Luca Caragiale
Luca Ion Caragiale | |
---|---|
modernism, avant-garde |
Luca Ion Caragiale (Romanian pronunciation:
The son of dramatist Ion Luca Caragiale and the half-brother of writer Mateiu Caragiale, Luca also became the son-in-law of communist militant Alexandru Dobrogeanu-Gherea. It was with Alexandru's brother, philosopher Ionel Gherea, that Luca wrote his work of collaborative fiction and sole novel. Titled Nevinovățiile viclene ("The Cunning Naïvetés"), it created controversy with its portrayal of adolescent love. Here and in his various modernist poems, Caragiale made a point of questioning established perceptions of love and romance.
Biography
Childhood and adolescence
Born into the Caragiale theatrical and literary family, of Greek-Romanian heritage, Luca was, through his mother Alexandrina, a descendant of the middle class Burelly family.[1][2] A famed beauty and a prominent socialite, Alexandrina was the model of visual artist Constantin Jiquidi (whose drawing of her in national costume became the first Romanian-issued postcard).[3] According to genealogical investigations conducted by Luca's father, she was also of Greek descent.[2]
Luca was Ion Luca Caragiale's second son, after Mateiu (later celebrated as the author of Craii de Curtea-Veche novel), who was born from the dramatist's extra-conjugal affair with Maria Constantinescu.[1][4][5] According to researcher Ioana Pârvulescu, while Mateiu felt permanently uneasy about his illegitimacy, Luca was "without doubt" his father's favorite, and, unlike his older brother, "effortlessly knew how to make himself loved."[4] Alexandrina Burelly later gave birth to Luca's younger sister, Ecaterina, who, in her old age, was to provide a written account of the tense relationship between Caragiale's two families.[6]
Luca's childhood and adolescence, coinciding with his father's itinerant projects, was spent abroad: while Luca was still a young child, he was taken by his family on a trip to France, Switzerland,
War years
Alexandrina, Ecaterina and Luca Caragiale spent two more years in Berlin, living on a Romanian state pension; in mid 1914, sensing that
After his marriage to Fany Gherea (tentatively dated to 1919),[8] Luca cemented the links between the Caragiale and the descendants of Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, the Marxist theorist who had been his father's close friend.[15] Fany was Constantin's granddaughter. Her father was journalist Alexandru "Sașa" Gherea (later a founding figure of the clandestine Romanian Communist Party), and her mother a native of Bavaria.[16] Luca and Constantin's other son, Ionel, were working together on Nevinovățiile viclene, a novel. It was first published in the 1910s by the Iași-based literary review Viața Românească, and immediately sparked controversy for describing the sexual desires of the educated youth.[4] The accusations of pornography, Pârvulescu notes, placed Viața Românească editor Garabet Ibrăileanu in a "delicate situation", but also enlisted a public defense of the text, written by Ion Luca's friend and collaborator Paul Zarifopol (whose statements, she notes, were "spiritual and persuading").[4] This collaborative text was also the last work of fiction ever authored by Ionel Gherea, who subsequently focused almost exclusively on his contribution to local philosophical debates.[4]
Once Romania joined the
Late activity
During the early
By 1921, Luca was working to publish his new poetry as a volume, which was to be titled Jocul oglinzilor ("The Game of Mirrors").
Fany Gherea remarried, taking as her husband Radu Lipatti, who was a relative of pianist
Some interest in her son's work resurfaced in the following decades. In 1969, Nevinovățiile viclene was republished by the state-run publishing house for the youth,
Work
Symbolist and Parnassian poetry
Luca and Mateiu Caragiale's stylistic affiliation with Symbolism illustrated a secondary stage in the development of Romania's own Symbolist current. This ideological choice, literary historian George Călinescu notes, pitied Luca against his father, a noted adversary of first-generation Symbolists such as Alexandru Macedonski: "[Caragiale senior] disliked the Symbolists and he anguished Luki so badly, that the latter broke out crying and declared his father to be without understanding for 'real poetry'."[11] Critics offer differing perspectives on Caragiale's overall contribution. According to Călinescu, his lyrical texts were generally "verbose and dry", while his other works lacked "the art of a prose writer."[15] Ioana Pârvulescu also opines that, while Mateiu, whom his father credited with the least talent, was able to impose himself in Romanian literature, Luca's "vaguely Symbolist" poetry only displayed "the involuntary expressiveness that one finds in any first attempts."[4] The verdict is common among other authors: Barbu Cioculescu and Ion Vartic mainly see young "Luki" as a mimetic and histrionic artist.[31] For Șerban Cioculescu, the overall nature of young Caragiale's contribution was outstanding: "Luca Ion was in fact a virtuoso who tried his hand on all instruments and keyboards with the same dexterity, in search of not just a poetic fixation, but in one's own fixation among the chaos of one's time. Beyond the mirages that his unquestionable talent puts on display for us, one catches a glimpse of a dramatic process of consciousness."[32]
A large part of Caragiale's contribution to poetry comprises
Eu vreau să-mi fie versul sonor ca și izvoare |
I want my verse to be as sonorous as springs |
This series of poems offers insight into Luca Caragiale's
To the bareness of autumnal landscapes, Caragiale the younger opposed a universe dominated by floral ornamentation. According to Cioculescu, the poems reference "more than forty species" of flowers, ranging from
Dormi în flori de iasomie |
You sleep now in jasmine flowers |
Avant-garde tendencies
The second category of poems are generally urban-themed, opting in favor of
A special connection between Caragiale and experimental literature was his ambition of modifying the standard Romanian lexis, through the introduction of neologisms or the recovery of obscure archaisms. Șerban Cioculescu argued that, by adopting this "twinned regime", Caragiale prolonged his stylistic connection with Parnassianism into the realm of avant-garde poetry, but did so at the risk of confusing his readers.[32] The neologisms, some of which were described as "very curious" by the critic, include words that did not settle into the common language, such as perpetrat ("perpetrated") and sfinctic ("sphinx-like"); among the archaic words employed are some words found in Romanian Orthodox Church vocabulary—blagoslovenie ("blessing"), pogribanie ("funeral")—and obsolete titles such as virhovnic ("leader").[32] According to the Cioculescu, Luca shared Mateiu's love for antiquated things, but was in effect "more complex" stylistically than his brother.[32] The speech characteristics were doubled by a recourse to theatrical attitudes, leading Barbu Cioculescu to speak of a stylistic approach reconnecting Luca's work to those of his forefathers, and especially to Ion Luca Caragiale's "mimetic" approach to comedy writing.[31]
Among such works, critics have found memorable his Triptic madrigalesc, which, according to Călinescu, helped introduce to local literature "the cosmopolitan sensation, so cultivated by Western poetry (Valery Larbaud, Blaise Cendrars)".[15] Dedicated to an unknown young woman, it opened with the lines:
Când te-am zărit |
When I saw you |
This prosaic preoccupation, Călinescu notes, led Caragiale to depict the dust-covered
Other writings
With Nevinovățiile viclene, Pârvulescu argues, the young Caragiale produced a "more interesting" work than his poems, but the text's nature made it impossible to delimit "what part is owed to which author."[4] The debates surrounding are deemed "ridiculous" by Pârvulescu, who notes that the two protagonists, 15-year-old Radu and 13-year-old Sanda, only manage to steal each other "the first kisses."[4] The eroticism is present, but, according to the same commentator, is also "diffused, kept in check at the level of suggestions", and comparable to the style of later novels by Ionel Teodoreanu.[4] The children's discovery of love during a summer vacation intersects itself, and contrasts with, episodes in the mature relationship between an uncle and aunt.[4] The underlying meditation about one's loss of innocence is also rendered by the book's two mottos. One is a quote from Immanuel Kant, suggesting that innocence is "hard to keep and easy to lose"; the other a "Spanish proverb": "The devil sits to the right side of the Cross."[4]
Among Caragiale's other texts were several prose manuscripts brought to critical attention primarily for their titles, as listed by Călinescu: Isvodul vrajei ("The Catalog of Bewitching"), Chipurile sulemenite ("The Painted Faces"), Balada căpitanului ("The Captain's Ballad").[15] A more unusual text left by the poet is a self-portrait in prose. The piece drew the attention of writer and art historian Pavel Chihaia for being "of a sincerity that one can only hope to meet in the present", and for contrasting Mateiu's own "conceited" autobiographical texts.[44] The text moves from issues related to Luca's physical appearance ("lifeless" eyes, "unpleasant and stupid" hair) to self-admitted moral weakness (the joy of being confronted with other people's defects, the "cowardice" which prompts him to "say things I do not mean" etc.).[44]
Notes
- ^ a b (in Romanian) Lucian Nastasă, Genealogia între știință, mitologie și monomanie, at the Romanian Academy's George Bariț Institute of History, Cluj-Napoca
- ^ Z. Ornea, "Receptarea dramaturgiei lui Caragiale" Archived 22 October 2011 at the Wayback Machine, in România Literară, Issue 31/2001
- ^ (in Romanian) Gabriel Dimisianu, "Revelațiile cartofiliei", in România Literară, Issue 22/2002
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m (in Romanian) Ioana Pârvulescu, "În numele fiului" Archived 26 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine, in România Literară, Issue 10/2001
- ^ Cioculescu, pp. 356sqq
- ^ Cioculescu, pp. 367–368
- ^ Călinescu, pp. 494–495
- ^ a b c d Vartic, p. 4
- ^ Călinescu, p. 651
- ^ a b c d e Cioculescu, p. 383
- ^ a b c Călinescu, p. 495
- ^ Barbu Cioculescu, "În exil" Archived 26 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine, in România Literară, Issue 4/2002
- ^ Cioculescu, p. 384
- ^ Cioculescu, pp. 384–385
- ^ a b c d e f g h Călinescu, p. 710
- ^ Călinescu, p. 710; Vartic, p. 4
- ^ Boia, p. 203
- ^ Boia, pp. 203–204
- ^ Cioculescu, p. 369. See also Boia, p. 204; Vartic, p. 4
- ^ Cioculescu, pp. 28, 70, 120–121
- ^ Sanda Tomescu Baciu, "Knut Hamsun: The Artist and the Wanderer", in Philologica, Issue 2/2010, p. 28; Vartic, p. 4
- ^ Octav Șuluțiu, "Cronica literară: Zoe Verbiceanu, Baladele lui François Villon", in Gândirea, Issues 3–4/1941, p. 195
- ^ a b Vartic, p. 5
- ^ a b (in Romanian) Florin Oprescu, "Intrarea prin oglindă", in Tomis, February 2005
- ^ Vartic, pp. 4–5
- ^ (in Romanian) Tudorel Urian, "Nenea Iancu & sons", in România Literară, Issue 32/2003
- ^ a b Vartic, p. 8
- ^ Vartic, pp. 6–7
- ^ Vartic, pp. 5–8
- ^ Vartic, pp. 9–11
- ^ a b (in Romanian) Laura Pavel, "Gratia interpretandi" Archived 26 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine, in România Literară, Issue 4/2004
- ^ a b c d Cioculescu, p. 388
- ^ a b Cioculescu, pp. 383–384
- ^ Cioculescu, p. 384. The correct form of the verb a striga ("to shout") in this case is strigă, not strig. Cioculescu proposes that the text could have been remedied by changing strig înfiorarea to strigă-nfiorarea.
- ^ Cioculescu, pp. 384–385, 386–387
- ^ Cioculescu, p. 386
- ^ a b Cioculescu, p. 385
- ^ Cioculescu, pp. 385–386
- ^ Cioculescu, p. 387
- ^ Călinescu, p. 710. Partially rendered in Cioculescu, p. 383
- ^ Cioculescu, pp. 386–387
- ^ Cioculescu, pp. 387, 388
- ISBN 90-04-07599-2
- ^ a b (in Romanian) Pavel Chihaia, "Printre cărți și manuscrise" Archived 17 October 2015 at the Wayback Machine, in Observator Cultural, Issue 339, September 2006
References
- ISBN 978-973-50-2635-6
- George Călinescu, Istoria literaturii române de la origini pînă în prezent. Bucharest: Editura Minerva, 1986.
- OCLC 6890267
- Ion Vartic, "Caragiale după Caragiale. Povestea urmașilor", in Apostrof, Vol. XXVII, Issue 12, 2016, pp. 4–11.