50 Facts About Paul Georgescu

Paul Georgescu was born in Tandarei, a commune on the Baragan.

Paul Georgescu was a political prisoner of the Antonescu regime, said to have been because he had given shelter to a Soviet spy.

Paul Georgescu was, according to legend, sentenced to death by the authorities before turning nineteen, but managed to evade execution.

Paul Georgescu was rapporteur at the 1956 Writers' Union Congress, during which the Communist Party, using Stalinist rhetoric, condemned the cultural aspects of De-Stalinization as "formalism" and "vulgar sociologism".

Paul Georgescu's texts, offering endorsement to the Romanian Socialist Realist current, were published as Incercari critice.

Paul Georgescu, who took over for Stancu as editor, published articles in the other venues of the Socialist Realist press: Contemporanul, Viata Romaneasca and the PCR platform Scinteia.

Paul Georgescu assumed a first-hand position in directing and promoting a young generation of writers during 1952, when he became one of the main lecturers at the newly founded School of Literature, a Writers' Union venture.

At that stage, Calinescu recalls, Paul Georgescu developed a fondness for both him the young modernist poet Nichita Stanescu, as well as with their literary friends Cezar Baltag, Nicolae Breban, Grigore Hagiu, Modest Morariu and Petre Stoica.

Paul Georgescu is believed to have had a similar role in the careers of Matei Calinescu and Calinescu's Gazeta Literara companions, as well as in those of Stefan Banulescu and Marin Preda.

Paul Georgescu continued to play an important part in launching the careers of young writers.

Between 1976 and 1986, Paul Georgescu was in correspondence with Ion Simut, an aspiring critic whom the educational system of the day had assigned to a schoolteacher's position in the remote commune of Tetchea, Bihor County.

Paul Georgescu helped Simut publish his contributions in Bucharest journals, personally intervening with editors.

Paul Georgescu was in the meantime engaged in a rivalry with some main figures of the neorealist tendency, who were traditionally closer to the Ceausescu regime: Preda, Eugen Barbu, Petru Dumitriu and Titus Popovici.

Paul Georgescu published two other novels: Inainte de tacere and Doctorul Poenaru, followed in 1977 by Revelion.

Paul Georgescu had a malformation of the vertebral column and was already walking with a limp; in old age, his limbs were affected by ankylosis, which greatly reduced his mobility, and he developed a tendency for obesity.

Virstele ratiunii, a book of interviews Paul Georgescu granted to poet Florin Mugur, was published in 1982.

At that time, Paul Georgescu was cultivating some apolitical or anti-communist authors of modernist or avant-garde literature, preferring them over the revival of nationalist and traditionalist literature in Ceausescu's Romania.

Paul Georgescu became interested in the works of a new subversive and lyrical generation of writers, collectively known as Optzecisti, playing a special part in the promotion of their representatives Stefan Agopian and Mircea Cartarescu.

In 1984, Paul Georgescu finished the first of his novels having for a common setting Huzurei.

Paul Georgescu died in October 1989, some two months before the Romanian Revolution toppled communism.

Paul Georgescu was buried on the outskirts of Bucharest, at the cemetery in Straulesti.

Paul Georgescu called attention to supposed attempts at reviving the conservative and neoclassical tenets of the 19th century literary group Junimea through the works of its leader Titu Maiorescu, making similar claims about the legacy of post-Junimist and modernist critic Eugen Lovinescu, founder of Sburatorul review.

Paul Georgescu took a personal part in condemning and marginalizing Negoitescu, describing him as a "reactionary" author who had failed in adopting "the judicious attitude".

Calinescu records how, during meetings with his friends at Casa Capsa and in other contexts, Paul Georgescu refused to talk official literature while openly discussing his admiration for foreign writers whose aesthetic choices or open rejection of Stalinism had made them unpublishable behind the Iron Curtain: Andre Gide, Arthur Koestler, Andre Malraux, Ignazio Silone and Paul Valery.

The distance Paul Georgescu took from the official tenets reflected on his literary choices, a process which ended with his own marginalization.

Paul Georgescu notes how, in 1958, the editor published a "Zhdanovist" essay targeting directly Ion Barbu, which included negative comments on sampled poems, and how it was later revealed to him that this was a covert method to make Barbu's poetry somehow available to the general public.

The positive accounts, conservative critic Dan C Mihailescu notes, gravitate around the perception that Georgescu discreetly criticized Stalinism from the Left Opposition camp, and was a covert adherent to Trotskyism.

Progressively after Nicolae Ceausescu's arrival to power, an event which signaled the start of relative liberalization together with the open encouragement of nationalism, Paul Georgescu responded to the official policies.

At that stage, Bedros Horasangian argues, Paul Georgescu "played along", transforming himself from a "not at all naive or innocent critic and literary ideologue" into a person who acknowledged the change in perspective.

Paul Georgescu was revisiting the legacy of Junimea, contributing the preface to a 1967 complete edition of Maiorescu's essays.

Paul Georgescu was a man so extraordinary, that it was impossible to make an accusation of his militant Marxism.

Paul Georgescu was a Marxist, but he was not a Ceausist.

Paul Georgescu's contemporaries describe his enduring passion for ideological conflict.

Such confrontational stances were reportedly reflected in his regular activities: according to Cosasu, Paul Georgescu reacted to the power regained by the Securitate secret police under Ceausescu, and ridiculed its tactics by circulating political jokes and gossip.

Paul Georgescu reportedly made no secret of his antipathy for Ceausescu himself.

The writer records how Paul Georgescu had ceased his collaboration with Scinteia over this type of ideological differences, and how he showed contempt the radical nationalist discourse promoted by Eugen Barbu's Luceafarul and Saptamina or by Adrian Paunescu's Flacara.

Paul Georgescu had an increasingly hostile relationship with Marin Preda, whom he allegedly suspected of having joined the nationalist circles after publishing the novels Delirul and Cel mai iubit dintre pamanteni.

Calinescu notes that, although himself dissatisfied with life under Ceausescu, Paul Georgescu was "angered" by news that his former employee had defected and settled in the United States, and had come to see Calinescu's action as determined by his distant kinship with nationalist philosopher Mircea Vulcanescu.

Cosasu, who had by then grown disillusioned with communism, recalls having engaged his friend about the need to repent, a point Paul Georgescu received with amusement, and, as a stated atheist, sarcastically compared with belief in the Last Judgment.

Paul Georgescu casually referred to Alain Robbe-Grillet, the French Nouveau Roman author, as Rochie-Fripta, in turn a word-by-word translation of the humorous homonym robe grille.

Paul Georgescu integrated such names in his regular speech, creating a secret system of references that his closest friends were required to learn.

Radu Cosasu notes that, although he considered himself one of the neorealists, Paul Georgescu rejected works by the realist greats.

Paul Georgescu is commonly believed to have been stimulated by the novels of George Calinescu.

Particularly during the 1960s, Georgescu blended these sources with influences from the trends of 20th century French literature: the Nouveau Roman of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean-Paul Sartre's Marxist existentialism.

Paul Georgescu was at the time taking his examples from "engaged authors" such as Sartre and Andre Malraux, resenting the independent road taken by Albert Camus.

Paul Georgescu progressively earned recognition as an author just as he was largely withdrawn from public life.

The recollection aspect in Paul Georgescu's prose was present in other writings of the period, including Doctorul Poenaru, whose eponymous protagonist is his own father.

Paul Georgescu was especially prolific in the final part of his career, when he reputedly identified with the slogan anul si romanul.

The narrator Miron Perieteanu, himself a fictional version of Paul Georgescu, tells the successive stories of Ioan, Luca, Matei and Marcu.

Under anagramed names, Paul Georgescu, Cosasu, Dumitriu, and fellow writers Eugen Barbu, Lucia Demetrius, Victor Eftimiu, Nicolae Labis and Zaharia Stancu are characters in Tineretea unui comisar politic, a novel by the Romanian-born French author Miron Bergmann.