37 Facts About Mihai Eminescu

Mihai Eminescu was an active member of the Junimea literary society and worked as an editor for the newspaper Timpul, the official newspaper of the Conservative Party.

Mihai Eminescu's poetry was first published when he was 16 and he went to Vienna, Austria to study when he was 19.

Mihai Eminescu's father was Gheorghe Eminovici, an aristocrat from Bukovina, which was then part of the Austrian Empire.

Mihai Eminescu crossed the border into Moldavia, settling in Ipotesti, near the town of Botosani.

Mihai Eminescu married Raluca Iurascu, an heiress of an old noble family.

Mihai Eminescu was the seventh of the eleven children of Gheorghe Eminovici and Raluca Jurascu.

Mihai Eminescu spent his early childhood in Botosani and Ipotesti, in his parents family home.

Mihai Eminescu finished 4th grade as the 5th of 82 students, after which he attended two years of gymnasium.

Mihai Eminescu paid his rent by translating hundreds of pages of a book by Heinrich Theodor Rotscher, although this never resulted in a completed work.

Mihai Eminescu renewed ties to his family; his father promised him a regular allowance to pursue studies in Vienna in the fall.

From October 1869 to 1872 Mihai Eminescu studied at the University of Vienna.

Mihai Eminescu was active in student life, befriended Ioan Slavici, and came to know Vienna through Veronica Micle; he became a contributor to Convorbiri Literare, edited by Junimea.

In 1870 Mihai Eminescu wrote three articles under the pseudonym "Varro" in Federatiunea in Pest, on the situation of Romanians and other minorities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Mihai Eminescu then became a journalist for the newspaper Albina in Pest.

Mihai Eminescu was a good friend of Ion Creanga, a writer, whom he convinced to become a writer and introduced to the Junimea literary club.

Mihai Eminescu opposed this and another clause of the Treaty of Berlin: Romania's having to give southern Bessarabia to Russia in exchange for Northern Dobruja, a former Ottoman province on the Black Sea.

In 1886, Mihai Eminescu suffered a nervous breakdown and was treated by Romanian doctors, in particular Julian Bogdan and Panait Zosin.

Professor Doctor Irinel Popescu, corresponding member of the Romanian Academy and president of the Academy of Medical Sciences of Romania, states that Mihai Eminescu died because of mercury poisoning.

Mihai Eminescu says that the poet was "treated" by a group of incompetent doctors and held in misery, which shortened his life.

Mihai Eminescu's last wish was a glass of milk, which the attending doctor slipped through the metallic peephole of the "cell" where he spent the last hours of his life.

Contemporary specialists, primarily physicians who have dealt with the Mihai Eminescu case, reject both hypotheses on the cause of death of the poet.

Mihai Eminescu was wrongly diagnosed and treated, aiming his removal from public life, as some eminescologists claim.

Mihai Eminescu was diagnosed since 1886 by Dr Julian Bogdan from Iasi as syphilitic, paralytic and on the verge of dementia due to alcohol abuse and syphilitic gummas emerged on the brain.

Mihai Eminescu is unanimously celebrated as the greatest and most representative Romanian poet.

Mihai Eminescu was only 20 when Titu Maiorescu, the top literary critic in Romania, dubbed him "a real poet", in an essay where only a handful of the Romanian poets of the time were spared Maiorescu's harsh criticism.

Mihai Eminescu defined himself as a Romantic, in a poem addressed To My Critics, and this designation, his untimely death as well as his bohemian lifestyle had him associated with the Romantic figure of the genius.

Mihai Eminescu's life was a continuous oscillation between introvert and extrovert attitudes.

In reality, just as one can discover from his poems and letters and just as Caragiale remembered, Mihai Eminescu was seldom influenced by boisterous subconscious motivations.

Mihai Eminescu's life was but an overlap of different-sized cycles, made of sudden bursts that were nurtured by dreams and crises due to the impact with reality.

Mihai Eminescu used to have a unique manner of describing his own crisis of jealousy.

Mihai Eminescu was proclaimed Romania's national poet, not because he wrote in an age of national revival, but rather because he was received as an author of paramount significance by Romanians in all provinces.

Mihai Eminescu's statues are everywhere; his face was on the 1000-lei banknotes issued in 1991,1992, and 1998, and is on the 500-lei banknote issued in 2005 as the highest-denominated Romanian banknote ; Eminescu's Linden Tree is one of the country's most famous natural landmarks, while many schools and other institutions are named after him.

Several young Romanian writers provoked a huge scandal when they wrote about their demystified idea of Mihai Eminescu and went so far as to reject the "official" interpretation of his work.

In 2004, the Mihai Eminescu Statue was erected in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

In 2021, the Dutch artist Kasper Peters performs a theater show entitled "Mihai Eminescu", dedicated to the poet.

In May 2024, the first Mihai Eminescu sculpture was opened in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan.

In Muntenia, there are 21 such monuments, while in Oltenia Mihai Eminescu is commemorated through 11 busts.