50 Facts About Gheorghe Eminescu

Gheorghe Matei Eminescu was a Romanian historian, memoirist and Land Forces officer.

Gheorghe Eminescu failed as a student, and was barred from all the country's civilian high schools.

Gheorghe Eminescu fought in the Romanian campaigns of World War I, commanding a machine gunners' unit during the defense of Marasesti.

Gheorghe Eminescu remained there for some 15 years, commanding units on Romania's border with the Soviet Union and eventually rising to the position of Lieutenant Colonel.

Gheorghe Eminescu was sidelined and imprisoned following the establishment of Communist Romania, though his daughter, Yolanda, was able to integrate within the academic elite.

Under the selectively liberal climate of national communism, Gheorghe Eminescu was allowed to publish in magazines such as Romania Literara and Magazin Istoric.

Gheorghe Eminescu was survived by daughter Yolanda, a noted female judge and academic in Romania, and by his granddaughter Roxana, who joined the teaching staff at the University of Western Brittany; his direct descendants mostly live in France.

Gheorghe Eminescu belonged to the boyar aristocracy of Moldavia through both his paternal grandparents.

Also rejecting claims that Eminovici was a foreign name, the Lieutenant Colonel's father Matei Gheorghe Eminescu noted his descent from Moldavian peasants, raised into the boyardom by Prince Grigore Sturdza in 1841.

Captain Matei or Mateiu Gheorghe Eminescu was both the youngest and the longest lived of the eight Gheorghe Eminescu siblings who survived past childhood.

Gheorghe Eminescu was for long uninterested in literary pursuits of any kind, preferring to read on topics such as horticulture and home economics.

Gheorghe Eminescu was baptized Romanian Orthodox at the Cathedral of Ploiesti.

Gheorghe Eminescu recalled being unimpressed at the time, since he only knew of Caragiale as a tenant and restaurateur.

Gheorghe Eminescu studied first at the Ion Craciunescu School in Mizil, where, as he reports, he only had top grades because he was Condu's grandson.

Gheorghe Eminescu recalls spending summers with Hanibal in Glogova, where Matei was tending to the estate of an absentee landlord, Guna Vernescu.

Hanibal Gheorghe Eminescu died at age sixteen, having been diagnosed with Graves' disease.

Gheorghe Eminescu caught glimpse of literary doyens such as Alexandru Macedonski and George Cosbuc, and was present for an impromptu poetry recital by Symbolist Ion Minulescu, with Octavian Goga in the audience.

Gheorghe Eminescu was mostly impressed by Goga, who represented the form of Romanian nationalism that Eminescu himself had embraced.

In 1913, due to "my extracurricular activity", Gheorghe Eminescu found himself under interdiction to attend any civilian high school in Romania.

Gheorghe Eminescu's relatives stepped in, and decided that he should follow an officer's career.

Gheorghe Eminescu tried to back out of the career imposed on him by never showing up for his entry-level examination, but the Condeescus, using their connections in high places, arranged that he still be matriculated.

Gheorghe Eminescu earned distinction in the defense of Marasesti, serving under poet Andrei Naum; he took command of the 2nd Machine Gunners Company when both Naum and the company commander, Radu Nicolae, were killed in action.

Gheorghe Eminescu was afterwards captured by the German Army and sent to an internment camp in Germany.

Gheorghe Eminescu was well treated by his captors, and, as his daughter reports, became an avid Germanophile.

Gheorghe Eminescu witnessed Brosteanu's difficulties in dealing with the Moldavian Democratic Republic, and always resented the latter's political leader, Ion Inculet.

Much of the interwar years, and overall as many as thirty years of Gheorghe Eminescu's life, were spent researching Napoleon's biography.

Gheorghe Eminescu was in charge of guarding the Bessarabian border between Romania and the Soviet Union, first as a company commander in Cetatea Alba, then as the leader of a battalion in Ismail.

Gheorghe Eminescu was later moved further south, in Dobruja, serving with garrisons in Cernavoda and Medgidia.

Gheorghe Eminescu's wife survived him and, in 1940, was living "in seclusion, on a small and narrow street in Cluj".

Gheorghe Eminescu married a local Bessarabian, Elena Labuntev, in Cetatea Alba's Ascension Cathedral.

Gheorghe Eminescu graduated with high honors from the University of Bucharest Faculty of Law in 1944.

Gheorghe Eminescu was persuaded by his friends to join the National Peasants' Party.

Gheorghe Eminescu's name appeared among the first of a list of party recruits, though, by his own account, his activity there was minimal.

Gheorghe Eminescu's life changed upon the close of World War II, as Bessarabia was again incorporated with the Soviet Union and Romania herself came under a communist regime.

Gheorghe Eminescu was originally held for "failure to denounce" a political crime, but was later found guilty of a more serious charge, namely "conspiracy against the social order".

Gheorghe Eminescu was sent to Aiud prison, alongside old-regime figures such as Istrate Micescu, Nichifor Crainic, and Radu Gyr.

Gheorghe Eminescu was released in 1954, after carrying out his 7-year term in jail.

Gheorghe Eminescu's daughter, appointed in 1945 as one of Romania's first three female judges, became an academic in 1949, focusing on international copyright law.

Gheorghe Eminescu was only allowed back as a librarian, and could advance professionally after 1965.

Gheorghe Eminescu appeared alongside Augustin Z N Pop at literary festivals, including one held in Constanta during April 1963, and another one held at Mircesti that December.

Gheorghe Eminescu stopped doing so in 1979, when the regime allowed I D Marian to publish an Eminescu monograph that the Lieutenant Colonel saw as blasphemous.

Gheorghe Eminescu expressed his revolt in a short article, which was allowed for print in Romania Literara.

The book was never published, since, as Gheorghe Eminescu found out through literary critic Constantin Ciopraga, the manuscript was mishandled and lost.

Gheorghe Eminescu himself was convinced that the editorial director Mircea Radu Iacoban had hidden the work, and that he intended to have it published under Corneliu Sturzu's name, once Gheorghe Eminescu had died.

Gheorghe Eminescu specialized in Portuguese literature, after being introduced to the poetry of Fernando Pessoa by a member of the Portuguese Communist Party, who was living in exile in Romania.

Gheorghe Eminescu was known locally for having introduced Fernando Arrabal's plays to Romania in the late 1970s, but recalls being pressured by Ceausescu's Securitate into becoming a spy.

One of Gheorghe Eminescu's last published contributions, included in the third issue of Limba si Literatura Romana in 1981, was an autobiographical record of his participation in the battle of Marasesti; in 1986, he revised for print a second edition of his Napoleon biography.

In January 1984, Gheorghe Eminescu returned to Mizil, where he was interviewed by writer George Stoian.

An article by Gheorghe Eminescu, describing the final decay of the Ancien Regime, appeared in Magazin Istoric in July 1987, with a biographical note introducing him as a "historical writer" and the "nephew of our great national poet".

Gheorghe Eminescu's only published poem was a testament-like piece, appearing when he was already in his nineties.