Tudor Arghezi

Background

Tudor Arghezi was born on May 21, 1880 in Bucharest, Bucuresti, Romania, into the family of Nae and Maria Theodorescu.

Education

Tudor Arghezi graduated from Saint Sava High School in October 1891.

Career

Tudor Arghezi, a prominent twentieth-century Romanian poet, was concerned in much of his work with a search for self — especially a spiritual self — in the promethean complexities of modern life. He was acclaimed by modernists for the symbolism in his poetry (Arghezi had early on translated the works of Charles Baudelaire and other French symbolists). But his poetry also had firm roots in Romanian folk traditions, and he was often credited with bringing bucolic imagery back to the palette of modern Romanian poetry. “How should life be lived? That is the question Arghezi took, while still in his youth, as the starting point in his search for the supreme ideal of existence,” wrote Dumitru Micu in his book Tudor Arghezi. And the poet’s writings show that this question was never far from his heart.

Arghezi was christened with the name of Ion N. Theodorescu. He found “Tudor Arghezi” — an ancient name for a Romanian river — in a Greek historian’s book. Arghezi left home at the age of eleven to avoid entering training to become a Roman Catholic priest as his parents wished. He published his first poems in a magazine at the age of sixteen. Two years later he joined an orthodox monastery. Yet before he entered the cloistered walls, Arghezi’s life was already crowded with experience.

He had continued contributing to Romanian journals that championed the cause of symbolist poetry. During the same period he worked as an apprentice stone mason, the secretary of an art exhibit, and a chemist at a sugar plant. Arghezi did not publish while in the monastery, but he did not stay a monk for long. He quit the contemplative life in 1904 over what he considered were attempts to convert him to Roman Catholicism. The experience left him with a life-long distrust of the Church. In pamphlets he would later write he would urge abolishing the Church, which he saw as “a shameful blot on the country.”

Arghezi spent the next six years wandering through Switzerland and France, taking odd jobs where he could. Critic Adrian Anghelescu saw Arghezi’s wandering years as very important to his development: “In spite of the poverty and privations he suffered under, this period will turn out to be highly significant as regards the maturation of both the man and especially the writer.” Anghelescu opined that the experience of being cut off from family and friends and of being “a loner” in a sea of humanity in such teeming cities in Geneva, Switzerland, changed Arghezi’s outlook on life. He placed especial significance on a grand carnival that Arghezi saw in Geneva and how it provided him with baroque metaphors he would use often in his work. Anghelescu cited Arghezi’s own writings to shore up his case.

In the next phase of his career Arghezi became a fiery polemicist, journalist, and pamphleteer. He cofounded the journal Cronica with former classmate Gala Galaction. Critic Monica Spiridon noted in Cahiers Roumains D’Etudes Litteraires that Arghezi “became an assiduous contributor to several periodicals” and that in his writings he “used foul language in most delightful ways." Spiridon pointed out that Arghezi’s journalism was more concerned with telling morality tales than with outlining the bare facts of his subjects’ lives. His journalism was also barbed at times and he often expressed himself as a pacifist. During World War I he was thrown in prison for working for a pro-German newspaper.

It was the publication of his first volume of poetry, however, in 1927 that would establish Arghezi’s national — and, subsequently, international — reputation. That book, "Cuvinte potrivite", has been hailed by critics as the poet’s major poetical achievement. At the time of its publication, however, it was both hailed and repudiated for its experimentation with language and verse form. The poems in "Cuvinte potrivite" are filled with images of tormented longing for spiritual tranquility in a chaotic world. Two novels "Icoane de lemn" and "Poarta neagra", and another book of poetry, "Flori de mucigai", soon followed, and they have also been praised by critics. In all, Arghezi would publish some twenty volumes of poetry in his life. The poems of "Flori de mucigai" are lighter than those of the previous volume, and at times infused with pagan spirituality and childlike curiosity. His novels drew on his personal experiences as a journalist and from his time in prison.

Arghezi was again imprisoned during World War II, this time for his polemical essays on church and state. He went through a period of self-imposed silence from 1948 to 1955. He started publishing again, but most critics believe that his later output did not measure up to his earlier writings. Ironically, Arghezi enjoyed more fame during the last decade of his life than he had previously. He died in 1967 in Bucharest.

Achievements

• Tudor Arghezi was best known for his unique contribution to poetry and children's literature. Arghezi is perhaps the most striking figure of Romanian interwar literature, and one of the major poets of the 20th century. The freshness of his vocabulary represents a most original synthesis between the traditional styles and modernism. He has left behind a vast oeuvre, which includes poetry, novels, essays, journalism, translations and letters.
  
  The impact of his writings on Romanian poetic language was revolutionary, through his creation of unusual lyrical structures, new subgenres in prose - such as the poetic novel, the "tablet" (tableta) and the "ticket" (biletul). He excelled at powerful and concise formulations, the shock value of which he exploited to startle lazy or conformist thinking, and his writings abound in paradoxes, as well as metaphysical or religious arguments. Despite his association with the Communist regime, Arghezi is widely acknowledged as a major literary figure. His work has traditionally been a staple of Romanian literature textbooks for decades.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Cartea Mea Frumoasa (Romanian Edition)
  • LA ROUMANIE. 1964
  • Bucharest 195
  • The Rumanian Landscape: The Carpathians [Third 3rd Edition] 1963
  • Versuri 1961
  • Paysages de Roumanie: Les Carpathes 1960
  • Stihuri Pestrite 1960
  • Selected Poems of Tudor Arghezi (Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation)

Religion

In 1899 he took holy orders in a monastery in Cernica, but he soon renounced them.

Politics

After the war his failure to embrace Socialist Realism brought him into conflict with the communist regime. A controversial intellectual, Arghezi had a fluctuating relationship with the newly established Communist regime. Although he was awarded several literary prizes under during the period of Soviet-induced transition to a people's republic, he became a harsh critic of censorship and agitprop-like state control in media, and was targeted as a decadent poet very soon after the communist-dominated republican institutions took power.

Views

Quotations: "A barbaric war. Once upon a time, we had pledged our duty to fight against the arming of civilized states. With every newborn baby, the quantity of explosive matter destined to suppress him was also being created. As progress and «rational outlook» were being viewed as calamities, arms and ammunitions factories were increasing the shell storages, were fabricating the artillery used in extermination."

Membership

Arghezi was elected a member of the Romanian Academy in 1955, and celebrated as national poet on his 80th and 85th birthdays.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Tudor Arghezi is above all the exponent of a Romanian sensitivity and of a specifically Romanian vision of the world. The naturalism and organicism of his conception, the bucolic inclinations, evident in his lyrical imagery, are features fundamentally characteristic of both Romanian folklore and arghezian writings.

Interests

• Writers

  Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, Alexandru Macedonski, Anton Pann

Connections

Tudor died and was buried in the garden of his house next to his wife Paraschiva in 1967 (she had died the previous year), with tremendous pomp and funeral festivities orchestrated by Communist Party officials. His home is now a museum. It was managed by his daughter, Mitzura until her death in 2015. Arghezi and Paraschiva also had a son, known as Baruțu, but actually called Iosif.

Father:

Nae Theodorescu

Mother:

Maria Theodorescu

spouse 2nd:

Paraschiva Arghezi

spouse 1st:

Constanta Zissu

Son:

Eliazar Lotar Teodorescu

Daughter:

Domnica Arghezi

Son:

Barutu Arghezi

Friend:

Vasile Demetrius