29 Facts About H Bonciu

The autofictional and cruel detail in H Bonciu's narratives makes him a senior figure among Romania's own Trairist authors, while its capture of the unnaturally grotesque finds him as one of the country's Neoromantics and Surrealists.

Beyond this uncertain affiliation, it is known that H Bonciu must have spent part of his youth in the German Empire and Austria-Hungary, and that such a cultural encounter shaped his entire approach to literature.

In 1920, H Bonciu resumed his contribution to Rampa, where he published his translation of poems by Anton Wildgans.

In 1924, H Bonciu married a Gabriela Kimmel, living, until 1934, in relative isolation from the literary scene.

Early in the 1930s, the family had moved back to Iasi, where H Bonciu set up a new business in the production and distribution of Moldavian wine.

The passion for wine-making later resulted in a friendship between H Bonciu and celebrated actor-satirist Constantin Tanase; the latter acclimatized Uricani trunks at his own villa, in Balotesti.

Additionally, H Bonciu published versions of poems by France's pre-Symbolist Charles Baudelaire.

The work won praise from essayist and literary chronicler Ovidiu Papadima, who wrote for the magazine Gandirea that H Bonciu was a "precious" and thoughtful translator, whose versions were more polished than Wildgans' originals.

Nevertheless, H Bonciu continued to write and, in 1936, Alcaly issued his second novel: Pensiunea doamnei Pipersberg.

The scandal intensified with time, and H Bonciu saw himself included in lists of "pornographers", alongside some major or minor modernist writers: Arghezi, Geo Bogza, Mihail Celarianu, Mircea Eliade etc.

Reportedly, H Bonciu was first arrested for a short while in 1932, together with Bogza.

Two years later, the case was being revisited by his peers inside the Romanian Writers' Society, where H Bonciu's defense was taken by novelist Zaharia Stancu and critic Serban Cioculescu.

The guild's anti-H Bonciu lobby included poet George Gregorian and the formerly accused Eliade.

In parallel with his growth as a novelist, H Bonciu became known to the literati as a prankster and eccentric social observer.

In 1937, at the funeral of novelist Anton Holban, H Bonciu grabbed the public eye by seating himself in the coffin, his protest against "the inequities of the clergy".

Antisemitism and fascism became official policies in Romania in the late 1930s, and H Bonciu found himself excluded from literary life for most of the war years.

For reasons unknown, H Bonciu refused to openly affiliate with any of the many interwar literary factions which thrived in Greater Romania.

Ovid Crohmalniceanu proposed that H Bonciu is in fact an Expressionist by accident, whose actual literary models are the proto-Expressionism of Vienna Secession and currents born into Austrian culture.

Dan Grigorescu suggests that H Bonciu's Expressionism was mostly "exterior", spread over Jugendstil, Impressionism, Surrealism and various eclectic mixtures; Marian Victor Buciu focuses on H Bonciu as a meeting point between the "Naturalist typology" and Expressionism, noting that his Surrealism is less supplied.

Such nuances notwithstanding, H Bonciu's contribution was readily annexed to the school of Romanian Expressionism.

However, according to cultural historian Ion Pop, H Bonciu remains Romania's only "integral Expressionist", although, even in this context, H Bonciu's work "did not record any significant [Expressionist] shakes".

Traditionally, H Bonciu's writing style and mastery of the Romanian language have received both attention and praise.

In 21st-century reviews, H Bonciu was variously described as an author from the "second shelf" or "bottom bench" of Romanian literary culture.

Some students of H Bonciu's work disagree: according to Adriana Babeti, the "disconcerting amalgam" gives H Bonciu his originality and strength.

Later revealed as H Bonciu's alter ego, the narrator of Bagaj.

The plot is, in fact, a story within a story: H Bonciu reads through Sinidis' "black notebook", left unopened after its author was murdered.

The killer is a Man with Copper Beak, whose confession to H Bonciu is rendered as a detailed story.

When read as a camouflaged record of actual events in H Bonciu's life, the novel reveals his claims about having been a witness to Vienna's artistic life under the Double Monarchy: Viennese writers such as Altenberg, Petzold, Wildgans, Peter Hille, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig appear as characters, and Endre Ady is a literary prototype.

Holban gave praise to the work as a source of "delight", and first suggested that H Bonciu belonged in the same category as Louis-Ferdinand Celine or Axel Munthe.