sarcophagidae are commonly known as flesh flies. Most flesh flies breed in carrion, dung, or decaying material, but a few species lay their eggs in the open wounds of mammals; hence their common name...
for sport.
The pahuci welcomed their graduation with one final act of defiance against the school principal, whom they visited in his office, where they began hopping about in circles. Even though their group did not survive once its members took different career paths, they had regular reunions at the Spiru Godelea tavern
Tavern
A tavern is a place of business where people gather to drink alcoholic beverages and be served food, and in some cases, where travelers receive lodging....
, where they earned notoriety for their rude and unconventional behavior. Urmuz enrolled at the Bucharest Medical School
Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy
Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy is a state-run health sciences University in Bucharest, Romania. It is the largest institution of its kind in Romania with over 2.865 employees, 1.654 teachers and over 4.800 students...
, allegedly after pressures from his stern father. According to Ciprian, this training did not agree with his friend, who would complain of being "unable to make himself understood by the cadavers." This was probably a sign that the young man could not bear to witness dissection
Dissection
Dissection is usually the process of disassembling and observing something to determine its internal structure and as an aid to discerning the functions and relationships of its components....
. He eventually entered 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:...
Faculty of Law, which was to be his alma mater, while also taking lectures in composition and counterpoint
Counterpoint
In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in contour and rhythm and are harmonically interdependent . It has been most commonly identified in classical music, developing strongly during the Renaissance and in much of the common practice period,...
at the Music and Declamation Conservatory
National University of Music Bucharest
The National University of Music Bucharest is a university-level school of music located in Bucharest, Romania. Established as a school of music in 1863 and reorganized as an academy in 1931, it has functioned as a public university since 2001...
. Additionally, he completed his first service term in the Romanian Infantry
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...
.
Urmuz became head of his family in 1907. That year, his father and two younger brothers died, and his sister Eliza was married. He also continued to take the initiative in daring acts of épater le bourgeois. Ciprian recalls the two of them renting a carriage which Urmuz would order around, making a right at every junction, and effectively going around in circles around the Palace of Justice
Palace of Justice (Bucharest)
The Palace of Justice , located in Bucharest, Romania, was built between 1890 and 1895.Located on the banks of the Dâmboviţa River, it houses the Bucharest Court of Appeal and the Sector 5 Court. Its last major restoration was between 2003 and 2006....
. Urmuz then proceeded to pester the street vendors, stopping over to buy a random assortment of useless items: pretzel
Pretzel
A pretzel is a type of baked food made from dough in soft and hard varieties and savory or sweet flavors in a unique knot-like shape, originating in Europe...
s, a pile of charcoal, and an old hen which he impaled on his walking cane.
Dobrujan career and military life
Having passed his law examination in 1904, Urmuz was first appointed judge in the rural locality of Cocu (Răchiţele)Cocu, Arges
Cocu is a commune in Argeş County, in southern central Romania. It is composed of eight villages: Bărbăteşti, Cocu, Crucişoara, Făcăleţeşti, Greabănu, Popeşti, Răchiţele de Jos and Răchiţele de Sus....
, in Argeş County
Arges County
Argeș is a county of Romania, in Wallachia, with the capital city at Pitești.-Demographics:In 2002, it had a population of 652,625 and the population density was 95/km².*Romanians – 96%*Roma , and other.-Geography:...
. It is probable that at around this stage (ca. 1908), he was committing to paper the first fragments in his collection Bizarre Pages, some of which were reportedly written during a family reunion in Cocu. According to Eliza Vorvoreanu, he was doing this mainly to entertain his mother and sisters, but Urmuz also amused local potentates, one of whom even offered his daughter's hand in marriage (Urmuz refused). At the time, Mitică also discovered his passion for modern art
Modern art
Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...
: he was an admirer of primitivist
Primitivism
Primitivism is a Western art movement that borrows visual forms from non-Western or prehistoric peoples, such as Paul Gauguin's inclusion of Tahitian motifs in paintings and ceramics...
sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi
Constantin Brancusi
Constantin Brâncuşi was a Romanian-born sculptor who made his career in France. As a child he displayed an aptitude for carving wooden farm tools. Formal studies took him first to Bucharest, then to Munich, then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris...
, fascinated by his 1907 work The Wisdom of the Earth.
Eventually, Urmuz was made a justice of the peace
Justice of the Peace
A justice of the peace is a puisne judicial officer elected or appointed by means of a commission to keep the peace. Depending on the jurisdiction, they might dispense summary justice or merely deal with local administrative applications in common law jurisdictions...
in the remote Dobruja
Dobruja
Dobruja is a historical region shared by Bulgaria and Romania, located between the lower Danube river and the Black Sea, including the Danube Delta, Romanian coast and the northernmost part of the Bulgarian coast...
region: for a while, he was in Casimcea
Casimcea
Casimcea is a commune in Tulcea County, Romania. It is composed of seven villages: Casimcea, Cişmeaua Nouă, Corugea, Haidar, Rahman, Războieni and Stânca....
village. Later, he was dispatched closer to Bucharest, at Ghergani
Racari
Răcari is a town located in Dâmboviţa County, Romania. It administers seven villages: Bălăneşti, Colacu, Ghergani, Ghimpaţi, Mavrodin, Săbieşti and Stăneşti.-References:...
, Dâmboviţa County
Dâmbovita County
Dâmbovița ; also spelt Dîmbovița is a county of Romania, in Muntenia, with the capital city at Târgoviște.-Demographics:In 2002, it had a population of 541,763 and the population density was 134/km²...
. These assignments were interrupted in 1913, when Urmuz was called under arms, in the Second Balkan War
Second Balkan War
The Second Balkan War was a conflict which broke out when Bulgaria, dissatisfied with its share of the spoils of the First Balkan War, attacked its former allies, Serbia and Greece, on 29 June 1913. Bulgaria had a prewar agreement about the division of region of Macedonia...
against Bulgaria
Bulgaria
Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...
.
Ciprian mentions having lost touch with his friend "for a long time", before receiving a letter in which the latter complained about the provincial apathy and the lack of musical entertainment; attached was a draft of the "Algazy & Grummer" story, which Ciprian was supposed to read to the "seminary brethren", informing them "about the progresses registered in young literature". Ciprian tells of having discovered the writer in Urmuz, and popularizing this and other stories in his own circle of intellectuals. He also mentions that, in his budding acting career, he was basing some of his performances at Blanduzia Garden on Urmuz's letters.
These developments coincided with the outbreak of World War I. Between 1914 and summer 1916, when Romania was still neutral territory, Ciprian's efforts of circulating the Bizarre Pages may have reached a peak. Urmuz's texts were probably spread around in handwritten copies, becoming somewhat familiar to Bucharest's bohemian society, but Urmuz himself was still an anonymous figure. Both Ciprian and fellow actor Grigore Mărculescu are said to have given public readings from the Bizarre Pages at Casa Capşa
Casa Capsa
Casa Capşa is a historic restaurant in Bucharest, Romania, first established in 1852. At various times it has also included a hotel; most recently, it reopened as a 61-room hotel 17 June 2003....
restaurant. According to literary historian Paul Cernat, if rumors about Ciprian's early performances of Urmuz's texts are true, it would constitute one of the first samples of avant-garde shows
Experimental theatre
Experimental theatre is a general term for various movements in Western theatre that began in the late 19th century as a retraction against the dominant vent governing the writing and production of dramatical menstrophy, and age in particular. The term has shifted over time as the mainstream...
in Romanian theatrical tradition.
Around 1916, Urmuz had obtained a relocation, as judge in the Muntenian town of Alexandria
Alexandria, Romania
Alexandria is the capital city of the Teleorman County, Romania. It is located south-west of Bucharest, towards the Bulgarian border. The city is situated on the Vedea River. The city has 58,651 inhabitants.-Alexandria in 1900:...
. It was there that he met with poet and schoolteacher Mihail Cruceanu, also on assignment. As Cruceanu later recalled, Urmuz was captivated by the artistic revolt carried out in Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
by the Futurist
Futurism
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century.Futurism or futurist may refer to:* Afrofuturism, an African-American and African diaspora subculture* Cubo-Futurism* Ego-Futurism...
group, and in particular by the poetry of Futurist leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti was an Italian poet and editor, the founder of the Futurist movement, and a fascist ideologue.-Childhood and adolescence:...
. According to literary historian Tom Sandqvist, Urmuz may have first read about the Italian intitiatives in the local newspaper Democraţia, which had covered them in early 1909. As a result of this or another encounter, he decided to include, as a subtitle to one of his manuscripts, the words: Schiţe şi nuvele... aproape futuriste ("Sketches
Sketch story
A sketch story, or sketch, is a piece of writing that is generally shorter than a short story, and contains very little, if any, plot. The term was most popularly-used in the late nineteenth century. As a literary work, it is also often referred to simply as the sketch.-Style:A sketch is mainly...
and Novellas... almost Futuristic").
Having reached the rank of Lieutenant, Demetrescu-Buzău was again called under arms when Romania joined the Entente Powers
Allies of World War I
The Entente Powers were the countries at war with the Central Powers during World War I. The members of the Triple Entente were the United Kingdom, France, and the Russian Empire; Italy entered the war on their side in 1915...
. In one account, he saw action against the Central Powers
Central Powers
The Central Powers were one of the two warring factions in World War I , composed of the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria...
in Moldavia
Moldavia
Moldavia is a geographic and historical region and former principality in Eastern Europe, corresponding to the territory between the Eastern Carpathians and the Dniester river...
, following the Army's northward retreat. However, this is partly contradicted by his correspondence from Moldavia, which shows that his new office was as a quartermaster
Quartermaster
Quartermaster refers to two different military occupations depending on if the assigned unit is land based or naval.In land armies, especially US units, it is a term referring to either an individual soldier or a unit who specializes in distributing supplies and provisions to troops. The senior...
, and which records his frustration at not having been allowed to fight in the trenches. According to another account, he was mostly bedridden with malaria
Malaria
Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease of humans and other animals caused by eukaryotic protists of the genus Plasmodium. The disease results from the multiplication of Plasmodium parasites within red blood cells, causing symptoms that typically include fever and headache, in severe cases...
, and therefore unable to perform any military duty.
Debut
Urmuz was again in Bucharest, working as grefier (registrar or court reporterCourt reporter
A court reporter, stenotype reporter, voice writing reporter, or transcriber is a person whose occupation is to transcribe spoken or recorded speech into written form, using machine shorthand or voice writing equipment to produce official transcripts of court hearings, depositions and other...
) at the High Court of Cassation and Justice
High Court of Cassation and Justice
The High Court of Cassation and Justice is Romania's supreme court, and the court of last resort. It is the equivalent of France's Cour de cassation and serves a similar function to other courts of cassation around the world...
; sources disagree on whether this appointment dated from 1918 or earlier. Reportedly, this was a well paid employment with special perks, which may have made Urmuz uncomfortable about his other life as a bohemian hero. A photograph portrait taken in that period, one of the few to survive, was read as an additional clue that Urmuz had become melancholy and anxious. Sandqvist also sees him as a "catastrophically lonely" and insomnia
Insomnia
Insomnia is most often defined by an individual's report of sleeping difficulties. While the term is sometimes used in sleep literature to describe a disorder demonstrated by polysomnographic evidence of disturbed sleep, insomnia is often defined as a positive response to either of two questions:...
c customer of the brothel
Brothel
Brothels are business establishments where patrons can engage in sexual activities with prostitutes. Brothels are known under a variety of names, including bordello, cathouse, knocking shop, whorehouse, strumpet house, sporting house, house of ill repute, house of prostitution, and bawdy house...
s, adding: "To all appearances as a result of disgusting experiences during the wars, returning home to Bucharest Demetru Demetrescu-Buzău chose to live an extremely ascetic and isolated life with long night walks." Urmuz's feats and pranks were nonetheless attracting more public attention, and he himself allegedly read his work to a bohemian public, in places such as Gabroveni Inn
Gabroveni Inn
-History:Built in 1739 on a land plot belonging to the former Voivodal Court , the inn belonged to the "Inner Town" , the inside section of Bucharest's Fortress...
; at least some of these were free exercises in oral literature
Oral literature
Oral literature corresponds in the sphere of the spoken word to literature as literature operates in the domain of the written word. It thus forms a generally more fundamental component of culture, but operates in many ways as one might expect literature to do...
, and as such entirely lost.
The year 1922 brought Urmuz's debut in print. Fascinated by the (then unnamed) Bizarre Pages, poet and journalist Tudor Arghezi
Tudor Arghezi
Tudor Arghezi was a Romanian writer, best known for his contribution to poetry and children's literature. Born Ion N. Theodorescu in Bucharest , he explained that his pen name was related to Argesis, the Latin name for the Argeş River.-Early life:Along with Mihai Eminescu, Mateiu Caragiale, and...
included two of them in Cuget Românesc newspaper. Arghezi reportedly made efforts to persuade his more serious fellow editors of Cuget, and possibly intended to undermine their attempt of putting out a newspaper of record
Newspaper of record
Newspaper of record is a term that may refer either to any publicly available newspaper that has been authorized by a government to publish public or legal notices , or any major newspaper that has a large circulation and whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered professional and...
. The gazette had also published a manifesto by Arghezi, in which he had outlined the goal of combating "sterile literature", and his intention of cultivating the "will to power
Will to power
The will to power is widely seen as a prominent concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The will to power describes what Nietzsche may have believed to be the main driving force in man; achievement, ambition, the striving to reach the highest possible position in life; these are all...
" in post-war literary culture. Urmuz was thus the first avant-garde writer popularized by Arghezi, in a list which, by 1940, also came to include a large section of the younger Romanian modernists.
Arghezi later wrote that his relationship with Urmuz was difficult, especially since the grefier panicked that the establishment would discover his other career: "he feared that the Cassation Court would better detect him as Urmuz than under his own name". The memoirist refers to Demetrescu-Buzău's perfectionism and unease, enhanced in the week before publication: "He would wake up in the middle of the night and would send a very urgent letter, asking me if the comma after a 'that' should be moved before. I found him wandering around my house at night, shy, restless, fainthearted or in a hopeful trance, that something of substance may or may not be found in his prose, that perhaps there's an error, asking me to publish it, and then again to destroy it; to publish it together with an eulogistic note, and then again to curse him. He bribed [the printers] to change phrases and words that I had to put back into place, as previous editorial interventions were for sure better than his." The letters they exchanged show that the grefier was not enthusiastic about even seeing his texts and his pseudonym in print, to which Arghezi was replying: "from among the few we'll be cooperating with, you were my first choice".
By May 1922, Urmuz had grown more confident in his strength as a writer. He sent Arghezi a copy of the "Algazy & Grummer" story, which, he joked, needed to be published for "the nation's benefit". He also proposed headlining it with the additional title Bizarre Pages. The work was never published by Cuget, probably because of a change in priorities: around that date, the paper hosted traditionalist editorials by culture critic 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...
, which were incompatible with Arghezi's fronde.
Suicide
On November 23, 1923, Urmuz shot himself, an event which remains shrouded in mystery. His death occurred in a public location, described as being close to Kiseleff RoadSoseaua Kiseleff
Şoseaua Kiseleff is a major road in Bucharest that runs as a northward continuation of Calea Victoriei. The road was created in 1832 by Pavel Kiselyov, the commander of the Russian occupation troops in Wallachia and Moldavia...
in northern Bucharest. Some early sources suggest that he may have been suffering from an incurable disease, but he is also argued to have been fascinated with guns and their destructive potential. In 1914 for instance, he wrote down in his papers a homage to revolvers, crediting them with a magical power over the suicidal brain. Reports also show that he was theorizing the purposelessness and hollowness of life, addressing his fears on the subject to family members during the funeral of his brother Constantin (also in 1914). Researcher Geo Şerban wrote about Demetrescu-Buzău's well-hidden disappointment, assessing that, during his final year, the writer continued to act cheerful and relaxed, but that a "devastating" tension was building up inside him. At around that time, Urmuz took his one real trip as an adult civilian, visiting the Budaki Lagoon
Budaki Lagoon
Budaki, or Budaksky Lagoon is a Black Sea lagoon in Bessarabia, southern Ukraine. Located in 18 km from the city of Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi. The lagoon is separated from the Black Sea by the 80–200 m wide sandbar...
in 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....
.
Writing in 1927, Arghezi publicized his regret at not having cultivated the friendship: "I never saw him again and I am weighed down by the irreparable grief of never seeking him out. I believe my optimism could have rekindled in his cerebral chaos those candid and pure things that were beginning to die." Several Urmuz exegetes have traditionally seen the suicide intrinsically linked to Urmuz's artistic attitude. For scholar Carmen Blaga, it was the "dissolution of [his] faith" in Romania's intellectual class, along with economic decline and "an existential void", that prompted the writer to opt himself out. This resonates with claims by the first-generation followers of Urmuz: Geo Bogza
Geo Bogza
Geo Bogza was a Romanian avant-garde theorist, poet, and journalist, known for his left-wing and communist political convictions. As a young man in the interwar period, he was known as a rebel and was one of the most influential Romanian Surrealists...
suggests that his mentor killed himself once the deconstructive process, performed by his "sharp intellect", reached a natural conclusion; Saşa Pană
Sasa Pana
Saşa Pană was a Romanian avant-garde poet, novelist, and short story writer.-Biography:...
claims that Urmuz was tired of merely amusing the "cretins" and "profiteers" who held sway over Bucharest's literary scene, and, determined to turn his literary persona into "stardust", took the risk of destroying his physical self. Additionally, academic George Călinescu
George Calinescu
George Călinescu was a Romanian literary critic, historian, novelist, academician and journalist, and a writer of classicist and humanist tendencies...
argued that there was a philosophical rationale "very in tune with his century": "he wanted to die in some original way, 'without any cause'."
Kept at the city morgue, the body was assigned to Urmuz's brother-in-law and fellow clerk C. Stoicescu, who stated that the writer had been suffering from neurosis
Neurosis
Neurosis is a class of functional mental disorders involving distress but neither delusions nor hallucinations, whereby behavior is not outside socially acceptable norms. It is also known as psychoneurosis or neurotic disorder, and thus those suffering from it are said to be neurotic...
. Urmuz was buried on November 26, in his family plot at Bellu cemetery. On the day, the event was publicized by a small obituary in Dimineaţa daily, signed with the initial C (presumably, for Ciprian). Both this and other press notices failed to mention that the grefier and the published author were one and the same, and the general public was for long unaware of any such connection. Story goes that an anonymous woman visited the family shortly after the burial, inquiring as to whether the deceased had left any letters.
In its manuscript form, Urmuz's definitive corpus of works covers only 40 pages, 50 at most. Various other manuscripts survive, including diaries and hundreds of aphorism
Aphorism
An aphorism is an original thought, spoken or written in a laconic and memorable form.The term was first used in the Aphorisms of Hippocrates...
s, but have for long been unknown to researchers.
The avant-garde herald vs. the conservative
Shortly after his death, Urmuz's work was linked to the emergence of avant-garde rebellion throughout Europe, and in particular to the rise of Romania's own modernist scene: writing in 2007, Paul Cernat describes this version of events as a "founding mythMyth of origins
An origin myth is a myth that purports to describe the origin of some feature of the natural or social world. One type of origin myth is the cosmogonic myth, which describes the creation of the world...
" of Romanian avant-garde literature. A literary critic and modernist enthusiast, Lucian Boz, assessed that Urmuz, like Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...
before him, embodied the "lyrical nihilism
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...
" of avant-garde currents. In the 1960s, literary historian Ovid Crohmălniceanu wrote of his being "the world's first pre-Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
exercises". In 2002 however, scholar Adrian Lăcătuş revised this thesis, arguing that it had created a "blockage" in critical reception, and that the actual Urmuz had more complex views on the avant-garde. Others have emphasized that Urmuz's unusual revolt ran contemporary with the revival of intense traditionalism of Romanian literature (the 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...
moment), which would make his pre-Dada inspiration a moment of special significance.
The contact with Futurism
Futurism
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century.Futurism or futurist may refer to:* Afrofuturism, an African-American and African diaspora subculture* Cubo-Futurism* Ego-Futurism...
, although acknowledged by Urmuz, is judged by many of his commentators as superficial and delayed. Literary historian Nicolae Balotă first proposed that the Romanian had merely wanted to show his sympathy for (and not a like-mindedness with) Futurism; that the works in question date back before the Futurist Manifesto
Futurist Manifesto
The Futurist Manifesto, written by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, was published in the Italian newspaper Gazzetta dell'Emilia in Bologna on 5 February 1909, then in French as "Manifeste du futurisme" in the newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909...
, to the Cocu
Cocu, Arges
Cocu is a commune in Argeş County, in southern central Romania. It is composed of eight villages: Bărbăteşti, Cocu, Crucişoara, Făcăleţeşti, Greabănu, Popeşti, Răchiţele de Jos and Răchiţele de Sus....
period; and that the Bizarre Pages have more in common with Expressionism
Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...
than with Marinetti. According to Cernat: "By the looks of it, [the Bizarre Pages] were completed largely independent of influence from the European avant-garde movements [...]. We do not know, however, how many of these were already completed in 1909, the year when European Futurism was 'invented'." Emilia Drogoreanu, a researcher of Romanian Futurism, stresses: "The values and representations of [the] world celebrated through Futurism exist within the Urmuzian text, but are entirely uprooted from the significance offered them by [the Futurists]". Although she finds various similarities between Urmuz and Marinetti, Carmen Blaga notes that the former's jadedness was no match for the latter's militancy.
Various authors have also suggested that Urmuz was actually a radical conservative, whose vehemence against platitude in art only camouflaged a basic conventionalism. This perspective found its voice with Lăcătuş, who sees Urmuz as a conservative heretic, equally annoyed by bourgeois and anti-bourgeois discourses. Writing in 1958, Ciprian also reflected on the possibility that Ciriviş was actually "teasing" the avant-garde tendencies emerging in his day, but concluded: "I would rather assume that under these various experiments was smoldering the lust for shaking the individual out of his skin, of tearing him away from himself, of disassembling him, of making him doubt the authenticity of accumulated knowledge." He writes that Urmuz's work lashed out at "human nature in its most intimate creases." Accordingly, some authors have even considered Urmuz the inheritor of late-19th-century Decadence
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:...
or of a matured alexandrine
Alexandrine
An alexandrine is a line of poetic meter comprising 12 syllables. Alexandrines are common in the German literature of the Baroque period and in French poetry of the early modern and modern periods. Drama in English often used alexandrines before Marlowe and Shakespeare, by whom it was supplanted...
purity. In other such readings, Urmuz appears to lend his backing to the sexist
Sexism
Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the application of the belief or attitude that there are characteristics implicit to one's gender that indirectly affect one's abilities in unrelated areas...
or antisemitic viewpoints of his contemporaries. Crohmălniceanu also writes: "the musings comprised in his manuscript notebooks [...] are restrained, flat, commonplace, as if the work of a different man."
Much debate surrounds the issue of Urmuz's connection to an absurdist
Absurdism
In philosophy, "The Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any...
streak in earlier Romanian literature and folklore
Folklore of Romania
A feature of Romanian culture is the special relationship between folklore and the learned culture, determined by two factors. First, the rural character of the Romanian communities resulted in an exceptionally vital and creative traditional culture. Folk creations were the main literary genre...
. In the 1940s, George Călinescu
George Calinescu
George Călinescu was a Romanian literary critic, historian, novelist, academician and journalist, and a writer of classicist and humanist tendencies...
discussed in detail an Urmuzian tradition, of as being characteristic for the literary culture of Romania's southern, Wallachia
Wallachia
Wallachia or Walachia is a historical and geographical region of Romania. It is situated north of the Danube and south of the Southern Carpathians...
n, cities. He noted that Urmuz was one of "the great grimacing sensitive" Wallachians, a "Balkan
Balkans
The Balkans is a geopolitical and cultural region of southeastern Europe...
" succession which also includes Hristache the Baker, Anton Pann
Anton Pann
Anton Pann , was an Ottoman-born Wallachian composer, musicologist, and Romanian-language poet, also noted for his activities as a printer, translator, and schoolteacher...
, Ion Minulescu
Ion Minulescu
Ion Minulescu was a Romanian avant-garde poet, novelist, short story writer, journalist, literary critic, and playwright. Often publishing his works under the pseudonyms I. M. Nirvan and Koh-i-Noor , he journeyed to Paris, where he was heavily influenced by the growing Symbolist movement and...
, 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...
, 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 Arghezi. In his definition, the source of Arghezi and Urmuz is in the folkloric tradition of self-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...
, where the doina
Doina
The Doina is a Romanian musical tune style, with Middle Eastern roots, that can be found in Romanian peasant music, as well as in Lăutărească and Klezmer music.-Origins and characteristics:...
songs degenerate into spells or "grotesque whines". The image of a folkloric Urmuz was soon after taken up by other critics, including Eugenio Coşeriu
Eugenio Coseriu
Eugenio Coşeriu July 27, 1921, Mihăileni, Bălţi, Republic of Moldova – September 7, 2002, Tübingen, Germany) was a linguist that specialized in Romance languages at the University of Tübingen, author of over 50 books, honorary member of the Romanian Academy....
and Crohmălniceanu.
The buffoon vs. the professional writer
A section among Urmuz's commentators tends to classify him as a genial but superficial prankster, a buffoon rather than a serious author. Although sympathetic to Urmuz's work, George Călinescu called the Bizarre Pages "an intelligent literary game" of "witty teenagers". The goal, Călinescu suggested, was "purely epic", "seeming to tell a story without in fact recounting anything". Another verdict of this kind belongs to aesthetician Tudor VianuTudor Vianu
Tudor Vianu was a Romanian literary critic, art critic, poet, philosopher, academic, and translator. Known for his left-wing and anti-fascist convictions, he had a major role on the reception and development of Modernism in Romanian literature and art...
, who also believed that Urmuz was a satirist of automatic behavior
Automatic behavior
Automatic behavior, from the Greek automatos or self-acting, is the spontaneous production of often purposeless verbal or motor behavior without conscious self-control or self-censorship...
, and fundamentally a sarcastic realist. More severe in tone, Pompiliu Constantinescu
Pompiliu Constantinescu
Pompiliu Constantinescu was a Romanian literary critic.-Biography:He was born on 17 May 1901, "in a place where he saw the light of day for the first time, on Sabines Street no...
assessed that Urmuz was superficial, chaotic and amateurish, interesting to researchers only because of defying "the bourgeois platitude". Contrarily, another interwar exegete, Perpessicius
Perpessicius
Perpessicius was a Romanian literary historian and critic, poet, essayist and fiction writer. One of the prominent literary chroniclers of the Romanian interwar, he stood apart in his generation for having thrown his support behind the modernist and avant-garde currents of Romanian literature...
, made ample efforts to rehabilitate Urmuz as a thoughtful literary figure with "great creative verve", on the same level as Arghezi and poet Adrian Maniu.
Ciprian noted that Urmuz was unlike the "cheeky, daring, disorganized" pranksters whom he superficially resembled, that nothing in Urmuz's exterior gave the impression that he was in any way "spoiled". Time, he suggests, did not alter Urumuz's "attitude on life": "Only now the about-turns were more daring and the tightrope acts was much more savvy." In 1925, commenting on Urmuz's flair for depicting the "overall pointlessness of [human] existence", Ciprian also argued: "For the mediocre mindset, [Urmuz] may seem incoherent and unbalanced—which is why his work is not addressed to the masses." Critic Adrian G. Romilă writes that the new "paradigm" in Urmuz's literary universe appears significant and laborious, but adds: "That which we do not know is if the writer [...] wasn't purely and simply playing around." However, Ioana Pârvulescu assessed that Urmuz, an author of "extreme originality", "put his own life into play and games [...] and that is why his work is more tragic than comedic or is nested in that no man's land where tragedy and comedy overlap."
Crohmălniceanu sees in the Bizarre Pages indication of a "singular" and tragic experience, while Geo Şerban argues that Urmuz's "verve" comes from destructive pressures on his own psychology. Reviewer Simona Vasilache also suggests that the Bizarre Pages hide a "long digested" rage, with serious and even dramatic undertones. Other essayists have spoken about Urmuz's "cruelty" in depicting anguishing situations, in criticizing social life and in using language stripped of its metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
s; they call him "one of the cruelest authors I ever did read" (Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian and French playwright and dramatist, and one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd...
) and "cruel in a primitive sense" (Irina Ungureanu). As Ciprian reports, Urmuz was also self-deprecatory, amused by the others' attention, and claiming that his own elucubraţii ("phantasmagorias") could only still be used to "trip the seminary brethren". One of his aphorisms hints to his internal drama and its role in creation: "There are cases when God can only help you by giving you more and more suffering."
Kafka, Jarry and "antiliterature"
Among those who describe Urmuz as more of an individual rebel than an avant-garde hero, several have come to regard him as the Romanian parallel of solitary intellectuals who likewise made an impact on 20th-century literature20th century in literature
See also: 20th century in poetry, 19th century in literature, other events of the 20th century, 21st century in literature, list of years in literature.Literature of the 20th century refers to world literature produced during the 20th century...
. In the decades after his death, Romanian reviewers started comparing him to Czechoslovakia's Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
, a parallel which was still being supported in the 21st century. According to Romilă, Urmuzian and Kafkaesque literature are both about dehumanization
Dehumanization
Dehumanization is to make somebody less human by taking away his or her individuality, the creative and interesting aspects of his or her personality, or his or her compassion and sensitivity towards others. Dehumanization may be directed by an organization or may be the composite of individual...
, in Urmuz's case with a predilection for mechanical oddities which colonize and modify human existence. Other frequent analogies rank Urmuz together with Alfred Jarry
Alfred Jarry
Alfred Jarry was a French writer born in Laval, Mayenne, France, not far from the border of Brittany; he was of Breton descent on his mother's side....
, the French proto-Dadaist and inventor of 'Pataphysics. He was also described as an equivalent of Anglophone nonsense writers (Edward Lear
Edward Lear
Edward Lear was an English artist, illustrator, author, and poet, renowned today primarily for his literary nonsense, in poetry and prose, and especially his limericks, a form that he popularised.-Biography:...
, Lewis Caroll). Elsewhere, he is paralleled with Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
's Daniil Kharms
Daniil Kharms
Daniil Kharms was an early Soviet-era surrealist and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist. One of his pseudonyms, which was signed in Latin alphabet, was Daniel Charms.- Life :...
, or modernist Poles
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
from Bruno Schulz
Bruno Schulz
Bruno Schulz was a Polish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher born to Jewish parents, and regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. Schulz was born in Drohobycz, in the province of Galicia then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and spent...
to Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. Those who speak about his fundamental conservatism or his humorist's talent have also likened Urmuz and the Bizarre Pages to Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style.-Early life and education:Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen,...
and his sarcastic Dictionary of Received Ideas
Dictionary of Received Ideas
The Dictionary of Received Ideas is a short satirical work collected and published in 1911-3 from notes compiled by Gustave Flaubert during the 1870s, lampooning the clichés endemic to French society under the Second French Empire. It takes the form of a dictionary of automatic thoughts and...
. At the other end, those who focus on Urmuz's bizarre and sad metamorphoses have paralleled his work to Tim Burton
Tim Burton
Timothy William "Tim" Burton is an American film director, film producer, writer and artist. He is famous for dark, quirky-themed movies such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet...
's Oyster Boy stories.
A major disagreement among critics relates to Urmuz's ambiguous positioning, between literature, antiliterature
Anti-art
Anti-art is a loosely-used term applied to an array of concepts and attitudes that reject prior definitions of art and question art in general. Anti-art tends to conduct this questioning and rejection from the vantage point of art...
and metafiction
Metafiction
Metafiction, also known as Romantic irony in the context of Romantic works of literature, is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion...
. In reference to the Bizarre Pages, Crohmălniceanu introduced the term "antiprose". In Crohmălniceanu's view, the antiliterary "device" Urmuz invented is impersonal and regulated, in the manner of Dada "readymades
Readymades of Marcel Duchamp
The readymades of Marcel Duchamp are ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified, as an antidote to what he called "retinal art". By simply choosing the object and repositioning or joining, titling and signing it, the object became art...
", but as such ingenious and therefore inimitable. Authors such as Adrian Marino, Eugen Negrici, Lucian Raicu and Mircea Scarlat have spoken about Urmuz as a revolutionist of language, who liberated texts from coherence and even semantics
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
; whereas others—Livius Ciocârlie, Radu Petrescu, Ion Pop, 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...
, Marin Mincu, Mihai Zamfir—have regarded him as mainly a textualist, interested in reusing and redefining the limits of poetry or narration, but creating a coherent, if personal, universe. According to Vasile Andru, Urmuzian literature is by definition open to all these associations, its antiliterary aspects illustrating the modern gap between "nature and nurture
Nature versus nurture
The nature versus nurture debate concerns the relative importance of an individual's innate qualities versus personal experiences The nature versus nurture debate concerns the relative importance of an individual's innate qualities ("nature," i.e. nativism, or innatism) versus personal experiences...
". Critic C. Trandafir, who sees Urmuz's apparent textualism as canceled out by deeper meanings in his prose, writes: "The man who wrote the 'bizarre pages' had a clear critical awareness of the transformations needed within literary discourse."
Esoteric layers
As Vasile VoiculescuVasile Voiculescu
Vasile Voiculescu was a Romanian poet, short-story writer, playwright, and physician.-Early life and education:Voiculescu was born in Pârscov, Buzău County, Romania, to a family of wealthy peasants. He attended primary school in Pleşcoi, a village near his home, for a year, after which he was sent...
recalls, Urmuz had was genuinely "tormented by metaphysical
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
matters". Some of Urmuz's commentators therefore discussed him as a reader of the unconscious mind
Unconscious mind
The unconscious mind is a term coined by the 18th century German romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge...
or propagator of esoteric
Esotericism
Esotericism or Esoterism signifies the holding of esoteric opinions or beliefs, that is, ideas preserved or understood by a small group or those specially initiated, or of rare or unusual interest. The term derives from the Greek , a compound of : "within", thus "pertaining to the more inward",...
knowledge, suggesting that a hidden layer of mystical symbolism can be discerned in all his activities. According to Perpessicius, the Bizarre Pages as a whole carry a 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...
of mythopoeia, or "fragments of a new mythology
Mythology
The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...
". Boz also drew a comparison between Urmuz and the morose 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...
, arguing that they both send the reader on "tragic explorations" and "journeys to the underworld". In Boz's interpretation, Urmuz was not at all a humorist, but rather one who issued a solitary "call to order" and, creating a "magical phenomenon", elevated his reader above the realities of the flesh. He first discussed the connection between the Bizarre Pages and 1930s 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....
, which likewise turned its attention to the abnormal psychology
Abnormal psychology
Abnormal psychology is the branch of psychology that studies unusual patterns of behavior, emotion and thought, which may or may not be understood as precipitating a mental disorder...
, to "psychosis
Psychosis
Psychosis means abnormal condition of the mind, and is a generic psychiatric term for a mental state often described as involving a "loss of contact with reality"...
" and "dementia
Dementia
Dementia is a serious loss of cognitive ability in a previously unimpaired person, beyond what might be expected from normal aging...
". The theoretical proto-Surrealism of such works, which places less importance on their topical humor, has generated a long debate between scholars later in the 20th century: some have denied Urmuzian Surrealism, whereas others have continued to identify him as the earliest Romanian Surrealist.
Simona Popescu, the poet-essayist, presumes that Urmuz's inner motivation was his "psycho-mania", which holds no respect for either convention or posterity, but only for committing one's own "abyssal obsessions" to paper: "death, the Eros, creation, and destruction." Adrian Lăcătuş also makes note of Urmuz's ambiguous allusions to autoeroticism
Autoeroticism
Autoeroticism is the practice of stimulating oneself sexually. The term was popularized toward the end of the 19th century by British sexologist Havelock Ellis, who defined autoeroticism as "the phenomena of spontaneous sexual emotion generated in the absence of an external stimulus proceeding,...
, incest
Incest
Incest is sexual intercourse between close relatives that is usually illegal in the jurisdiction where it takes place and/or is conventionally considered a taboo. The term may apply to sexual activities between: individuals of close "blood relationship"; members of the same household; step...
, bisexuality
Bisexuality
Bisexuality is sexual behavior or an orientation involving physical or romantic attraction to both males and females, especially with regard to men and women. It is one of the three main classifications of sexual orientation, along with a heterosexual and a homosexual orientation, all a part of the...
or paraphilia
Paraphilia
Paraphilia is a biomedical term used to describe sexual arousal to objects, situations, or individuals that are not part of normative stimulation and that may cause distress or serious problems for the paraphiliac or persons associated with him or her...
. Additionally, various commentators suggest that Urmuz's creative spark hides an unresolved conflict with his father. According to Cernat, Urmuz was in conflict with "paternal authority" and more attached to his mother, an "Oedipus complex
Oedipus complex
In psychoanalytic theory, the term Oedipus complex denotes the emotions and ideas that the mind keeps in the unconscious, via dynamic repression, that concentrate upon a boy’s desire to sexually possess his mother, and kill his father...
" also found in some other literary figures of the pre-modernist generation. Others too see in Ciriviş's pranks a planned revenge against parental and social pressures. His sister Eliza credited such accounts, by noting: "You can tell he failed in life because he obeyed his parents blindly, and perhaps also in part due to his lack of will, his shyness, his fear of the public."
Urmuz the aphorist genuinely trusted that the "Soul" of the world was a unity of opposites
Unity of opposites
The unity of opposites was first suggested by Heraclitus a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher.Philosophers had for some time been contemplating the notion of opposites. Anaximander posited that every element was an opposite, or connected to an opposite...
, and, inspired by the philosophy of Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson
Henri-Louis Bergson was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for understanding reality.He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize...
, also spoke of a "universal vital flux
Élan vital
Élan vital was coined by French philosopher Henri Bergson in his 1907 book Creative Evolution, in which he addresses the question of self-organisation and spontaneous morphogenesis of things in an increasingly complex manner. Elan vital was translated in the English edition as "vital impetus", but...
". Lăcătuş and others suggest that Urmuz's worldview is the modern correspondent of Gnosticism
Gnosticism
Gnosticism is a scholarly term for a set of religious beliefs and spiritual practices common to early Christianity, Hellenistic Judaism, Greco-Roman mystery religions, Zoroastrianism , and Neoplatonism.A common characteristic of some of these groups was the teaching that the realisation of Gnosis...
and Manichaeism
Manichaeism
Manichaeism in Modern Persian Āyin e Māni; ) was one of the major Iranian Gnostic religions, originating in Sassanid Persia.Although most of the original writings of the founding prophet Mani have been lost, numerous translations and fragmentary texts have survived...
: in one of the manuscripts he left behind, Urmuz speculates about there being two Gods, one good and one evil. A distinct, and disputed, interpretation was put forth by researcher Radu Cernătescu, who believes that Urmuz's life and work reflected the doctrine of Freemasonry
Freemasonry in Romania
The beginnings of Freemasonry in the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia date to the 18th century and the activities of the humanist scholar Anton Maria del Chiaro, secretary to voivodes Constantin Brâncoveanu and Constantine Mavrocordatos...
. Cernătescu reads indications of Masonic "awakening" throughout Urmuz's stories, and notes that the pahuci brotherhood was probably the junior or parody version of a Romanian Masonic Lodge
Masonic Lodge
This article is about the Masonic term for a membership group. For buildings named Masonic Lodge, see Masonic Lodge A Masonic Lodge, often termed a Private Lodge or Constituent Lodge, is the basic organisation of Freemasonry...
.
Early prose
Definitions vary in respect to the exact nature and species of Urmuz's experimentalExperimental literature
Experimental literature refers to written works - often novels or magazines - that place great emphasis on innovations regarding technique and style.-Early history:...
works, which are prose-like in content. Ciprian simply assessed that Urmuz's pieces "do not belong to any literary genre." In line with his comments about the mythological layer of Urmuz's work, Perpessicius suggested that Urmuz created "new fairy tale
Fairy tale
A fairy tale is a type of short story that typically features such folkloric characters, such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, dwarves, giants or gnomes, and usually magic or enchantments. However, only a small number of the stories refer to fairies...
s" and "fantasy
Fantasy literature
Fantasy literature is fantasy in written form. Historically speaking, literature has composed the majority of fantasy works. Since the 1950s however, a growing segment of the fantasy genre has taken the form of films, television programs, graphic novels, video games, music, painting, and other...
sketches". This intuition was given endorsement by other scholars, who included the Bizarre Pages in anthologies of Romanian fantasy literature. Contrarily, Boz found that Urmuz was "the poet of transcendental absurdity", "the reformer of Romanian poetry", and the counterpart of Romania's 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...
. The Eminescu-Urmuz comparison, which put aside all their differences in style and vision, was a favorite of avant-garde authors, and, late in the century, served to inspire sympathetic academics such as Marin Mincu.
According to Ciprian, one of Urmuz's earliest prose fragments was composed, with "The Chroniclers", during pahuci escapades. Its opening words, Ciprian recalls, were: "The deputy arrived in a brick and tile cart. He was bringing no news, but offered his friends, upon arrival, a few Leclanché
Leclanché
Leclanché S.A. was established in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland in 1909. During the early years Leclanché designed, developed and manufactured dry cells and lighting equipment. From the 1920s, it diversified its production to include into capacitors, followed later by rechargeable batteries and...
batteries". The same author suggests that these drafts were much inferior to Urmuz's published works, beginning with "Algazy & Grummer".
In its definitive version, the Algazy piece offers a glimpse into the strange life and cannibalistic
Cannibalism
Cannibalism is the act or practice of humans eating the flesh of other human beings. It is also called anthropophagy...
death of its storekeeper characters: Algazy, "a nice old man" with his beard "neatly laid out on a grill [...] surrounded by barbed wire", "does not speak any European languages
Languages of Europe
Most of the languages of Europe belong to Indo-European language family. These are divided into a number of branches, including Romance, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Greek, and others. The Uralic languages also have a significant presence in Europe, including the national languages Hungarian, Finnish,...
" and feeds on municipal waste; Grummer, who has "a bilious temper
Humorism
Humorism, or humoralism, is a now discredited theory of the makeup and workings of the human body, adopted by Greek and Roman physicians and philosophers, positing that an excess or deficiency of any of four distinct bodily fluids in a person directly influences their temperament and health...
" and "a beak of aromatic wood", spends most time lying under the counter, but sometimes assaults customers in the middle of conversations about sports or literature. When Algazy discovers that his associate has digested, without giving a thought to sharing, "all that was good in literature", he takes his revenge by consuming Grummer's rubbery bladder. A race begins as to who can eat the other first. Their few remains are later discovered by the authorities, and one of Algazy's many wives sweeps them up into oblivion. A different, early variant is quoted "from memory" and commented in Ciprian. In this account, Algazy the storekeeper is persuaded by his domineering wife to make their only son a magistrate. Grummer prepares the boy for his unexpected novitiate
Novitiate
Novitiate, alt. noviciate, is the period of training and preparation that a novice monastic or member of a religious order undergoes prior to taking vows in order to discern whether they are called to the religious life....
, strapping him down to the floor of a cave that must have the scent of colts
Colt (horse)
A colt is a young male horse, under the age of four. The term "colt" is often confused with foal, which refers to a horse of either sex under one year of age....
.
From its very title, "Algazy & Grummer" references a defunct firm of suitcase manufacturers. Urmuz's own note to the text apologizes for this, explaining that the names' "musicality" is more suited to the two fictional characters than to their real-life models, and suggesting that the company should change name (or that its patrons must adapt their physical shape accordingly). The narrative may hint to the everyday tensions between these entrepreneurs, and perhaps to the boredom of a career in sales; according to philologist Simona Constantinovici, it is also the confrontation of an entrepreneurial Turk
Turks of Romania
Turks in Romania, also known as Romanian Turks, are ethnic Turks who form an ethnic minority in Romania. According to the 2002 census, there were 32,098 Turks living in the country, forming a minority of some 0.2% of the population.- History :...
(Algazy) and an intellectual Jew
History of the Jews in Romania
The history of Jews in Romania concerns the Jews of Romania and of Romanian origins, from their first mention on what is nowadays Romanian territory....
(Grummer), represented as a fight between the ostrich
Ostrich
The Ostrich is one or two species of large flightless birds native to Africa, the only living member of the genus Struthio. Some analyses indicate that the Somali Ostrich may be better considered a full species apart from the Common Ostrich, but most taxonomists consider it to be a...
and the platypus
Platypus
The platypus is a semi-aquatic mammal endemic to eastern Australia, including Tasmania. Together with the four species of echidna, it is one of the five extant species of monotremes, the only mammals that lay eggs instead of giving birth to live young...
. Beyond the mundane pretext, the story was often described as Urmuz's manifesto against any literary technique
Literary technique
A literary technique is any element or the entirety of elements a writer intentionally uses in the structure of their work...
, and even a witty meditation on the signified and signifier
Sign (semiotics)
A sign is understood as a discrete unit of meaning in semiotics. It is defined as "something that stands for something, to someone in some capacity" It includes words, images, gestures, scents, tastes, textures, sounds – essentially all of the ways in which information can be...
. Carmen Blaga further proposes that Urmuz philosophic intent is to show the gap between universe, in which all things are possible and random, and man, who demands familiarity and structure.
"Ismaïl and Turnavitu"
In "Ismaïl and Turnavitu", Urmuz further explores the bizarre in its everyday settings. This was noted by Ciprian: "[Urmuz] waged war on nature, he created besides nature and against its laws. He was a solitary summit defying heaven and asking: That's all? [...] Always the same slopes? the same compassesCompass (drafting)
A compass or pair of compasses is a technical drawing instrument that can be used for inscribing circles or arcs. As dividers, they can also be used as a tool to measure distances, in particular on maps...
? the same people? the same beards?" The result, Sandqvist writes, is "breakneck, absurd, and inordinately grotesque." Călinescu singled out the work: "The best of his absurd pieces is 'Ismaïl and Turnavitu', the solemnly academic portraiture and parody of bourgeois mannerisms, where there's always a confusion being made between the three kingdoms, the animal, the vegetal and the mineral".
Ismaïl "is made up of eyes, sideburns, and a dress", tied with rope to a badger and stumbling down Arionoaia Street. Protected from "legal responsibility" in the country ("a seed-bed at the bottom of a hole in Dobruja
Dobruja
Dobruja is a historical region shared by Bulgaria and Romania, located between the lower Danube river and the Black Sea, including the Danube Delta, Romanian coast and the northernmost part of the Bulgarian coast...
"), the creature raises an entire badger colony: some he eats raw, with lemon; the others, once they have turned sixteen, he rapes "without the smallest qualm of conscience." The seed-bed is where Ismaïl also interviews job applicants, received on the condition that they hatch him "four eggs each". The process is supported by his "chamberlain
Chamberlain (office)
A chamberlain is an officer in charge of managing a household. In many countries there are ceremonial posts associated with the household of the sovereign....
" Turnavitu, who exchanges love letters with the applicants. Ismaïl's actual residence is kept a secret, but it is presumed that he lives, sequestered from "the corruption of electoral mores", in an attic above the home of his grotesquely disfigured father, only to emerge in a ball gown
Ball gown
A ball gown is worn for ballroom dancing and only the most formal social occasions according to rules of etiquette. It is traditionally a full-skirted gown reaching at least to the ankles, made of luxurious fabric, delicately and exotically trimmed. Most versions are cut off the shoulder with...
for the yearly celebration of plaster
Plaster
Plaster is a building material used for coating walls and ceilings. Plaster starts as a dry powder similar to mortar or cement and like those materials it is mixed with water to form a paste which liberates heat and then hardens. Unlike mortar and cement, plaster remains quite soft after setting,...
. He then offers his body to the workers, in hopes of thus resolving "the labor issue". Whereas Ismaïl has once worked as an air fan for "dirty Greek coffee houses" in the Lipscani
Lipscani
Lipscani is a street and a district of Bucharest, Romania, which in the Middle Ages was the most important commercial center of Bucharest and the whole Wallachia...
quarter, Turnavitu has a past in "politics": he was for long the government-appointed air fan at the fire precinct kitchen. Ismaïl has spared Turnavitu a life of near constant rotation, remunerating his services: the seed-bed interviews, the ritualized apologizes to the leashed badgers, the praise of Ismaïl's fashion sense, and the swabbing of canola
Canola
Canola refers to a cultivar of either Rapeseed or Field Mustard . Its seeds are used to produce edible oil suitable for consumption by humans and livestock. The oil is also suitable for use as biodiesel.Originally, Canola was bred naturally from rapeseed in Canada by Keith Downey and Baldur R...
over Ismaïl's gowns. Their relationship breaks down as Turnavitu, returning from the Balearic Islands
Balearic Islands
The Balearic Islands are an archipelago of Spain in the western Mediterranean Sea, near the eastern coast of the Iberian Peninsula.The four largest islands are: Majorca, Minorca, Ibiza and Formentera. The archipelago forms an autonomous community and a province of Spain with Palma as the capital...
in the form of a jerrycan
Jerrycan
A jerrycan is a robust fuel container originally made from pressed steel. It was designed in Germany in the 1930s for military use to hold 20 litres of fuel. The development of the Jerrycan was a huge improvement on earlier designs, which required tools and funnels to use.-Uses:Today similar...
, passes the common cold
Common cold
The common cold is a viral infectious disease of the upper respiratory system, caused primarily by rhinoviruses and coronaviruses. Common symptoms include a cough, sore throat, runny nose, and fever...
to Ismaïl's badgers. Sacked from his job, he contemplates suicide ("not before seeing to the extraction of four canines
Canine tooth
In mammalian oral anatomy, the canine teeth, also called cuspids, dogteeth, fangs, or eye teeth, are relatively long, pointed teeth...
in his mouth"), and hurls himself into a pyre made up of Ismaïl's dresses; the patron falls into depression and "decrepitude", retreating to his seed-bed for the rest of his own life.
Like "Algazy & Grummer", "Ismaïl and Turnavitu" probably has a skeletal structure borrowed from real life: Turnavitu was a distinguished clan within Bucharest's Greek nobility, tracing its origin back to the Phanariote era. The semi-fictional world is populated by other symbols of Romania's connection to the Orient, that are meant to evoke "the banality of a distinctively Balkan scenery" (Carmen Blaga). Other interpretations have seen in the two protagonists caricatures of political corruption and parvenu
Parvenu
A Parvenu is a person who is a relative newcomer to a socioeconomic class. The word is borrowed from the French language; it is the past participle of the verb parvenir...
morals.
"The Funnel and Stamate"
"The Funnel and Stamate" insists on the geographical setting of Urmuzian misadventures. Stamate's townhouse is a haven for objects or beings, their presence inventoried over several rooms. Only accessible through a tube, the windowless first room holds together a sample of the thing-in-itselfNoumenon
The noumenon is a posited object or event that is known without the use of the senses.The term is generally used in contrast with, or in relation to "phenomenon", which refers to anything that appears to, or is an object of, the senses...
, the statue of a 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...
n priest and grammarian, and two humans always "in the process of descending from the ape
Human evolution
Human evolution refers to the evolutionary history of the genus Homo, including the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species and as a unique category of hominids and mammals...
". The second room, decorated in "Turkish style" and "eastern luxury", is painted once a day and carefully measured, by compass, to prevent shrinkage. A third section, under the "Turkish" room, houses a limitless canal, a tiny room and a stake "to which the entire Stamate family is tethered." The "dignified" and "elliptical
Ellipse
In geometry, an ellipse is a plane curve that results from the intersection of a cone by a plane in a way that produces a closed curve. Circles are special cases of ellipses, obtained when the cutting plane is orthogonal to the cone's axis...
" head of the clan spits chewed-up celluloid
Celluloid
Celluloid is the name of a class of compounds created from nitrocellulose and camphor, plus dyes and other agents. Generally regarded to be the first thermoplastic, it was first created as Parkesine in 1862 and as Xylonite in 1869, before being registered as Celluloid in 1870. Celluloid is...
on his fat boy Bufty, who "pretends not to notice". For relaxation, the Stamates contemplate Nirvana
Nirvana
Nirvāṇa ; ) is a central concept in Indian religions. In sramanic thought, it is the state of being free from suffering. In Hindu philosophy, it is the union with the Supreme being through moksha...
, located over the canal and "in the same precinct" as them. Old Stamate's musings are interrupted by the provocative intrusion of a siren
Siren
In Greek mythology, the Sirens were three dangerous mermaid like creatures, portrayed as seductresses who lured nearby sailors with their enchanting music and voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island. Roman poets placed them on an island called Sirenum scopuli...
, who lures him into the deep by presenting him with "an innocent and too decent looking funnel." Stamate returns "a better and more tolerant man", deciding to use the funnel for both the pleasures of sex and those of science. Neglecting his family duties, he goes on nightly expeditions into the funnel, until he discovers in horror that Bufty uses the funnel for a similar purpose. Stamate then decides to part with his wife (sewing her in a bag, to "preserve the cultural traditions of his family") and with Bufty: trapped in the funnel, the boy is sent over to Nirvana, where Stamate makes sure he becomes a "bureau sub-chief". Stamate is left alone to contemplate his plight, wandering to and fro at great speed, and submerging "into micro-infinity."
As an early supporter of Urmuz, Ciprian spoke of "The Funnel and Stamate" as "without parallel" in its satire of family life, suggesting that the scene were all the Stamates are tied to a single stake is "more evocative than hundreds of pages from a novel" (part of the story has also been read as a sexist joke on fashionable androgyny
Androgyny
Androgyny is a term derived from the Greek words ανήρ, stem ανδρ- and γυνή , referring to the combination of masculine and feminine characteristics...
, since Stamate has a "tonsured and legitimate wife"). Urmuz's original version in fact carries the subtitle "A Four-Part Novel", in which Paul Cernat reads the intention of parodying the staple genres of traditional literature; according to Ioana Pârvulescu, the definition needs to be taken seriously, and makes the text ("perhaps the shortest [novel] in European literature
European literature
European literature refers to the literature of Europe.European literature includes literature in many languages; among the most important of the modern written works are those in English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Polish, German, Italian, Modern Greek, Czech and Russian and works by the...
") a "microscopic" Romanian equivalent of modernist works by James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
. Linguist Anca Davidoiu-Roman notes: "Urmuz's antinovel
Antinovel
An antinovel is any experimental work of fiction that avoids the familiar conventions of the novel. The term was coined by the French philosopher and critic Jean-Paul Sartre....
[...] apparently preserves the structures of the novelistic genre, but undermines them from the inside, cultivating the absurd, the black humor, [...] the nonsensical and the zeugma
Zeugma
Zeugma is a figure of speech in which two or more parts of a sentence are joined with a single common verb or noun. A zeugma employs both ellipsis, the omission of words which are easily understood, and parallelism, the balance of several words or phrases...
." The core theme is believed to be sexual: a paraphrase of Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written early in the career of playwright William Shakespeare about two young star-crossed lovers whose deaths ultimately unite their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular archetypal stories of young, teenage lovers.Romeo and Juliet belongs to a...
, with Stamate as the ridiculously abstract thinker falling for the debased stand-in of femininity
Femininity
Femininity is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with girls and women. Though socially constructed, femininity is made up of both socially defined and biologically created factors...
; or even the detailed creation of "an aberrant mechanism for erotic gratification." Stamate himself is also described as standing in for "the unimaginative bourgeois".
"The Fuchsiad"
Another one of Urmuz's prose creations is "The Fuchsiad", subtitled "An Heroic-Erotic Musical Poem in Prose". Among the scholars, PerpessiciusPerpessicius
Perpessicius was a Romanian literary historian and critic, poet, essayist and fiction writer. One of the prominent literary chroniclers of the Romanian interwar, he stood apart in his generation for having thrown his support behind the modernist and avant-garde currents of Romanian literature...
was first to argue that the subtext here is a direct reference to Greek mythology
Greek mythology
Greek mythology is the body of myths and legends belonging to the ancient Greeks, concerning their gods and heroes, the nature of the world, and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices. They were a part of religion in ancient Greece...
and Norse paganism
Norse paganism
Norse paganism is the religious traditions of the Norsemen, a Germanic people living in the Nordic countries. Norse paganism is therefore a subset of Germanic paganism, which was practiced in the lands inhabited by the Germanic tribes across most of Northern and Central Europe in the Viking Age...
, re-contextualized "with the sadistic pleasure of children who take apart their dolls". The protagonist Fuchs is an eminently musical creature, who came into the world not out of his mother's womb, but through his grandmother's ear. At the conservatory, he turns into "the perfect chord
Chord (music)
A chord in music is any harmonic set of two–three or more notes that is heard as if sounding simultaneously. These need not actually be played together: arpeggios and broken chords may for many practical and theoretical purposes be understood as chords...
", but out of modesty spends most of his education hiding at the bottom of a piano. Puberty comes and he grows "some kind of genitalia"—in fact a "fig leaf
Fig leaf
A fig leaf is the covering up of an act or an object that is embarrassing or disagreeable. The term is a metaphorical reference to the Biblical Book of Genesis, in which Adam and Eve used fig leaves to cover "their nakedness" after eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and...
" which keeps rejuvenating. The actual story begins on the one night Fuchs spends in the open air: under the spell of its mysteries, the composer finds his way into Traian Street (Bucharest's red-light district
Red-light district
A red-light district is a part of an urban area where there is a concentration of prostitution and sex-oriented businesses, such as sex shops, strip clubs, adult theaters, etc...
).
There, a group of "vestals
Vestal Virgin
In ancient Roman religion, the Vestals or Vestal Virgins , were priestesses of Vesta, goddess of the hearth. The College of the Vestals and its well-being was regarded as fundamental to the continuance and security of Rome, as embodied by their cultivation of the sacred fire that could not be...
" whisks him away, praying to be shown the beauty of "immaterial love" and begging him to play a sonata
Sonata
Sonata , in music, literally means a piece played as opposed to a cantata , a piece sung. The term, being vague, naturally evolved through the history of music, designating a variety of forms prior to the Classical era...
. His music is heard by the goddess Venus
Venus (mythology)
Venus is a Roman goddess principally associated with love, beauty, sex,sexual seduction and fertility, who played a key role in many Roman religious festivals and myths...
, and she is instantly "defeated by passion", asking Fuchs to join her on Mount Olympus
Mount Olympus
Mount Olympus is the highest mountain in Greece, located on the border between Thessaly and Macedonia, about 100 kilometres away from Thessaloniki, Greece's second largest city. Mount Olympus has 52 peaks. The highest peak Mytikas, meaning "nose", rises to 2,917 metres...
. The act of lovemaking between clueless, overanxious Fuchs and the giant goddess is a disaster, particularly after the former decides to enter his whole body into Venus' ear. The embarrassed and angered audience humiliates the guest and banishes him to the planet Venus
Venus
Venus is the second planet from the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. The planet is named after Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty. After the Moon, it is the brightest natural object in the night sky, reaching an apparent magnitude of −4.6, bright enough to cast shadows...
; merciful Athena
Athena
In Greek mythology, Athena, Athenê, or Athene , also referred to as Pallas Athena/Athene , is the goddess of wisdom, courage, inspiration, civilization, warfare, strength, strategy, the arts, crafts, justice, and skill. Minerva, Athena's Roman incarnation, embodies similar attributes. Athena is...
allows him to return home, but on condition he does not reproduce. However, Fuchs still decides to spend some of his time practicing his lovemaking on Traian Street, hoping that Venus will grant him a second chance, and believing that he and the goddess could breed a race of Supermen
Übermensch
The Übermensch is a concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche posited the Übermensch as a goal for humanity to set for itself in his 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra ....
. In the end, the prostitutes also reject his advances, deeming him a "dirty satyr
Satyr
In Greek mythology, satyrs are a troop of male companions of Pan and Dionysus — "satyresses" were a late invention of poets — that roamed the woods and mountains. In myths they are often associated with pipe-playing....
", no longer capable of immaterial love. The story ends with Fuchs' flight to into "boundless nature", whence his music "has been beaming away with equal force in all directions", fulfilling his destiny as an enemy of inferior art.
Urmuz's story has been variously described as his praise of artistic freedom
Artistic freedom
Artistic freedom is the extent of freedom of an artist to produce art to his/her own insight. The extent can deviate to customs in a certain school of art, directives of the assigner, etc....
, and more precisely as an ironic take on his own biography as a failed musician. On a more transparent level, it references classical composer Theodor Fuchs, depicted by posterity as a "puberal" and "clumsy" man, and known as a disgraced favorite of Romanian Queen-Consort Elisabeth of Wied
Elisabeth of Wied
-Titles and styles:*29 December 1843 – 15 November 1869: Her Serene Highness Princess Elisabeth of Wied*15 November 1869 – 26 March 1881: Her Royal Highness The Princess of Romania...
. "The Fuchsiad" may also contain 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...
nods to A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play that was written by William Shakespeare. It is believed to have been written between 1590 and 1596. It portrays the events surrounding the marriage of the Duke of Athens, Theseus, and the Queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta...
.
"Emil Gayk" and "Going Abroad"
The "Emil Gayk" sketch was the only one which is precisely dated to the early stages of World War I, focusing its satire on the debates of neutralists and interventionists. Gayk, the ever-vigilant, gun-tauting, bird-like civilian, who sleeps in his tailcoatTailcoat
A tailcoat is a coat with the front of the skirt cut away, so as to leave only the rear section of the skirt, known as the tails. The historical reason coats were cut this way was to make it easier for the wearer to ride a horse, but over the years tailcoats of varying types have evolved into forms...
but otherwise wears only a festoon
Festoon
Festoon , a wreath or garland, and so in architecture a conventional arrangement of flowers, foliage or fruit bound together and suspended by ribbons, either from a decorated knot, or held in the mouths of lions, or suspended across the back of bulls heads as...
ed drape, swims about in just one direction ("for fear of coming out of his neutrality") and gets inspired by the military muses. His career is in foreign relations, which he revolutionizes with such novel ideas as the negotiated annexation of a unidimensional
One-dimensional space
In physics and mathematics, a sequence of n numbers can be understood as a location in n-dimensional space. When n = 1, the set of all such locations is called 1-dimensional Euclidean space.-Polytopes:...
, arrow-like, territory at Năsăud
Nasaud
Năsăud is a town in Bistriţa-Năsăud County in Romania located in the historical region of Transylvania. The town administers two villages, Liviu Rebreanu and Luşca.The name Năsăud is possibly derived from the Slavic nas voda, meaning "near the water"...
—pointed toward Luxembourg
Luxembourg
Luxembourg , officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg , is a landlocked country in western Europe, bordered by Belgium, France, and Germany. It has two principal regions: the Oesling in the North as part of the Ardennes massif, and the Gutland in the south...
, in memory of the 1914 invasion
German occupation of Luxembourg in World War I
The German occupation of Luxembourg in World War I was the first of two military occupations of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg by Germany in the twentieth century. From August 1914 until the end of World War I in November 1918, Luxembourg was under full occupation by the German Empire...
. Gayk has an adoptive daughter, educated on his behalf by waiters, who makes her home in the fields and eventually demands access to the sea. Angered by this claim, Gayk begins a large-scale war against her; the conflict ends in a stalemate, as Gayk can no longer accessorize his marshal's uniform, and the girl has lost her supplies of gasoline and beans. The father is placated with regular gifts of feed grain
Feed grain
Feed grain refers to any of several grains most commonly used for livestock feed, including corn, grain sorghum, oats, rye, and barley. These grains and the farms producing them historically have received federal commodity program support in the United States...
, whereas the daughter is allowed a two-centimeter-wide littoral.
In its subtext, "Emil Gayk" teases the irredentist
Irredentism
Irredentism is any position advocating annexation of territories administered by another state on the grounds of common ethnicity or prior historical possession, actual or alleged. Some of these movements are also called pan-nationalist movements. It is a feature of identity politics and cultural...
ambitions of the interventionist camp, in respect to 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...
province. Urmuz quotes a humorous slogan, circulated as a lampoon of nationalist attitudes: "Transylvania without the Transylvanians". This probably references the fact that, although Romanian by culture or ethnicity, many Transylvanian intellectuals were primarily the loyal subjects of the Habsburg Monarchy
Habsburg Monarchy
The Habsburg Monarchy covered the territories ruled by the junior Austrian branch of the House of Habsburg , and then by the successor House of Habsburg-Lorraine , between 1526 and 1867/1918. The Imperial capital was Vienna, except from 1583 to 1611, when it was moved to Prague...
. According to Crohmălniceanu, the actual purpose is to overturn "ossified" constructs, as in the case of territorial demands which cover no real surface. Similarly, Şerban speaks about "Emil Gayk" as a piece in which magnified "paltry aspects" and "anomalies" are supposed to send the reader into a "state of vigil".
The plot of "Going Abroad" depicts someone's convoluted attempt to leave the country for good. The unnamed seven-year-old "he" in the story settles his scores with the assistance of "two old ducks" and embarks for the voyage, only to be pulled back in by "paternal feelings"; he consequently isolates himself in a tiny room, where he converts to Judaism, punishes his servants, celebrates his Silver Jubilee
Silver Jubilee
A Silver Jubilee is a celebration held to mark a 25th anniversary. The anniversary celebrations can be of a wedding anniversary, ruling anniversary or anything that has completed a 25 year mark...
, and rethinks his escape. His wife, jealous of his contacts with a seal, decides against it, but offers him various parting gifts: flatbread
Flatbread
A flatbread is a simple bread made with flour, water, and salt and then thoroughly rolled into flattened dough. Many flatbreads are unleavened: made without yeast or sourdough culture: although some flatbread is made with yeast, such as pita bread....
, a kite
Kite
A kite is a tethered aircraft. The necessary lift that makes the kite wing fly is generated when air flows over and under the kite's wing, producing low pressure above the wing and high pressure below it. This deflection also generates horizontal drag along the direction of the wind...
, and a sketchbook by art teacher Borgovanu. This results in a quarrel, and the protagonist finds himself tied by the cheekbones, "delivered unceremoniously on dry land." For a third attempt at leaving, the husband relinquishes wealth and titles, strips down and, bound with a bark rope, gallops to another town, joining the bar association
Bar association
A bar association is a professional body of lawyers. Some bar associations are responsible for the regulation of the legal profession in their jurisdiction; others are professional organizations dedicated to serving their members; in many cases, they are both...
. The story ends with a rhyming "moral":
De vreţi cu toţi, în timpul nopţii, un somn de tihnă să gustaţi, Nu faceţi schimb de ilustrate cu cel primar din Cârligaţi Calmatuiu Călmăţuiu is a commune in Teleorman County, Romania. It is composed of four villages: Bujoru, Caravaneţi, Călmăţuiu and Nicolae Bălcescu.... . |
If forty winks is what y'all want to catch, Exchange no postcards with that mayor in Kurlygatz. |
"Going Abroad" is possibly about Urmuz's own difficulties in deciding his own fate, transposed into a faux sample of travel literature
Travel literature
Travel literature is travel writing of literary value. Travel literature typically records the experiences of an author touring a place for the pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue or itinerary. Travel literature may be cross-cultural or transnational in focus, or...
, an example of what Balotă calls the failed homo viator ("human pilgrim") in Urmuz.
Unclassified prose
Two samples of Urmuz's prose have been traditionally seen as his secondary, less relevant, contributions. These are "After the Storm" and the posthumous "A Little Metaphysics and Astronomy". In the former, an unnamed cavalier makes his way into a grim monastery, his heart moved at the sight of a pious hen; the repentant man then finds "ecstasy" in nature, leaping through the trees or releasing captive flies. Agents of the revenue serviceRevenue service
A revenue service is a government agency responsible for the intake of government revenue, including taxes and sometimes non-tax revenue. Depending on the jurisdiction, revenue services may be charged with tax collection, investigation of tax evasion, or carrying out audits.-Revenue services by...
make efforts to confiscate his tree, but the protagonist is still able to squat on one of the branches after he gives proof of naturalization
Naturalization
Naturalization is the acquisition of citizenship and nationality by somebody who was not a citizen of that country at the time of birth....
, and then—by taking a swim through the "infected pond nearby"—shames his adversaries into leaving. Strengthened by cynicism and his affection for the hen, he heads back to his "native village", where he is to train folks in the "art of midwifery
Midwifery
Midwifery is a health care profession in which providers offer care to childbearing women during pregnancy, labour and birth, and during the postpartum period. They also help care for the newborn and assist the mother with breastfeeding....
." According to critics, "After the Storm" should be seen as a caricature of minor 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...
and conventional fantasy or travel literature. Simona Vasilache also finds it "an Odyssey
Odyssey
The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second—the Iliad being the first—extant work of Western literature...
covering some twenty lines", "a misalliance of heroism and pilferage" with echoes from Urmuz's hero Ion Luca Caragiale
Ion Luca Caragiale
Ion Luca Caragiale was a Wallachian-born Romanian playwright, short story writer, poet, theater manager, political commentator and journalist...
.
"A Little Metaphysics and Astronomy", which is structured like a treatise, opens with a pun on the creation narrative, postulating that God created fingerspelling
Fingerspelling
Fingerspelling is the representation of the letters of a writing system, and sometimes numeral systems, using only the hands. These manual alphabets , have often been used in deaf education, and have subsequently been adopted as a distinct part of a number of sign languages around the world...
before "the Word", and venturing to suggest that "the heavenly bodies", like abandoned children, are in fact nobody's creation, that their spin is really a form of attention seeking
Attention seeking
Enjoying the attention of others is quite socially acceptable. In some instances, however, the need for attention can lead to difficulties. The term attention seeking is generally reserved for such situations where excessive and "inappropriate attention seeking" is seen.-Styles:The following...
. Here, Urmuz questions the possibility of a single cause in the universe, since God's interest is in unnecessary duplications or multitudes in stars, men and fish species. Beyond the jokes on scientific pretense, Vasilache reads "A Little Metaphysics..." as a clue to Urmuz's own disillusioned worldview, which she traces back to the suicidal warnings in Urmuz's notebooks. She argues that such a melancholy and lonely diarist is in contrast with Urmuz's literary persona, as known from the Bizarre Pages. Likewise, Carmen Blaga describes the text as a sober meditation on "the tragic sense of history" and "the fall into temporality
Temporality
Temporality is a term often used in philosophy in talking about the way time is. The traditional mode of temporality is a linear procession of past, present, and future....
".
Among the last Urmuzian works to be discovered is "Cotadi and Dragomir". The first in the duo is a muscular but short and insect-like merchant, who wears dandruff, tortoiseshell
Tortoiseshell material
Tortoiseshell or tortoise shell is a material produced mainly from the shell of the hawksbill turtle, an endangered species. It was widely used in the 1960s and 1970s in the manufacture of items such as combs, sunglasses, guitar picks and knitting needles...
combs, a lath
Lath
A lath is a thin, narrow strip of some straight-grained wood or other material, including metal or gypsum. A lattice, or lattice-work, is a criss-crossed or interlaced arrangement of laths, or the pattern made by such an arrangement...
armor which greatly hiders his movements, and a piano lid screwed to his buttocks. The descendant of Macedonian
Macedonia (region)
Macedonia is a geographical and historical region of the Balkan peninsula in southeastern Europe. Its boundaries have changed considerably over time, but nowadays the region is considered to include parts of five Balkan countries: Greece, the Republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia, as...
nobility, Cotadi feeds on ant eggs and excretes soda water
Carbonated water
Carbonated water is water into which carbon dioxide gas under pressure has been dissolved, a process that causes the water to become effervescent....
, except when he corks himself to solve the "agrarian question
Land reform in Romania
Four major land reforms have taken place in Romania: in 1864, 1921, 1945 and 1991. The first sought to undo the feudal structure that had persisted after the unification of the Danubian Principalities in 1859; the second, more drastic reform, tried to resolve lingering peasant discontent and create...
". For fun, he lures his clients into angry conversations—these end with him banging the piano lid, which is also a urinating wall, on the shop's floor. Dragomir is long, crooked, brownish and kind-hearted; he intervenes in the disputes between Cotadi and the more stubborn customers, intimidating the latter with a cardboard contraption that extends upwards from his neck. His friend rewards such attentions with meals of octopus, sorb-pears or paint, and Dragomir earns the right to sleep inside the gate wall. They are to be buried together, "in the same hole", with a daily supply of French oil. From such a grave, Cotadi hopes, an olive tree plantation may spring up, for the benefit of his descendants. Like "Algazy & Grummer", "Cotadi and Dragomir" was interpreted as an allusion to the stillness of a life in commerce.
"The Chroniclers"
Written in the manner of fableFable
A fable is a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, mythical creatures, plants, inanimate objects or forces of nature which are anthropomorphized , and that illustrates a moral lesson , which may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy maxim.A fable differs from...
s, but lacking any directly interpretable message, Urmuz's "The Chroniclers" referenced Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
, Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei , was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism...
and the turn-of-the-century Balkan
Balkans
The Balkans is a geopolitical and cultural region of southeastern Europe...
insurgent Boris Sarafov
Boris Sarafov
Boris Petrov Sarafov was a revolutionary from the region of Macedonia, one of the leaders of Supreme Macedonian-Adrianople Committee and Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization...
(Sarafoff). Its opening lines suggest that the eponymous chroniclers, for lack of baggy pants, approach someone with the surname "Rapaport" and demand to be issued passports. The lyrical convention breaks down toward the end, which states:
Galileu scoate-o sinteză Din redingota franceză, Şi exclamă: Sarafoff, Serveşte-te de cartof! Morală: pelicanul sau babiţa. |
[...] from out his French tux Galileo then extracts a synthesis with a cry "Sarafoff have another fry!" Moral: the pelican Pelican A pelican, derived from the Greek word πελεκυς pelekys is a large water bird with a large throat pouch, belonging to the bird family Pelecanidae.... or the pouchbill Gular skin Gular skin , in ornithology, is an area of featherless skin on birds that joins the lower mandible of the beak to the bird's neck.... . |
Ciprian simply discussed the piece as "Urmuz's idiotic lyrics", while Călinescu found it a "pure fable, on the classical canon, but nonsensical". Cernat also described its "moral" as "empty" and "tautological
Tautology (rhetoric)
Tautology is an unnecessary or unessential repetition of meaning, using different and dissimilar words that effectively say the same thing...
", but other critics see as hidden layer of meaning in the seemingly random cultural imagery. Ion Pop, commenting on Urmuz's hypertextuality
Hypertextuality
Hypertextuality is a postmodern theory of the inter-connectedness of all literary works and their interpretation.The prefix 'hyper' is derived from the Greek 'above, beyond or outside'...
, assumes that the "pelican and pouchbill" motif comes from a book once used as teaching aid. He also suggests that the passion and hunger which ties together the various characters is in fact the thirst for freedom, for movement and for exotic settings: "Rapaport" is the Wandering Jew
Wandering Jew
The Wandering Jew is a figure from medieval Christian folklore whose legend began to spread in Europe in the 13th century. The original legend concerns a Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and was then cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming...
, Aristotle is the mentor of a great conqueror, and Galilei is invoked for his remark "And yet it moves
Eppur Si Muove
Eppur si muove is the third full-length album by the German symphonic metal band Haggard. It was released on April 26, 2004 by Drakkar Entertainment....
". The mention of "Sarafoff" has been read as an indirect homage to Caragiale—who had first referred to the insurgent in some of his humorous sketches.
Contimporanul circle
Paul Cernat notes that the Ciriviş's "posthumous destiny", leading to an unexpected glorification, was itself an "Urmuzian" affair. Cernat also cautions that the image of Urmuz as an absolute predecessor of Romanian modernism is "erroneous", since the experiments of Jarry, Charles CrosCharles Cros
Charles Cros was a French poet and inventor. He was born in Fabrezan, Aude, France, 35 km to the East of Carcassonne....
, Jules Laforgue
Jules Laforgue
Jules Laforgue was an innovative Franco-Uruguayan poet, often referred to as a Symbolist poet. Critics and commentators have also pointed to Impressionism as a direct influence and his poetry has been called "part-symbolist, part-impressionist".-Life:...
, Edward Lear
Edward Lear
Edward Lear was an English artist, illustrator, author, and poet, renowned today primarily for his literary nonsense, in poetry and prose, and especially his limericks, a form that he popularised.-Biography:...
and others were just as important in its formative process. He concludes that the avant-garde "apologetes" were projecting their own expectations into the Bizarre Pages, in which they read the antithesis of "High Romanticism", and into the writer, who became Romanian version of a poète maudit
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....
. Ion Pop also suggests: "In [Urmuz's] human destiny, and in his writing too, [the avant-garde writers] find issues which trouble them as well in prefiguring their own destinies. He satisfies the pride of those who carry on with an uncertain and anxious existence, endlessly in conflict with the world..." According to Andru: "Enthusiastic, ingenious, skeptical, rhetorical, or indecent words have been uttered about [the Bizarre Pages]. People used terms having to do with the literary revolutions of the 20th century [...]. In his pages people found themes present in all the innovating actions that gained momentum especially since 1922–1924".
Cernat describes the growth of Urmuz's myth as similar to Early Christianity
Early Christianity
Early Christianity is generally considered as Christianity before 325. The New Testament's Book of Acts and Epistle to the Galatians records that the first Christian community was centered in Jerusalem and its leaders included James, Peter and John....
: Ciprian as a "prophet", Arghezi as a "baptist", the modernist aficionados as "apostles" and "converts". Over time, various exegetes have noted that the modernist aspects of Arghezi's prose, written after 1923, show his debt to Urmuz's absurdism and nonsense humor
Surreal humour
Surreal humour is a form of humour based on violations of causal reasoning with events and behaviours that are logically incongruent. Constructions of surreal humour involve bizarre juxtapositions, non-sequiturs, irrational situations, and/or expressions of nonsense.The humour arises from a...
. Arghezi's Bilete de Papagal
Bilete de Papagal
Bilete de Papagal was a Romanian left-wing publication edited by Tudor Arghezi, begun as a daily newspaper and soon after issued as a weekly satirical and literary magazine...
review was also a promotional instrument for the Bizarre Pages: in 1928, continuing the Cuget Românesc project, it circulated "Algazy & Grummer".
While his role as a pre-Dadaist is up for debate, Urmuz is thought by many to have been a considerable influence on a Romanian founder of Dada, Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement...
. During its first years, the Romanian avant-garde would generally not mention Urmuz outside Arghezi's circle, but a surge in popularity came in stages after the European-wide impact of Dadaism, and especially after Tzara alienated some of his Romanian partners. This was the case of poet Ion Vinea and painter Marcel Janco
Marcel Janco
Marcel Janco was a Romanian and Israeli visual artist, architect, art theorist and cultural promoter, known as the co-inventor of Dadaism and a leading exponent of Constructivism in Eastern Europe. His first contribution came in the 1910s, when he joined up with poets Tristan Tzara and Ion Vinea...
, who together founded a modernist art magazine called Contimporanul
Contimporanul
Contimporanul was a Romanian avant-garde literary and art magazine, published in Bucharest between June 1922 and 1932...
. Late in 1924, Contimporanul teamed up with Ciprian, who gave a public reading from Urmuz during the Contimporanul International Art Exhibit.
The following year, Ciprian's eponymous text "Hurmuz", published in Contimporanul, listed the main claims about Urmuz's pioneering role. Also then, the Futurist journal Punct
Punct (magazine)
Punct was a Romanian weekly art and literary magazine, published from 1924 to 1925. Founded and directed by Scarlat Callimachi, it was edited by painter Victor Brauner and writer Stephan Roll...
, a close ally of Vinea and Janco, gave exposure to various unknown Urmuzian pages. In December 1926, a Contimporanul editorial signed by Vinea announced to the world that Urmuz was "the discreet revolutionist" responsible for the reshaping of Europe's literary landscape: "Urmuz-Dada-Surrealism, these three words create a bridge, decipher a parentage, clarify the origins of the world's literary revolution in the year 1918." In its coverage of the international scene, the journal continued to suggest that the suicidal author had anticipated the literary fronde, for instance calling Michel Seuphor a writer "à la Urmuz". In addition to republishing some of the Bizarre Pages in its own issues, it took the initiative in making Urmuz known to an international audience: the Berlin-based magazine Der Sturm
Der Sturm
Der Sturm was a magazine covering the expressionism movement founded in Berlin in 1910 by Herwarth Walden. It ran weekly until monthly in 1914, and became a quarterly in 1924 until it ceased publication in 1932....
included samples from Urmuz in its special issue Romania (August–September 1930), reflecting a Contimporanul who's who list. At around the same time, poet Jenő Dsida completed the integral translation of the Bizarre Pages into Hungarian
Hungarian language
Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
.
In his Contimporanul stage, Janco drew a notorious ink portrait of Urmuz. In old age, the same artist completed several cycle of engravings and paintings that alluded to the Bizarre Pages. Vinea's own prose of the 1920s was borrowing from Urmuz's style, which it merged with newer techniques from the avant-garde groups of Europe. He followed Urmuz's deceptive "novel" genre of "The Funnel and Stamate", which also became a characteristic of works by other Contimporanul writers: 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...
, F. Brunea-Fox, Filip Corsa, Sergiu Dan
Sergiu Dan
Sergiu Dan was a Romanian novelist, journalist, Holocaust survivor and political prisoner of the communist regime. Dan, the friend and collaborator of Romulus Dianu, was noted during the interwar period as a contributor to Romania's avant-garde and modernist scene, collaborating with poet Ion...
and Romulus Dianu. In addition, Jacques G. Costin, who moved between Contimporanul and the international Dada scene, was for long thought an imitator of Urmuz's style. Several critics have nevertheless revised this verdict, noting that Costin's work builds on distinct sources, Urmuz being just one.
unu and the 1930s literati
Another stream of Urmuzianism bled into the Surrealist magazine unuUnu
unu was the name of an avant-garde art and literary magazine, published in Romania from April 1928 to September 1935. Edited by writers Saşa Pană and Moldov, it was dedicated to Dada and Surrealism....
. Its main contributors, including Pană, Geo Bogza
Geo Bogza
Geo Bogza was a Romanian avant-garde theorist, poet, and journalist, known for his left-wing and communist political convictions. As a young man in the interwar period, he was known as a rebel and was one of the most influential Romanian Surrealists...
, Ilarie Voronca
Ilarie Voronca
Ilarie Voronca was a Romanian-French avant-garde poet and essayist.Voronca was of Jewish ethnicity...
, Ion Călugăru
Ion Călugăru
Ion Călugăru was a Romanian novelist, short story writer, journalist and critic. As a figure on Romania's modernist scene throughout the early interwar period, he was noted for combining a picturesque perspective on the rural Jewish-Romanian community, to which he belonged, with traditionalist and...
, Moldov and Stephan Roll, were all Urmuz enthusiasts from the far left. In 1930, Pană collected and published as a volume the complete works of Urmuz: titled Algazy & Grummer, it notably included "The Fuchsiad". Pană and Bogza visited the unpublished archive, which gave them a chance to acknowledge, but also to silence, the more conventional and antisemitic Urmuz revealed through the aphorisms. These manuscripts were kept in possession by the Pană family, and exhibited in 2009.
Bogza was previously editor of a short-lived magazine named Urmuz, published in Câmpina
Câmpina
Câmpina is a city in Prahova county, Romania, north of the county seat Ploieşti, located on the main route between Wallachia and Transylvania. In 2003, the city celebrated 500 years since its founding.-History:...
with support from poet Alexandru Tudor-Miu, and keeping contact with other Urmuzian circles: it was saluted by Arghezi and published a drawing portrait of Urmuz (probably Marcel Janco's). Bogza's first editorial piece proclaimed: "Urmuz lives. His presence among us whips to lash our consciousness." Later, in unus inaugural art manifesto
Art manifesto
The art manifesto has been a recurrent feature associated with the avant-garde in Modernism. Art manifestos are mostly extreme in their rhetoric and intended for shock value to achieve a revolutionary effect. They often address wider issues, such as the political system...
, Bogza described his suicidal mentor as "The Forerunner". Others in this group incorporated "Urmuzian" metamorphoses into their technique and, at that stage, the Bizarre Pages were also imitated in style by Pană's sister, Magdalena "Madda Holda" Binder, influencing stories by Pană's young follower Sesto Pals and novels by the isolated Surrealist H. Bonciu
H. Bonciu
H. Bonciu, or Horia Bonciu , was a Romanian novelist, poet, journalist and translator, noted especially as an atypical figure on his country's avant-garde scene...
. In the mid 1930s, unu illustrator Jules Perahim drew his own version of Urmuz's portrait.
After the Contimporanul group split and a young generation reassimilated modernism into a spiritualistic framework (Trăirism), critic Lucian Boz was the first professional to find no fault with the Bizarre Pages, and made Urmuz interesting for mainstream and elitist criticism. Between the unu Surrealists and Boz's version of modernism were figures such as Ion Biberi (who popularized Urmuz in France) and Marcel Avramescu. Avramescu (better known then as Ionathan X. Uranus) was notably inspired by Urmuz's pre-Dadaist prose, which he sometimes imitated. Other authors in this succession were Grigore "Apunake" Cugler
Grigore Cugler
Grigore Cugler was a Romanian avant-garde short story writer, poet and humorist. Also noted as a graphic artist, composer and violinist, he was a decorated World War I veteran who served as the Romanian Kingdom's diplomatic representative in various countries before and after World War II...
, widely credited as a 1930s Urmuz, and Constantin Fântâneru. The early 1930s also brought the publication of several new works of memoirs mentioning Demetrescu-Buzău, including texts by Cruceanu and Vasile Voiculescu
Vasile Voiculescu
Vasile Voiculescu was a Romanian poet, short-story writer, playwright, and physician.-Early life and education:Voiculescu was born in Pârscov, Buzău County, Romania, to a family of wealthy peasants. He attended primary school in Pleşcoi, a village near his home, for a year, after which he was sent...
—the latter was also the first to mention Urmuz on Romanian Radio (January 1932); another such Radio homage was later authored by Pană.
The channels of communication once opened, Urmuz came to be discussed with unexpected sympathy by Perpessicius, Călinescu and other noted cultural critics, consolidating his reputation as a writer. Călinescu's attitude was particularly relevant: the condescending but popularizing portrayal of Urmuz, which became part of Călinescu's 1941 companion to Romanian literature (Urmuz's earliest mention in such a synthesis), was first sketched in his literary magazine Capricorn (December 1930) and his 1938 university lectures. Although he confessed an inability to view Demetrescu-Buzău as a real writer, Călinescu preferred him over traditionalism, and, critics note, even allowed the Bizarre Pages to influence his own work as novelist. Meanwhile, a blunt negation of Urmuz's contribution was restated by the academic figure Pompiliu Constantinescu
Pompiliu Constantinescu
Pompiliu Constantinescu was a Romanian literary critic.-Biography:He was born on 17 May 1901, "in a place where he saw the light of day for the first time, on Sabines Street no...
, who nevertheless commented favorably on the writer's "ingeniousness". 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...
, another mainstream literary theorist, angered the avant-garde by generally ignoring Urmuz, but made note of Ciprian's readings "from Hurmuz's repertoire" at the 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...
literary sessions.
Urmuz may have acted as a direct or indirect influence of mainstream authors of fiction, one case being that of satirist Tudor Muşatescu
Tudor Musatescu
Tudor Muşatescu was a Romanian playwright and short story writer, best known for his humorous prose.-Biography:Muşatescu was born in Câmpulung to a family of middle-class intellectuals — his father was a lawyer while his mother was a writer. He began writing during his early years in school...
. Similar observations were made regarding the work of modern novelists Anişoara Odeanu or Anton Holban
Anton Holban
Anton Holban was a Romanian novelist. He was the nephew of Eugen Lovinescu.The son of Gheorghe Holban and Antoaneta Lovinescu, he was a writer, French teacher and theoretician of the novel...
.
The Drake's Head
By the late 1930s, Ciprian had also established himself as a leading modernist dramatist and director, with plays such as The Man and His Mule. Although his work in the field is described as the product of 1920s Expressionist theater, he was sometimes branded a plagiaristPlagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
of his dead friend's writings. This claim was traced back to Arghezi, and was probably a publicity stunt
Publicity stunt
A publicity stunt is a planned event designed to attract the public's attention to the event's organizers or their cause. Publicity stunts can be professionally organized or set up by amateurs...
meant to increase Urmuz's exposure, but taken with seriousness by another opinion maker, journalist Constantin Beldie. The ensuing scandal was amplified by the young Dadaists and Surrealists, who took the rumor to be true: Avramescu-Uranus, himself accused of plagiarizing Urmuz, made an ironic reference to this fact in a 1929 contribution to Bilete de Papagal. Unwittingly, Arghezi's allegations cast a shadow of doubt on Ciprian's overall work for the stage.
The Drake's Head was Ciprian's personal homage to the pahuci: it shows a grown-up Ciriviş, the main protagonist, returning from a trip abroad and reuniting with his cronies during an overnight party. The Drake's Head brotherhood spends the small hours of the morning bullying passers-by, chasing them "like birds of prey" and pestering them with absurd proposals. Quite jaded and interested in wrecking the very "pillars of logic", Ciriviş convinces his friends to follow him on a more daring stunt: trespassing private property, they take over an apple tree and treat it as a new home. Claiming that land ownership only covers the actual horizontal plane, they even strike out an agreement with the stupefied owner. Nevertheless, a pompous and indignant "Bearded Gentleman" takes up the cause of propriety and incites the Romanian Police
Romanian Police
The Romanian Police is the national police force and main civil law enforcement agency in Romania. It is subordinated to the Ministry of Interior and Administrative Reform.-Duties:The Romanian Police are responsible for:...
to intervene. The play premiered in early 1940. The original cast included Nicolae Băltăţeanu as Ciriviş and Ion Finteşteanu as Macferlan, with additional appearances by Ion Manu, Eugenia Popovici, Chiril Economu.
Cernat sees The Drake's Head as a sample of Urmuzian mythology: "Ciriviş [...] is shown as a quasi-mythological figure, the boss of a parodic-subversive fellowship which seeks to rehabilitate a poetic, innocent, apparently absurd freedom". According to Cernat, it remains Ciprian's only truly "nonconformist" play, particularly since it is indebted to "the absurd Urmuzian comedy". Some have identified the "Bearded Gentleman" as 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 traditionalist culture critic—the claim was later dismissed as mere "innuendo" by Ciprian, who explained that his creation stood for all "demagogue" politicians of the day.
Communist ban and diaspora recovery
Upon the end of World War II, Romania came under communist ruleCommunist 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...
, and a purge of interwar modernist values followed: Urmuz's works were among the many denied imprimatur by the 1950s. Before communist censorship
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...
became complete, Urmuz still found disciples in the last wave of the avant-garde. Cited examples include Geo Dumitrescu, Dimitrie Stelaru and Constant Tonegaru
Constant Tonegaru
Constant Tonegaru was a Romanian avant-garde and Decadent poet, who ended his career as a political prisoner and victim of the communist regime...
. Also at the time, writer Dinu Pillat donated a batch of Urmuz's manuscripts to the Romanian Academy Library.
The anti-Urmuzian current, part of a larger anti-modernist campaign
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...
, found an unexpected backer in George Călinescu, who became a fellow traveler of communism. In his new interpretation, the Bizarre Pages were depicted as farcical and entirely worthless. For a while, the Bizarre Pages were only cultivated by 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...
. Having discovered the book in interwar Romania, the dramatist and culture critic Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian and French playwright and dramatist, and one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd...
made it his mission to highlight the connections between Urmuz and European modernism. Ionesco's work for the stage, a major contribution to the international Theater of the Absurd movement, consciously drew upon various sources, including the Romanians Ion Luca Caragiale
Ion Luca Caragiale
Ion Luca Caragiale was a Wallachian-born Romanian playwright, short story writer, poet, theater manager, political commentator and journalist...
and Urmuz. The contextual importance of such influences, which remain relatively unknown to Ionesco's international audience, has been assessed differently by the various exegetes, as Ionesco himself once stated: "Nothing in Romanian literature has ever truly influenced me." Thanks to Ionesco's intervention, Urmuz's works saw print in Les Lettres Nouvelles journal. Allegedly, his attempt to publish Urmuz's work with Éditions Gallimard
Éditions Gallimard
Éditions Gallimard is one of the leading French publishers of books. The Guardian has described it as having "the best backlist in the world". In 2003 it and its subsidiaries published 1418 titles....
was sabotaged by Tristan Tzara, who may have feared that previous claims about his absolute originality would come under revision.
The entirety of Urmuz's work was republished in English by writer Miron Grindea
Miron Grindea
Miron Grindea was a Romanian-born literary journalist and the editor of ADAM International Review, a little magazine published for over 50 years....
and his wife Carola, in ADAM Review (1967, the same year when new German translations were published 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...
's Akzente journal). From his new home in Hawaii, Romanian writer Ştefan Baciu
Stefan Baciu
Ştefan Baciu was a Romanian poet, essayist, journalist, translator, art critic, diplomat, and university professor who spent most of his life in exile, first in Latin America, then in the U.S....
, whose own poetry borrows from Urmuz, further popularized the Bizarre Pages with Boz's assistance. Another figure of the anti-communist diaspora, 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...
, adopted Urmuzian aesthetics in some of her satirical essays. The diaspora community was later joined by Andrei Codrescu
Andrei Codrescu
Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009....
, who became a neo-Dadaist and wrote stories he calls "à la Urmuz".
From Onirism to the Optzecişti
In the 1950s and '60s, a literary underground, reacting against the communist worldview, began to emerge at various locations in Romania. It tried to reconnect with modernism, and in the process rediscovered Urmuz. Inside the meta-Metafiction
Metafiction, also known as Romantic irony in the context of Romantic works of literature, is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion...
and 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 group known as the Târgovişte School, Urmuz's style was mainly perpetuated by Mircea Horia Simionescu. The Bizarre Pages also inspired some other writers in the same group: Radu Petrescu, Costache Olăreanu and the 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....
n-born Tudor Ţopa
Tudor Ţopa
Tudor Gheorghe Ţopa is a Moldovan politician.- External links :* * * * * http://www.memorial.ru * http://www.rsl.ru* http://www.biblus.ru/Default.aspx...
. Elsewhere, Urmuz's work rekindled Romania's new poetry and prose, influencing some of the Onirist
Onirism
Onirism was a surrealist Romanian literary school most popular during the 1960s, in the wake of popular uprisings in Eastern Europe. One of the techniques it employed was automatic writing....
and post-Surrealist writers—from Leonid Dimov
Leonid Dimov
Leonid Dimov was a Romanian postmodernist poet and translator....
, Vintilă Ivănceanu and Dumitru Ţepeneag
Dumitru Tepeneag
Dumitru Ţepeneag is a contemporary Romanian novelist, essayist, short story writer and translator, who currently resides in France...
to Iordan Chimet
Iordan Chimet
Iordan Chimet was a Romanian poet, children's writer and essayist, whose work was inspired by Surrealism and Onirism. He is also known as a memoirist, theater, art and film critic, book publisher and translator...
and Emil Brumaru
Emil Brumaru
Emil Brumaru is a contemporary Romanian writer and poet.- Works :* Versuri , 1970* Detectivul Arthur , 1970...
. An icon of neo-modernist poetry was Nichita Stănescu
Nichita Stanescu
Nichita Stănescu was a Romanian poet and essayist. He is the most acclaimed contemporary Romanian language poet, loved by the public and generally held in esteem by literary critics.-Biography:...
, whose contributions include tributes to Urmuz and pastiche
Pastiche
A pastiche is a literary or other artistic genre or technique that is a "hodge-podge" or imitation. The word is also a linguistic term used to describe an early stage in the development of a pidgin language.-Hodge-podge:...
s of his writings, hosted by Manuscriptum in 1983. Between 1960 and 1980, the Bizarre Pages also stimulated the work of isolated modernist authors, such as Marin Sorescu
Marin Sorescu
- Biography :Born to a family of farmworkers in Bulzeşti, Dolj County, Sorescu graduated from the primary school in his home village. After that he went to the Buzesti Brothers High School in Craiova, after which he was transferred to the Predeal Military School. His final education was at the...
, Marius Tupan, Mihai Ursachi and, especially, Şerban Foarţă
Şerban Foarţă
Şerban Foarţă is a contemporary Romanian writer.-Works:* Texte pentru Phoenix , Litera Publishing House, Bucharest, 1976 * Simpleroze , Facla Publishing House, Timişoara, 1978* Şalul, eşarpele Isadorei/Şalul e şarpele...
.
Although the ban on Urmuz was still in place, George Ciprian made a daring (and possibly subversive) gesture by publishing his affectionate memoirs in 1958. A few years later, the episodic relaxation of communist censorship allowed for the republication of the Bizarre Pages, mistakenly included in a complete edition of Ciprian's literary works (1965). Such events heralded a revival of scholarly interest in proto-Dadaism, beginning with a 1970 monograph on Urmuz, by 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....
member Nicolae Balotă. Also then, Pană was free to circulate a new revised edition of his interwar anthology, reissued in collaboration with 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:**...
. It was later completed by an Urmuz corpus, which notably hosted the scattered diaries, as recovered by critic Gheorghe Glodeanu. In 1972, Iordan Chimet also included "The Chroniclers" in a nonconformist anthology of youth literature
Children's literature
Children's literature is for readers and listeners up to about age twelve; it is often defined in four different ways: books written by children, books written for children, books chosen by children, or books chosen for children. It is often illustrated. The term is used in senses which sometimes...
. In those years, the Bizarre Pages also inspired critically acclaimed illustrations by Nestor Ignat
Nestor Ignat
Nestor Ignat is a Romanian journalist, writer and graphic artist.Born in Iași in 1918, Ignat graduated from the Spiru Haret High School of Bucharest in 1936 and continued his studies at the University of Bucharest....
and Ion Mincu, and the multimedia event Cumpănă ("Watershed") by composer Anatol Vieru
Anatol Vieru
Anatol Vieru was a music theoretician, influential pedagogue, and a leading Romanian-Jewish composer of the 20th century. A pupil of Aram Khachaturian, he composed seven symphonies, eight string quartets, numerous concertos, and much chamber music. He also wrote three operas: Iona , Praznicul...
.
With the 1960s, a 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....
ideology was officially established in Romania, and this encouraged the rise of "Protochronism
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...
" as a cultural phenomenon. The Protochronists exaggerated past Romanian achievements, and magnified previous claims about the folkloric roots of Urmuz's literature. Some Protochronists also described a positive, jocular, "village idiot
Village idiot
The village idiot in strict terms is a person locally known for ignorance or stupidity, but is also a common term for a stereotypically silly or nonsensical person. The term is also used as a stereotype of the mentally disabled...
" Urmuz, more presentable than Europe's misanthropic avant-garde. A leading representative of this trend was literary theorist Edgar Papu, who exaggerated Vinea and Ionesco's homage to Urmuz and Caragiale to argue that Romania was the actual origin of Europe's avant-garde movements. The idea proved popular beyond Protochronism, and was arguably found in essays by Nichita Stănescu and Marin Mincu. The Europeanist
Europeanism
Although this term is occasionally used to describe support for European integration , it is more commonly used in relation to the idea that Europeans have common norms and values that transcend national or state identity, that have been promoted most actively...
reaction rejected Protochronism, but, in its bid of making Urmuz palatable to cultural officials, often interpreted him through the grid of Marxist humanism
Marxist humanism
Marxist humanism is a branch of Marxism that primarily focuses on Marx's earlier writings, especially the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in which Marx espoused his theory of alienation, as opposed to his later works, which are considered to be concerned more with his structural...
(Balotă, Matei Călinescu
Matei Calinescu
Matei Călinescu was a Romanian literary critic and professor of comparative literature at Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana....
, 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...
). Some more or less vehement opponents of Urmuz became party to the debate after 1970; they include Alexandru George, Gelu Ionescu, Alexandru Piru and Marin Niţescu.
At roughly the same time, Romania witnessed the birth of the Optzecişti generation, whose interest was in recovering Caragiale, Urmuz and the 1930s avant-garde as its models to follow, and who reactivated corrosive humor. Among the individual Optzecişti who took inspiration from the Bizarre Pages are 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'...
, Nichita Danilov
Nichita Danilov
Nichita Danilov is a Romanian poet. He served as the acting Ambassador of Romania to Moldova in 1999.-Early life:...
, Florin Iaru, Ion Stratan and "the sentimental Urmuz" Florin Toma. 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....
poet Mircea Dinescu
Mircea Dinescu
Mircea Dinescu is a Romanian poet, journalist and editor.He was born in Slobozia, the son of Ştefan Dinescu, a metalworker and Aurelia . Dinescu studied at the Faculty of Journalism of the Ştefan Gheorghiu Academy, and was considered a gifted young poet during his youth, with several poetry...
also paid homage to Urmuz, imitating his style in one of his addresses to the communist censors.
With that, the influence of Urmuz again radiated outside the Romanian-speaking circles: while poet Oskar Pastior
Oskar Pastior
Oskar Pastior was a Romanian-born German poet and translator. He was the only German member of Oulipo....
translated the Bizarre Pages into German, Herta Müller
Herta Müller
Herta Müller is a Romanian-born German novelist, poet and essayist noted for her works depicting the effects of violence, cruelty and terror, usually in the setting of Communist Romania under the repressive Nicolae Ceauşescu regime which she experienced herself...
, a German Romanian
Germans of Romania
The Germans of Romania or Rumäniendeutsche were 760,000 strong in 1930. They are not a single group; thus, to understand their language, culture, and history, one must view them as independent groups:...
novelist and dissident, is thought to have been influenced by some of Urmuz's writing techniques. Marin Mincu and Marco Cugno also introduced Urmuz's literature to the Italophone
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
public, with a 1980 collection. In Romania, as part of centennial celebrations, scattered translations old and new were issued by Minerva as a hexalingual album, with noted contributions from Ionesco, Voronca, Mincu, Cugno, Leopold Kosch, Andrei Bantaş
Andrei Bantas
Andrei Bantaş was a Romanian dictionary author, translator and teacher. He was Professor of English language and literature at the University of Bucharest, Romania....
etc. Other translations from Urmuz were pioneered in English by Stavros Deligiorgis (standard bilingual edition, 1985) and later by Julian Semilian. The same effort was undertaken in Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
by Jan Willem Bos and in Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
by Dan Shafran.
Postmodern Urmuzianism
A noted rise in interest for Urmuzian literature followed in the wake of 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...
. In 2011, a poll among Romanian literati, organized by Observator Cultural
Observator Cultural
Observator Cultural is a literary magazine based in Bucharest, Romania. It covers Romania's cultural and arts scene.-External links:*...
review, listed "The Funnel and Stamate" as the 22nd-best Romanian novel; this rekindled polemics about whether the work should even be considered a novel. With the appearance of new "alternative" schoolbooks during the 1990s, Urmuz earned more exposure as an optional addition to the standard curriculum
Education in Romania
According to the Law on Education adopted in 1995, the Romanian Educational System is regulated by the Ministry of Education and Research . Each level has its own form of organization and is subject to different legislation. Kindergarten is optional between 3 and 6 years old...
. New editions of his various works were published at a fast rate, in both Romania and neighboring Moldova
Moldova
Moldova , officially the Republic of Moldova is a landlocked state in Eastern Europe, located between Romania to the West and Ukraine to the North, East and South. It declared itself an independent state with the same boundaries as the preceding Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1991, as part...
: in just two years (2008–2009), there were three separate print versions of his collected texts, academic as well as paperback, and two audiobooks. These texts provided visual inspiration for Dan Perjovschi
Dan Perjovschi
Dan Perjovschi is an artist, writer and cartoonist born in 1961 in Sibiu, Romania. Perjovschi has over the past decade created drawings in museum spaces, most recently in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in which he created the drawing during business hours for patrons to see. The drawings...
, whose tribute "pictogram
Pictogram
A pictograph, also called pictogram or pictogramme is an ideogram that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Pictographs are often used in writing and graphic systems in which the characters are to considerable extent pictorial in appearance.Pictography is a...
s" were included in the 2009 Editura Cartier reprint of the Bizarre Pages. In March 2006, Curtea de Argeş
Curtea de Arges
Curtea de Argeș is a city in Romania on the right bank of the Argeş River, where it flows through a valley of the lower Carpathians , on the railway from Pitești to the Turnu Roşu Pass. It is part of Argeș County. The city administers one village, Noapteș...
city honored the writer with a series of special events and displays.
The literary currents of postmodernism
Postmodern literature
The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain characteristics of post–World War II literature and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature.Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact...
often appropriated Urmuz as their guide. This tendency was illustrated by the writings of new figures in Romanian literature: the minimalists
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
and neo-naturalists
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...
(Sorin Gherguţ, Andrei Mocuţa, Călin Torsan), the neo-Surrealists (Cristian Popescu
Cristian Popescu
Cristian Dumitru Popescu is a Romanian-American mathematician at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests are in Algebraic Number Theory, and in particular, in special values of L-functions. He formulated and proved function-field versions of the Gras conjectures and Rubin's...
, Iulia Militaru, Cosmin Perţa, Iulian Tănase, Stelian Tănase
Stelian Tanase
Stelian Tănase is a Romanian writer, historian, journalist, political analyst, and talk show host. Having briefly engaged in politics during the early 1990s, after the fall of the Communist regime, he has remained a leading figure of the Romanian civil society.A founding member of both the Group...
), the feminists
Feminist theory
Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical discourse, it aims to understand the nature of gender inequality...
(Catrinel Popa, Iaromira Popovici), the political satirists (Dumitru Augustin Doman, Pavel Şuşară) and the electronic literature
Electronic literature
Electronic literature is a literary genre consisting of works of literature that originate within digital environments.-Definitions:N. Katherine Hayles discusses the topic in the online article...
writers (Cătălin Lazurcă).
There were also loose stage or multimedia adaptations of the Bizarre Pages, including ones by Mona Chirilă (2000), Gábor Tompa
Gábor Tompa
Gábor Tompa is a Romanian theater director and teacher, born in Târgu Mureş on August 8, 1957. Since 2007 he has been Head of Directing at the Theatre and Dance Department of the University of California, San Diego...
(2002), Radu Macrinici (2005), Pro Contemporania ensemble (2006), Christian Fex and Ramona Dumitrean (both 2007); Urmuz's work has also been cited as an influence by the Romanian-born dramaturge David Esrig, who has used it in workshops. A theatrical company with Urmuz's name existed for a while in Casimcea
Casimcea
Casimcea is a commune in Tulcea County, Romania. It is composed of seven villages: Casimcea, Cişmeaua Nouă, Corugea, Haidar, Rahman, Războieni and Stânca....
, home of the Zilele Urmuz Festival. In 2011, two separate operatic renditions of Urmuz's work were showcased by Bucharest's SIMN Festival.
External links
- Urmuz's profile by Petre Răileanu, in Plural Magazine, Nr. 3/1999
- English translations from Urmuz, in Plural Magazine, Nr. 19/2003: "After the Storm", "Cotadi and Dragomir", "Emil Gayk", "The Fuchsiad", "The Funnel and Stamate", "Going Abroad", "Ismaïl and Turnavitu" by Stavros Deligiorgis; "Cotadi and Dragomir", "Emil Gayk", "The Fuchsiad", "The Departure Abroad (Going Abroad)" by Dan Mateescu
- "Algazy & Grummer", English translation by Julian Semilian, in fascicle, Issue one, Summer 2005 A alfeça e Stamate, translation by Tanty Ungureanu, in Primeir@Prova, University of PortoUniversity of PortoThe University of Porto is a Portuguese public university located in Porto, and founded 22 March 1911. It is the largest Portuguese university by number of enrolled students and has one of the most noted research outputs in Portugal...