Tudor Arghezi

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Tudor Arghezi : biography

21 May 1880 – 14 June 1967

During World War II the newspaper Informaţia Zilei took up the publishing of comments by Arghezi, as a column named after his former magazine, Bilete de Papagal. In 1943, it published virulent satires of the Romanian government, its military leader – Ion Antonescu, and Romania’s allegiance to Nazi Germany (see Romania during World War II). On 30 September 1943 Arghezi caused an outrage and a minor political scandal, after getting the paper to publish his most radical attack, one aimed at the German ambassador Manfred Freiherr von Killinger – Baroane ("Baron!" or "Thou Baron"). The piece centered on accusations of political and economic domination: "A flower blossomed in my garden, one like a plumped-up red bird, with a golden kernel. You blemished it. You set your paws on it and now it has dried up. My corn has shot into ears as big as Barbary Doves and you tore them away. You took the fruits out of my orchard by the cartload and gone you were with them. You placed your nib with its tens of thousands of nostrils on the cliffs of my water sources and you quaffed them from their depths and you drained them. Morass and slobber is what you leave behind in the mountains and yellow drought in the flatlands — and out of all the birds with singing tongues you leave me with bevies of rooks."Arghezi, Baroane, 1943, in Vianu, p.483

The authorities confiscated all issues, and the author was imprisoned without trial in a penitentiary camp near Târgu Jiu.Deletant, p.27; Willhardt et al., p.15 He was freed in 1944, only days after the King Michael Coup, which resulted in the fall of the Antonescu regime.

Arghezi and 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,Frunză, p.372 and was targeted as a decadent poet very soon after the communist-dominated republican institutions took power (1948). A series of articles written by Sorin Toma (son of the Stalinist literary figure Alexandru Toma)Tismăneanu, p.110, 310 in the Romanian Communist Party’s official voice, Scînteia, described his works as having their origin in Arghezi’s "violent insanity", called his style "a pathological phenomenon", and depicted the author as "the main poet of Romanian bourgeoisie";Sorin Toma, Poezia Putrefacţiei…, 1948, in Frunză, p.372 the articles were headlined Poezia Putrefacţiei sau Putrefacţia Poeziei ("The Poetry of Decay or the Decay of Poetry", in reference to Karl Marx’s The Misery of Philosophy – the title of which in turn mocked Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Philosophy of Misery). The Mărţişor house of the Arghezi family, today a museum

The writer had to retreat from public life, spending most of these years at the house he owned in Văcăreşti, Bucharest, the one he called Mărţişor (the name it still goes by today); his main source of income was provided by selling the yields of cherries the surrounding plot returned.Frunză, p.373; Ţoiu

However, as Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej consolidated his power over the state and Party post-1952, Arghezi was discovered as an asset to the new, more "national" tone of the regime — as several other censored cultural figures, he was paid a visit by Miron Constantinescu, the Communist activist overseeing the rehabilitation process.Tismăneanu, p.151, 183, 304

Once exonerated, he started being awarded numerous titles and prizes. Arghezi was elected a member of the Romanian Academy in 1955, and celebrated as national poet on his 80th and 85th birthdays. Although never turned-Socialist Realist,Kuiper, p.67 he adapted his themes to the requirements – such as he did in Cântare Omului ("Ode to Mankind") and 1907.Olivotto In 1965, Arghezi also won recognition abroad, being the recipient of the Herder Prize.Willhardt et al., p.15