Background
Mihail Eminescu was born at Ipotesti in northern Moldavia on January 15, 1850, into a family of country gentry. His father was Gheorghe Eminovici from Călinești, a Moldavian village in Suceava county, Bucovina, which was then part of the Austrian Empire (while his father came from Banat). He crossed the border into Moldavia, settling in Ipotești, near the town of Botoșani. He married Raluca Iurașcu, an heiress of an old aristocratic Moldavian family.
He spent his first years like a peasant child in the midst of nature and under the influence of folklore. His adolescence was agitated by conflicts with his family.
Education
From 1858 to 1866 he attended school in Cernăuți. He finished 4th grade as the 5th of 82 students, after which he attended two years of gymnasium. Eminescu studied philosophy in Vienna from 1869 to 1872 and in Berlin from 1872 to 1874.
Career
He made his literary debut at 16 in the Romanian review Familia (The Family), published in Budapest. Returning to Romania in 1874, he held several minor jobs in lasi (custodian of the university library, inspector of schools, subeditor of an obscure newspaper). There, and after leaving lasi, he found himself under the influence of the political and esthetic literary circle Junimea ("Youth").
In 1877 Eminescu went to Bucharest to work on the staff of the newspaper Timpul (Time). Eminescu's steady journalistic activity filled the years from 1877 to 1883. Struck by insanity in 1883, he lived until 1889 in a dramatic alternation between lucidity and madness.
Eminescu concentrated in his work the entire evolution of Romanian national poetry. The most illustrative poems of his early years (1866 - 1873) are "The Dissolute Youth, " "The Epigones, " "Mortua Est, " "Angel and Demon, " and "Emperor and Proletarian. " The overwhelming influences on his poetry of this period were from Shakespeare and Lord Byron.
The ever deeper influence of Romanian folklore, his close contact with German philosophy and romanticism in the years 1872 to 1874 when he was preparing for a doctor's degree in philosophy in Berlin, and the evolution of his own creative powers carried Eminescu toward a new vision of the world. His poetical universe shifted to the spheres of magical transparencies offered by folklore as ideal and possible grounds for a love that was both a dream and a transfiguration. His poetical expression became increasingly inward, simplified, and sweetened.
His poetry began to show rare strength and beauty, involving a universe in which a demiurgical eye and hand seemed to have conferred a new order upon the elements and to have infused them with infinite freshness and power. In "The Blue Flower" Eminescu offered a new interpretation of the aspiration in the fulfillment of love. The most important poem written during this period was "Câlin" ("Leaves from a Fairy Tale"), a synthesis of the epical and the lyrical, with a description of the Romanian landscape.
After 1876 the sphere of Eminescu's inner experience deepened. The poetry of his maturity reached all human dimensions, from the sensitive, emotional ones to the intellectual, spiritual ones.
Until 1883 his poetry was an uninterrupted meditation on the human condition in which the artist always stood on the summits of human thinking and feeling. The most important works of his last period are "A Dacian's Prayer, " "Ode in the Ancient Meter, " and the "Epistles. " His masterpiece is "The Evening Star" (1883), a version of the Hyperion myth. Ideas and meaning, expressed in symbols, are manifold, profoundly ambiguous, and discernible in an esthetic achievement of supreme simplicity and expressiveness.
In Barren Genius, a posthumously published novel of romantic trend, and especially in "Poor Dyonis, " a fantastic, philosophical short story, Eminescu added some demiurgical features to his romantic hero.
In 1886, Eminescu suffered a nervous breakdown and was treated by Romanian doctors, in particular Julian Bogdan and Panait Zosin. Immediately diagnosed with syphilis, after being hospitalized in a nervous diseases hospice within the Neamț Monastery, the poet is treated with mercury. Firstly, massages in Botoșani, applied by Dr. Itszak, and then in Bucharest at Dr. Alexandru A. Suțu's sanatorium, where between February–June 1889 he was injected with mercuric chloride.
Professor Doctor Irinel Popescu, corresponding member of the Romanian Academy and president of the Academy of Medical Sciences of Romania, states that Eminescu died because of mercury poisoning. He also says that the poet was "treated" by a group of incompetent doctors and held in misery, which also shortened his life. Mercury was prohibited as treatment of syphilis in Western Europe in the 19th century, because of its adverse effects.
Religion
A major obstacle to their fully embracing him was the fact he never identified himself as a Christian and his poetry rather indiscriminately uses Buddhist, Christian, agnostic, and atheist themes.
Views
The ever deeper influence of Romanian folklore, his close contact with German philosophy and romanticism in the years 1872 to 1874 when he was preparing for a doctor's degree in philosophy in Berlin, and the evolution of his own creative powers carried Eminescu toward a new vision of the world. In his poems he frequently used metaphysical, mythological and historical subjects.
Quotations:
He used to have a unique manner of describing his own crisis of jealousy:
"You must know, Veronica, that as much as I love you, I sometimes hate you; I hate you without a reason, without a word, only because I imagine you laughing with someone else, and your laughter doesn't mean to him what it means to me and I feel I grow mad at the thought of somebody else touching you, when your body is exclusively and without impartasion to anyone. I sometimes hate you because I know you own all these allures that you charmed me with, I hate you when I suspect you might give away my fortune, my only fortune. I could only be happy beside you if we were far away from all the other people, somewhere, so that I didn't have to show you to anybody and I could be relaxed only if I could keep you locked up in a bird house in which only I could enter. "
Membership
He was a member of the Junimea literary society and a member of the "Orient" literary circle.
Personality
Eminescu's life was a continuous oscillation between introvert and extrovert attitudes.
