Lucian Boz

Edit links
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Lucian Boz
Modernist literature
  • Contimporanul
  • Sburătorul

    • Lucian Boz (Romanian pronunciation: [lutʃiˈan ˈboz]; also rendered as Lucien Boz; November 9, 1908 – March 14, 2003) was a Romanian literary critic, essayist, novelist, poet and translator. Raised in Bucharest, he had a lawyer's training but never practiced, instead opting for a career in journalism and literary criticism. An active participant in the 1930s cultural scene, he theorized an empathetic and "enthusiastic" approach to literature, which was in tune with the avant-garde tendencies of his lifetime. After a stint editing the review Ulise in 1932–1933, he became a contributor to more major newspapers, including Adevărul, Cuvântul Liber, and Vremea; he was also for a while an editorial secretary at Ion Vinea's Contimporanul.

    Earning attention for his critical treatment of authors from Mihai Eminescu to Urmuz, Boz was singled out on the literary scene for his Jewish origins. His Romanian career was cut short with the advent of a censorious authoritarian and antisemitic government in 1937. Moving to Paris, he graduated from the École pratique des hautes études and settled into journalistic work, but was displaced by the German occupation. Upon this, Boz joined the French Resistance and was then interned at Drancy. His plight drew the attention of a fellow Romanian exile, Emil Cioran, who networked on his behalf; Boz was subsequently freed, becoming one of very few Jews to escape alive.

    Resuming his reporter's activity, and contributing to

    1989 Revolution to regain critical favor. During the 1990s and until soon before his death, Boz contributed material to a Romanian magazine. In 2000, his short roman à clef
    , dealing with the war years, was printed as his last major contribution.

    Biography

    Early life and career

    Originally from

    Gheorghe Lazăr High School. He then enrolled in the Law faculty of the University of Bucharest, where his professors included Istrate Micescu, Constantin C. Stoicescu and Vintilă Dongoroz. He graduated in 1934 but never practiced, instead entering a career in the press and in literary criticism.[1]

    Boz's first published work, a biographical sketch of Walt Whitman, appeared in Premiera magazine in 1927.[1] When he was aged nineteen, Tiparnița Literară published his review of Ion Barbu's poetry.[3] As he himself noted, he then used this text as a reference to be hired by Ion Vinea at Facla. Vinea preferred to have him work for the literary magazine, Contimporanul, though Facla also carried Boz's literary chronicles.[3] He was Contimporanul's editorial secretary in 1930–1931,[1] only quitting when he had to perform his mandatory service in the Romanian Land Forces; his replacement was a young Eugène Ionesco.[3] A member of the Eugen Lovinescu-led Sburătorul literary society, Boz contributed to Isac Ludo's Adam, Adevărul Literar și Artistic, Capricorn, Mișcarea, unu (where he used the pseudonym Vasile Cernat), Discobolul, and Viața Românească.[1] He began frequenting literary cafes, befriending, among others, Ionesco, Alexandru Sahia, and Ionathan X. Uranus.[4] With Ludo and Benador, he also attended a Jewish literary salon at Slova printing house, where he recalled running into Barbu Lăzăreanu, Theodor Loewenstein-Lavi, and Henric Streitman.[5]

    Boz was a noted promoter of

    Rimbaud) and his praise of modernists such as Jacques G. Costin.[9] At Zodiac, a literary sheet put out by I. Peltz, Boz wrote similar reviews of literary works by Vinea and Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu.[10] In 1931, Adevărul daily hosted his homage to Tristan Tzara.[11]

    Alongside Em. Ungher,

    Virgil Gheorghiu, Anton Holban, Eugen Jebeleanu, Alexandru Robot, Horia Stamatu, Simion Stolnicu, Octav Șuluțiu, and writer-cartoonist Neagu Rădulescu.[13] In 1933, Boz became editor at Adevărul and Dimineața, as well as at the weekly Cuvântul Liber.[1] At this stage in his life, he married an Adevărul colleague, Cora Costiner, from whom he would have a son, Alain.[14]

    Boz's 1932 essay on Mihai Eminescu (Eminescu. Încercare critică), originally printed in Capricorn,[11] drew lavish praise from George Călinescu. Other contemporary critics who appreciated his work included Lovinescu, Ionesco, Perpessicius, Pompiliu Constantinescu,[1] and Ion Biberi.[7] Some, including the modernist Vladimir Streinu, were derisive of the effort—as noted by their common friend Șerban Cioculescu, Streinu treated Boz's "abstruse essay" with "extreme cruelty".[15] Among later reviewers, Sergiu Ailenei notes that Boz's attempt to describe Eminescu by means of national psychology was "far-fetched".[16] In nationalist and traditionalist circles, the work was panned as offensive and anomalous. C. Vrăbete of Neamul Românesc saw it comprising "the most fantastic aberrations" and "monstrosities", for being "fed on German theories", and for suggesting that the Romanians were contemplative and had "Slavic blood". Boz, he noted, "seems not to be a Romanian, and not to have any links with the aspirations of our people".[17]

    Before 1935, Boz was a columnist at

    critical impressionism, and an empathetic, anti-intellectual, "enthusiastically visionary", reception of the literary work up for review.[20] His essays often focused on finding international connections for Romanian particulars, for instance tracing links between Vinea and Frank Wedekind; Tudor Arghezi, Urmuz, and Ramón Gómez de la Serna or François Villon; Geo Bogza and the Marquis de Sade.[21] In later decades, Boz was reviewed with reserve. In 1941, revising his early stance, Călinescu suggested that Boz's "visionary enthusiasm" was "an aberration", since it impaired the selection of values. He found Boz to be an "intelligent" writer, but one of "unthinking generosity".[22] However, he also described Ulise as the more mature of Romania's avant-garde papers.[23] Cernat takes the middle ground, describing Boz as "second-rate", "prolix" and "rather invertebrate", but "sometimes surprisingly intuitive".[24] His opposition to mainstream literary theory, Cernat notes, is suited to the avant-garde requirements, surpassing Călinescu's own limits. Boz, he concludes, "is worth rereading."[25]

    In wartime France

    Boz opposed the rise of fascism, and, in a 1937 interview with Azi, spoke out against its attempts to threaten and silence Jewish authors.[26] After Dimineața and Adevărul were suppressed by the National Christian government in December 1937, he left for Paris. There, he took courses at the École pratique des hautes études. He took part in public conferences and attended lectures by Jacques Maritain, Gabriel Péri and Dolores Ibárruri, also joining PEN International. He met Benjamin Fondane and Ilarie Voronca.[1] In 1939, he was accredited as the Paris correspondent of Tudor Teodorescu-Braniște's Jurnalul,[1] and still contributed to Adevărul Literar și Artistic, which sought to protect and recover Jewish Romanian intellectuals.[27] Boz also sent diplomatic reports for United Press. In order to make ends meet, he worked for French newspapers as well, including Le Petit Parisien, Excelsior and Dimanche Illustrée.[1]

    Boz was unable to complete his studies, due to the outbreak of World War II and subsequent

    Maquis du Vercors.[28] In 1943, the Gestapo arrested him and his wife, sending them to the Drancy internment camp.[1][29] While there, the only one of their friends from hunger-stricken Paris who brought them food was Emil Cioran, the Romanian philosopher.[1] Of several thousand Romanian Jews who passed through on their way to the Nazi extermination camps, a dozen were saved by the intervention of the Romanian legation, including Boz and his wife. Once released, he and Carola went into Vichy France, where she was arrested and threatened with a return to Drancy. She was freed upon the insistent intervention of Cioran, who accompanied the couple to the border and ensured they had left France safely.[1]

    At the end of 1944, following the

    Scînteia Tineretului,[31] while also working as an editor at Finanțe și Industrie daily and a correspondent of the Romanian Press Information Agency (ARIP).[1] In 1945, he published an overview of wartime France, Franța, 1938—1944, described at the time by Petru Comarnescu as one of "the books that so richly provide us with full awareness about the civilizations that will shape tomorrow's world."[32] It is equal parts memoir, historical account, and a reportage with colorful detail. The first part deals with the Paris of 1938–1940, up through the Battle of France and the beginnings of the Resistance. In the second part, which begins with Operation Torch, he describes his arrest, with a chapter on his wife's detainment written by her. He supplies descriptions of French people on both sides of the conflict and ends with the Liberation of 1944.[1] It earned praise from the literary chronicler at Revista Fundațiilor Regale, who noted its "adherence to the French spirit" and its "vivid and suggestive" depictions of "Maquis figures".[33] Boz also translated Jean Bruller's Le Silence de la mer, in his introduction discussing the choice between resistance and collaboration faced by wartime French writers.[1][34]

    In March 1946, he returned to Paris as a correspondent for the revived Adevărul, and for the dailies Finanțe și Industrie and L'Information Internationale, which would become an English-language weekly. At the same time, he occasionally wrote pieces for Le Monde and sent reports to Scandinavian papers. In 1947, Le Monde sent him on assignment to the famine-stricken areas of Romania; this would be his last visit to his native country. Because the Romanian newspapers who employed him disappeared with the advent of the Communist regime and his work for French newspapers and radio was only sporadic, he took a job at a Paris business.[1] At the end of 1950 he decided to emigrate. Avoiding Soviet-occupied Romania, he briefly stayed in Genoa before arriving in Australia in February 1951, after a 35-day journey.[1] His cousin Adolf Bleicher noted in 1979: "Lucian [had] the greatest luck, in that [the communists] never managed to capture him. All sorts of misfortunes plagued a cousin of his, also named Boz, who shared an address with Lucian's parents."[35] First stopping in Canberra, Boz took on blue-collar jobs to support himself. He began as a factory welder, having taken a course on arc welding in France, but changed jobs after suffering an accident.[1] Boz then moved to Sydney, where he opened a public relations firm with no employees. His only assistant was his wife, herself a devotee of literature and culture.[1]

    Final decades

    Thanks to his fluency in French and English, Boz was hired by

    National Order of Merit.[1]

    Because his commercial work kept him very busy, Boz had little time for cultural pursuits and could only read evenings and Sundays.

    Ovid Crohmălniceanu, Silvian Iosifescu, and Mircea Zaciu, but no reply at all from an older friend, Șerban Cioculescu.[38] He also sent letters to his Romanian friends, both inside the country and in the anticommunist diaspora. Among the cultural figures with whom he carried on a correspondence were Cioran, Ionesco, Constantin Noica, Anton Dumitriu, and Nicolae Steinhardt. Noica at one point marveled at how good Boz's Romanian still was.[1] By then, Boz had had a row with the exile publicist Ștefan Baciu, whose review Mele had hosted an antisemitic poem by César Tiempo.[39]

    In the late 1970s, Boz maintained a correspondence with Loewenstein-Lavi, by then a political exile, airing his various grievances against the previous decades of "communist terror". He attempted to familiarize himself with communist texts by Ludo, Benador and Sandu Lieblich, but concluded that these were in fact illegible.[40] Although he never criticized national communism, and even privately only did so in 1992, in a letter to Arșavir Acterian (calling the Danube–Black Sea Canal "an ill-fated undertaking of the demented Ceaușescu"), publication of his work was still blocked by the authorities, who considered him a political émigré. Franța, 1938—1944 was kept in a secret archive by Romania's censorship apparatus.[1] In the 1980s, Boz made photocopies of some of his interwar work, sending them to friends and acquaintances. Asked by Ionel Jianu to supply details about Romanian artists living in Australia, Boz submitted information about four of them, all of whom appeared in Jianu's subsequent 1986 volume, Les artistes roumains en Occident.[1] Emil Boldan and Constantin Crișan attempted to edit a volume of his essays, but the project came to nought. Nevertheless, several censored or self-censored articles about him did appear in the press, for instance a 1981 piece in Orizont by his friend Steinhardt, who knew the facts of the situation, that implied Boz left Romania for good in 1937.[1]

    Following the

    Romanian Revolution of 1989, Boz worked with Jurnalul Literar between 1994 and 2002, publishing letters, memories and biographical sketches.[1] He did similar work with Iosif Vulcan, the Romanian expatriate review in Cringila.[41] In private correspondence, he was particularly indignant about Lucian Pintilie's film The Oak, lamenting its presentation of Romania as "a kind of barbarian, brutal, violent state".[1] In 2000, he published a short roman à clef, Piatra de încercare ("The Testing Bench"), which featured autofiction, with himself as the protagonist, as well as appearances made by his wife and their son Alain, by Cioran, and by Eliade. The plot unfolds in wartime France, with the title referring to the French civilian population and its response to occupation.[1]

    Boz died in Sydney in 2003. He had by then came to be included in literary reference volumes, and his work was analyzed by, among others, Crișan, Nicolae Tzone, Nicolae Florescu, Florin Manolescu, Andrei and Barbu Brezianu.[1] His essays on Eminescu were republished by Constantin Cubleșan in the 2001 volume Eminescu în oglinzile criticii ("Eminescu's Critical Mirrors").[16] Samples of Boz's other work, reviewed by Tzone, saw print in Aldebaran review, and his correspondence was issued as a volume at Editura Dacia.[42]

    Notes

    1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj (in Romanian) Ilie Rad, "Recuperarea unui scriitor: Lucian Boz", in România Literară, Issue 34/2009
    2. ^ Gligor & Caloianu, pp. 93, 144, 154
    3. ^ a b c Alexandru Mirodan, "Dicționarul neconvențional al scriitorilor evrei de limbă română. F", in Minimum, Vol. IX, Issue 96, March 1995, p. 46
    4. ^ Neagu Rădulescu, Turnul Babel, pp. 45–46. Bucharest: Cugetarea-Georgescu Delafras, 1944
    5. ^ Gligor & Caloianu, pp. 154–155
    6. ^ Cernat, p. 293
    7. ^ a b Cernat, p. 330
    8. ISBN 0-8264-5825-4
    9. ^ Cernat, pp. 330–331, 347
    10. OCLC 15994515
    11. ^ a b Cernat, p. 331
    12. ^ Cernat, pp. 330, 333
    13. ^ Cernat, pp. 333–334
    14. ^ Gligor & Caloianu, pp. 94, 146
    15. ^ Șerban Cioculescu, "Rubrica mea. Vladimir Streinu (II)", in Flacăra, Vol. XXVIII, Issue 3, January 1979, p. 17
    16. ^ a b (in Romanian) Sergiu Ailenei, "Eminescu în ultimii ani", in Convorbiri Literare, June 2002
    17. ^ C. Vrăbete, "Superficialitate literară", in Neamul Românesc, October 6, 1932, p. 1
    18. ^ Ecaterina Cleynen-Serghiev, "La critique littéraire roumaine et la France durant l'entre-deux-guerres (I)", in Revue des Études Sud-est Européenes, Issues 3–4/1993, p. 391
    19. ^ Cernat, p. 334
    20. ^ Cernat, pp. 332–333, 336–337
    21. ^ Cernat, pp. 334–336, 348
    22. ^ Călinescu, p. 915; Cernat, p. 333
    23. ^ Călinescu, p. 967; Cernat, p. 333
    24. ^ Cernat, pp. 331, 339
    25. ^ Cernat, pp. 336–337
    26. ^ Boia, p. 82
    27. ^ Boia, p. 143
    28. ^ Gligor & Caloianu, p. 94
    29. ^ Gligor & Caloianu, p. 153
    30. ^ "Revista Revistelor. Revista Democrația", in Revista Fundațiilor Regale, Issue 11/1944, pp. 452–453
    31. ^ "Revista Revistelor. 1 Mai 1945", in Revista Fundațiilor Regale, Issue 5/1945, p. 458
    32. ^ Petru Comarnescu, "Note. Cărți pentru cunoașterea țărilor prietene", in Revista Fundațiilor Regale, Issue 4/1945, p. 237
    33. ^ Florian Nicolau, "Note. Franța, 1938—1944", in Revista Fundațiilor Regale, Issue 6/1945, pp. 714–715
    34. ^ Florian Nicolau, "Note. Tăcerea mării", in Revista Fundațiilor Regale, Issue 4/1945, pp. 231–232
    35. ^ Gligor & Caloianu, p. 107
    36. ^ Gligor & Caloianu, pp. 145–146
    37. ^ Gligor & Caloianu, pp. 161–164
    38. ^ Gligor & Caloianu, pp. 164–165, 169–170
    39. ^ Gligor & Caloianu, pp. 165–166
    40. ^ Gligor & Caloianu, pp. 153–155
    41. ^ (in Romanian) Ilie Rad, "Revista Iosif Vulcan din Australia", in Apostrof, Issue 1/2010
    42. ^ Cernat, p. 332

    References

    External links
    Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lucian_Boz&oldid=1216640585"