49 Facts About Paul Zarifopol

Paul Zarifopol was a Romanian literary and social critic, essayist, and literary historian.

Paul Zarifopol was a confidant and publisher of the Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale, building his theories on Caragiale's already trenchant appraisals of Romanian society and culture.

Paul Zarifopol was a noted censurer of neoclassical trends, of philistinism, and of inauthentic customs, advocating renewal, but not revolution.

In such venues, Paul Zarifopol defended his cosmopolitan philosophy against other philologists, but against the emerging neotraditionalists at Gandirea journal.

Paul Zarifopol viewed modern traditionalism as a fabrication and, with his essays, came out as a non-traditionalist and anti-totalitarian conservative thinker.

On his mother's Culiano side, Paul Zarifopol was related to prestigious literary and political figures.

The elder Paul Zarifopol managed the estates of Moldavian Prince Mihail Sturdza in Cristesti.

Paul Zarifopol eventually bought for himself the baroque manor and Sturdza property at Carligi, near Roman, then a townhouse in Iasi, where he and Stamatiu-Culianu managed Borta Rece tavern.

Paul Zarifopol Sr died in 1881, leaving Stamatiu in charge of family affairs.

Paul Zarifopol made his published debut in Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol's Arhiva in 1897, with a review of a historiographic work by Marie Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville.

Paul Zarifopol took a doctorate at the University of Halle in 1904, with a dissertation on trouvere Richard de Fournival.

Paul Zarifopol was an atheist; Fany was Jewish, and, like Paul Zarifopol, a religious nonconformist.

Until Caragiale's death in 1912, he and Paul Zarifopol pursued a steady correspondence.

From 1908 to 1911, Paul Zarifopol contributed to the Munich-based Suddeutsche Monatshefte.

Co-opted by the latter to write for Viata Romaneasca, Paul Zarifopol made himself known for sarcastic comments about modernist literature, describing Proust, Gide, and Cocteau as difficult "boys and children".

For much of that interval, Paul Zarifopol was a literary contributor for Tudor Arghezi's Cronica, but did not necessarily share the magazine's radical stances, nor its anti-war "Germanophilia".

Paul Zarifopol supported himself by turning to regular journalism, but still had trouble making ends meet, and made efforts to keep away from the centers of culture, living mostly in provincial Sinaia.

Paul Zarifopol, sometimes using the pen names PZ and Anton Gherman, returned as one of the main columnists at Viata Romaneasca and its satellite, Adevarul Literar si Artistic.

In 1924, Paul Zarifopol informed his protectors that he now had "a holy terror of officialdom", and that he resented Iasi for its support for the National-Christian Defense League, a form of "nationalist imbecility and charlatanry".

Didactic and social art, Paul Zarifopol contended, had no real artistic value, and politics were irrelevant in assessing the quality of artistic endeavor.

Paul Zarifopol's dissidence was admonished by other Viata Romaneasca veterans Ibraileanu and Mihai Ralea.

The magazine's literary columnists even accused Paul Zarifopol of committing a "crime" against taste at Adevarul Literar si Artistic, where Paul Zarifopol was introducing aestheticist guidelines, albeit with contributions that remained "interesting and profound".

Paul Zarifopol eventually moved to Bucharest in 1928, taking up residence on Strada Spatarului, Mosilor.

Paul Zarifopol carried on with his lampoons of traditionalism, publishing, in 1932, an especially mordant portrait of historian Vasile Parvan, Plicticoase fantome.

Paul Zarifopol was involved with Criterion, a debate club for political and cultural factions, one of the "old men" who were called upon as both arbiters and active participants.

In 1933, Paul Zarifopol was named editor-in-chief of Revista Fundatiilor Regale, the official literary magazine, which was largely conceived by him.

Once settled in his role as art for art's sake advocate, Paul Zarifopol created himself a confrontational niche, earning both respect and bewilderment from his readers.

Paul Zarifopol attributed such traits to Zarifopol's familiarity with "two sophistic races", Greeks and Jews, his claim in turn criticized by Ralea and philosopher Mircea Florian for its racialist undertones.

Florian discussed the constructive side of Paul Zarifopol's work, arguing that accusations of "bourgeois anarchism" and "iconoclasm" were prejudiced.

Eugen Lovinescu, the modernist literary theorist, shared Paul Zarifopol's overall aesthetic goals, but not his methods: Paul Zarifopol, he writes, was an unlikely follower of Titu Maiorescu's non-didactic school of "aesthetic autonomy" and authenticity, which had emerged at Junimea in the 1860s, and had influenced Caragiale.

Similarly, Sevastos notes that Paul Zarifopol was "wavery" when it came to the hierarchies of Romanian literature, being mistaken about not just Minulescu, but Ion Vinea and Pamfil Seicaru, whom he regarded as great humorists.

Calinescu believes that Paul Zarifopol was most "intelligent" in his essays on Proust and Gustave Flaubert, where he overcame his usual "journalistic banality".

Paul Zarifopol preferred archaic Moldavian forms, that he found resonating in the poetry of Dosoftei and Vasile Alecsandri.

Balota finds Paul Zarifopol a "suppressed scholar", "in denial of his formative background".

Calinescu was unimpressed by Paul Zarifopol's "rather belated" satire of bourgeois mores, since "the bourgeois is no longer that ridiculous conservative figure".

Yet, Paul Zarifopol was not entirely anti-middle class: he believed his type of "cold lucidity" was primarily an in-built antidote to the decay of the "colossal civilization" that was liberal society.

Paul Zarifopol criticizes both Francophilia and Germanophilia, noting that, although competing, they each supported deindividuation: the former, through corporatism; the latter, through militarism.

Paul Zarifopol contended that intellectuals were an illusory social class, but still collectively responsible for the failures of a society such as Romania's.

Paul Zarifopol took distance from more radical antiintelectualist stances, communist as well as Christian; but noted that natural disunity between intellectuals meant that communist terrorism was itself an intellectuals' affair.

Evidence exists that, beyond this public persona, Paul Zarifopol was more illiberal.

In 1932, writer Barbu Brezianu suggested that Zarifopol was on the "far-right" of Romanian literature, in the "grand conservative party" of D Nanu, Cincinat Pavelescu, Mihail Sadoveanu, and Al.

Paul Zarifopol Jr spent seventeen years as a political prisoner under the communist regime, being released with a general amnesty in 1964.

Sonia Paul Zarifopol, who never married, was a lover of literature and, in the 1930s, a discreet presence at Lovinescu's Sburatorul society.

Paul Zarifopol kept her father's entire collection of manuscripts and documents, now housed at the Museum of Romanian Literature.

Paul Zarifopol died in 1981, and her brother three years later; neither had children of their own.

George Paul Zarifopol's son, Constantin Radu "Dinu", was a published novelist.

Paul Zarifopol was joined there by her sister Christina Zarifopol-Illias, who organized the Bloomington Romanian Studies Program.

The critical reappraisal of Paul Zarifopol, begun by Eugen Simion in 1956, was taken up in the 1980s by Paleologu and Marin Mincu.

Reviewer Adrian Oprina describes Paleologu himself as a Paul Zarifopol disciple, noting that the Paul Zarifopol was "a spiritual parent for young people in the 1930s [though] one whose parentage was originally denied by them".