Urmuz

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Urmuz bigraphy, stories - Romanian writer

Urmuz : biography

March 17, 1883 – November 23, 1923

Urmuz ( pen name of Demetru Dem. Demetrescu-Buzău, also known as Hurmuz or Ciriviş, born Dimitrie Dim. Ionescu-Buzeu; March 17, 1883 – November 23, 1923) was a Romanian writer, lawyer and civil servant, who became a cult hero in Romania’s avant-garde scene. His scattered work, consisting of absurdist short prose and poetry, opened a new genre in Romanian letters and humor, and captured the imagination of modernists for several generations. Urmuz’s Bizarre (or Weird) Pages were largely independent of European modernism, even though some may have been triggered by Futurism; their valorization of nonsense verse, black comedy, nihilistic tendencies and exploration into the unconscious mind have repeatedly been cited as influential for the development of Dadaism and the Theatre of the Absurd. Individual pieces such as "The Funnel and Stamate", "Ismaïl and Turnavitu", "Algazy & Grummer" or "The Fuchsiad" are parody fragments, dealing with monstrous and shapeshifting creatures in mundane settings, and announcing techniques later taken up by Surrealism.

Urmuz’s biography between his high school eccentricity and his public suicide remains largely mysterious, and some of the sympathetic accounts have been described as purposefully deceptive. The abstruse imagery of his work has produced a large corpus of diverging interpretations. He has notably been read as a satirist of public life in the 1910s, an unlikely conservative and nostalgic, or an emotionally distant esotericist.

In Urmuz’s lifetime, his stories were only acted out by his thespian friend George Ciprian and published as samples by Cuget Românesc newspaper, with support from modernist writer Tudor Arghezi. Ciprian and Arghezi were together responsible for creating the link between Urmuz and the emerging avant-garde, their activity as Urmuz promoters being later enhanced by such figures as Ion Vinea, Geo Bogza, Lucian Boz, Saşa Pană and Eugène Ionesco. Beginning in the late 1930s, Urmuz also became the focus interest for the elite critics, who either welcomed him into 20th-century literature or dismissed him as a buffoonish impostor. By then, his activity also inspired an eponymous avant-garde magazine edited by Bogza, as well as Ciprian’s drama The Drake’s Head.

Urmuz’s ideas and stylistic affinities

The avant-garde herald vs. the conservative

Shortly after his death, Urmuz’s work was linked to the emergence of avant-garde rebellion throughout Europe, and in particular to the rise of Romania’s own modernist scene: writing in 2007, Paul Cernat describes this version of events as a "founding myth" of Romanian avant-garde literature.Cernat, Avangarda, p.339, 346 A literary critic and modernist enthusiast, Lucian Boz, assessed that Urmuz, like Arthur Rimbaud before him, embodied the "lyrical nihilism" of avant-garde currents.Cernat, Avangarda, p.334, 347 In the 1960s, literary historian Ovid Crohmălniceanu wrote of his being "the world’s first pre-Dada exercises".Crohmălniceanu, p.55 In 2002 however, scholar Adrian Lăcătuş revised this thesis, arguing that it had created a "blockage" in critical reception, and that the actual Urmuz had more complex views on the avant-garde. Others have emphasized that Urmuz’s unusual revolt ran contemporary with the revival of intense traditionalism of Romanian literature (the Sămănătorul moment), which would make his pre-Dada inspiration a moment of special significance.Cernat, Avangarda, p.352, 374, 386; Bogdan Creţu, , in Observator Cultural, Nr. 350, December 2006 Adrian G. Romilă, , in Convorbiri Literare, March 2002

The contact with Futurism, although acknowledged by Urmuz, is judged by many of his commentators as superficial and delayed. Literary historian Nicolae Balotă first proposed that the Romanian had merely wanted to show his sympathy for (and not a like-mindedness with) Futurism; that the works in question date back before the Futurist Manifesto, to the Cocu period; and that the Bizarre Pages have more in common with Expressionism than with Marinetti.Cernat, Avangarda, p.91, 361–362 According to Cernat: "By the looks of it, [the Bizarre Pages] were completed largely independent of influence from the European avant-garde movements […]. We do not know, however, how many of these were already completed in 1909, the year when European Futurism was ‘invented’." Emilia Drogoreanu, a researcher of Romanian Futurism, stresses: "The values and representations of [the] world celebrated through Futurism exist within the Urmuzian text, but are entirely uprooted from the significance offered them by [the Futurists]". Dan Gulea, , in Observator Cultural, Nr. 231, July 2004 Although she finds various similarities between Urmuz and Marinetti, Carmen Blaga notes that the former’s jadedness was no match for the latter’s militancy.Blaga, p.325–328, 330