63 Facts About Urmuz

Urmuz's scattered work, consisting of absurdist short prose and poetry, opened a new genre in Romanian letters and humor, and captured the imagination of modernists for several generations.

Urmuz has notably been read as a satirist of public life in the 1910s, an unlikely conservative and nostalgic, or an emotionally distant esotericist.

Urmuz had numerous other siblings, of whom most were daughters.

The future Urmuz was born in the northern Muntenian town of Curtea de Arges, and, at age five, spent one year in Paris with his parents.

Ionescu-Buzau's family had artistic interests, and Urmuz grew up with a fascination for classical music and fine art, learning to play the piano and taking up amateur oil painting.

Urmuz got along best with his mother, who was a pianist.

Some years later, while enrolled at the Gheorghe Lazar National College, Urmuz turned his interest toward mocking the severity of his teachers and challenging the dominance of artistic traditionalism.

One such early episode is attested by Ciprian: amused by the creation of a Vivat Dacia association of nationalist students, Urmuz subverted its meetings, and, with deadpan snark, suggested that membership fees should be paid in duck heads.

Also according to Ciprian, these events soon lost their shock value, leading him and Urmuz to "take to the streets", where they began their activity as pranksters.

Reportedly, Urmuz approached his seniors training at seminaries or other traditionalist institutions, earned their attention by claiming to share the nationalist agenda, and then began reciting them nonsense lyrics such as an evolving draft of his mock-fable "The Chroniclers".

Urmuz enrolled at the Bucharest Medical School, allegedly after pressures from his stern father.

Urmuz eventually entered the University of Bucharest Faculty of Law, which was to be his alma mater, while taking lectures in composition and counterpoint at the Music and Declamation Conservatory.

Urmuz continued to take the initiative in daring acts of epater le bourgeois.

Urmuz then proceeded to pester the street vendors, stopping over to buy a random assortment of useless items: pretzels, a pile of charcoal, and an old hen which he impaled on his walking cane.

Ciprian tells of having discovered the writer in Urmuz, and popularizing this and other stories in his own circle of intellectuals.

Urmuz's texts were probably spread around in handwritten copies, becoming somewhat familiar to Bucharest's bohemian society, but Urmuz himself was still an anonymous figure.

Around 1916, Urmuz had obtained a relocation, as judge in the Muntenian town of Alexandria.

Urmuz was again in Bucharest, working as grefier at the High Court of Cassation and Justice; sources disagree on whether this appointment dated from 1918 or earlier.

Urmuz was thus the first avant-garde writer popularized by Arghezi, in a list which, by 1940, came to include a large section of the younger Romanian modernists.

Arghezi later wrote that his relationship with Urmuz was difficult, especially since the grefier panicked that the establishment would discover his other career: "he feared that the Cassation Court would better detect him as Urmuz than under his own name".

Urmuz bribed [the printers] to change phrases and words that I had to put back into place, as previous editorial interventions were for sure better than his.

Urmuz proposed headlining it with the additional title Bizarre Pages.

On November 23,1923, Urmuz shot himself, an event which remains shrouded in mystery.

Urmuz's death occurred in a public location, described as being close to Kiseleff Road in northern Bucharest.

At around that time, Urmuz took his one real trip as an adult civilian, visiting the Budaki Lagoon in Bessarabia.

Shortly after his death, Urmuz's work was linked to the emergence of avant-garde rebellion throughout Europe, and in particular to the rise of Romania's own modernist scene: writing in 2007, Paul Cernat describes this version of events as a "founding myth" of Romanian avant-garde literature.

In 2002 however, scholar Adrian Lacatus revised this thesis, arguing that it had created a "blockage" in critical reception, and that the actual Urmuz had more complex views on the avant-garde.

The contact with Futurism, although acknowledged by Urmuz, is judged by many of his commentators as superficial and delayed.

Various authors have suggested that Urmuz was actually a radical conservative, whose vehemence against platitude in art only camouflaged a basic conventionalism.

Urmuz noted that Urmuz was one of "the great grimacing sensitive" Wallachians, a "Balkan" succession which includes Hristache the Baker, Anton Pann, Ion Minulescu, Mateiu Caragiale, Ion Barbu and Arghezi.

The image of a folkloric Urmuz was after taken up by other critics, including Eugenio Coseriu and Crohmalniceanu.

Ciprian noted that Urmuz was unlike the "cheeky, daring, disorganized" pranksters whom he superficially resembled, that nothing in Urmuz's exterior gave the impression that he was in any way "spoiled".

Crohmalniceanu sees in the Bizarre Pages indication of a "singular" and tragic experience, while Geo Serban argues that Urmuz's "verve" comes from destructive pressures on his own psychology.

Urmuz was described as an equivalent of Anglophone nonsense writers.

In Crohmalniceanu's view, the antiliterary "device" Urmuz invented is impersonal and regulated, in the manner of Dada "readymades", but as such ingenious and therefore inimitable.

In Boz's interpretation, Urmuz was not at all a humorist, but rather one who issued a solitary "call to order" and, creating a "magical phenomenon", elevated his reader above the realities of the flesh.

Urmuz first discussed the connection between the Bizarre Pages and 1930s Surrealism, which likewise turned its attention to the abnormal psychology, to "psychosis" and "dementia".

Urmuz the aphorist genuinely trusted that the "Soul" of the world was a unity of opposites, and, inspired by the philosophy of Henri Bergson, spoke of a "universal vital flux".

Lacatus and others suggest that Urmuz's worldview is the modern correspondent of Gnosticism and Manichaeism: in one of the manuscripts he left behind, Urmuz speculates about there being two Gods, one good and one evil.

Contrarily, Boz found that Urmuz was "the poet of transcendental absurdity", "the reformer of Romanian poetry", and the counterpart of Romania's national poet, Mihai Eminescu.

The Eminescu-Urmuz comparison, which put aside all their differences in style and vision, was a favorite of avant-garde authors, and, late in the century, served to inspire sympathetic academics such as Marin Mincu.

Urmuz's own note to the text apologizes for this, explaining that the names' "musicality" is more suited to the two fictional characters than to their real-life models, and suggesting that the company should change name.

In "Ismail and Turnavitu", Urmuz further explores the bizarre in its everyday settings.

Urmuz then offers his body to the workers, in hopes of thus resolving "the labor issue".

Urmuz's story has been variously described as his praise of artistic freedom, and more precisely as an ironic take on his own biography as a failed musician.

Two samples of Urmuz's prose have been traditionally seen as his secondary, less relevant, contributions.

Urmuz argues that such a melancholy and lonely diarist is in contrast with Urmuz's literary persona, as known from the Bizarre Pages.

Ion Pop, commenting on Urmuz's hypertextuality, assumes that the "pelican and pouchbill" motif comes from a book once used as teaching aid.

Urmuz suggests that the passion and hunger which ties together the various characters is in fact the thirst for freedom, for movement and for exotic settings: "Rapaport" is the Wandering Jew, Aristotle is the mentor of a great conqueror, and Galilei is invoked for his remark "And yet it moves".

Urmuz concludes that the avant-garde "apologetes" were projecting their own expectations into the Bizarre Pages, in which they read the antithesis of "High Romanticism", and into the writer, who became Romanian version of a poete maudit.

Urmuz followed Urmuz's deceptive "novel" genre of "The Funnel and Stamate", which became a characteristic of works by other Contimporanul writers: Felix Aderca, F Brunea-Fox, Filip Corsa, Sergiu Dan and Romulus Dianu.

Several critics have nevertheless revised this verdict, noting that Costin's work builds on distinct sources, Urmuz being just one.

Pana and Bogza visited the unpublished archive, which gave them a chance to acknowledge, but to silence, the more conventional and antisemitic Urmuz revealed through the aphorisms.

The channels of communication once opened, Urmuz came to be discussed with unexpected sympathy by Perpessicius, Calinescu and other noted cultural critics, consolidating his reputation as a writer.

Calinescu's attitude was particularly relevant: the condescending but popularizing portrayal of Urmuz, which became part of Calinescu's 1941 companion to Romanian literature, was first sketched in his literary magazine Capricorn and his 1938 university lectures.

Meanwhile, a blunt negation of Urmuz's contribution was restated by the academic figure Pompiliu Constantinescu, who nevertheless commented favorably on the writer's "ingeniousness".

Eugen Lovinescu, another mainstream literary theorist, angered the avant-garde by generally ignoring Urmuz, but made note of Ciprian's readings "from Hurmuz's repertoire" at the Sburatorul literary sessions.

The ensuing scandal was amplified by the young Dadaists and Surrealists, who took the rumor to be true: Avramescu-Uranus, himself accused of plagiarizing Urmuz, made an ironic reference to this fact in a 1929 contribution to Bilete de Papagal.

The entirety of Urmuz's work was republished in English by writer Miron Grindea and his wife Carola, in ADAM Review.

From his new home in Hawaii, Romanian writer Stefan Baciu, whose own poetry borrows from Urmuz, further popularized the Bizarre Pages with Boz's assistance.

Inside the meta- and autofictional group known as the Targoviste School, Urmuz's style was mainly perpetuated by Mircea Horia Simionescu.

Dissident poet Mircea Dinescu paid homage to Urmuz, imitating his style in one of his addresses to the communist censors.

In 2011, two separate operatic renditions of Urmuz's work were showcased by Bucharest's SIMN Festival.