Alexandru Toma

Alexandru Toma (occasionally known as A. Toma, born Solomon Moscovici; February 11, 1875 – August 15, 1954) was a Romanian poet, journalist and translator, known for his communist views and his role in introducing Socialist Realism to Romanian literature. Having debuted as a Symbolist, Toma was influenced by 19th-century writer Mihai Eminescu, an admiration which came to characterize his entire work. The official poet during the early years of the Communist regime and appointed a full member of the Romanian Academy, he is considered by many commentators to have actually been a second-shelf writer, with a problematic legacy.

Toma was, alongside novelist Mihail Sadoveanu, one of the literary figures whose writings were associated with the early years of Communism in Romania. Officials equated him with Eminescu, whose lyrical poems he would often adapt to the Socialist Realist guidelines, replacing their pessimism with an officially endorsed uplifting message. His other writings included positive portrayals of Stakhanovite workers, praises of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, as well as poems for children. Supported by the regime and widely publicized until shortly before his death, he fell out of favor and his work was gradually marginalized during the final years of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej's rule.

He was the father of Sorin Toma, a Romanian Communist Party activist and journalist himself noted for his commitment to Socialist Realism, as well as for his officially endorsed attacks on the influential poet Tudor Arghezi. Alexandru Toma's nephew, Virgiliu Moscovici-Monda, was himself a Symbolist poet.

Biography

Early life and career The future Alexandru Toma was born into a Jewish family in Urziceni, where his father Leibu Moscovici worked as a grocer. Leibu's other son, Zeilic, fathered Virgiliu Moscovici, who also pursued a career in literature during the interwar period, publishing several of his works under the pen name Virgiliu Monda.

Toma completed his secondary education in the industrial city of Ploiești, after which he graduated in Letters and Philosophy from the University of Bucharest. He qualified as a history and philosophy teacher, and was employed as such by several schools in Bucharest, including Basarab and Saint Sava colleges. His poetic work, and his first translations from foreign authors, were published by Lumea Ilustrată magazine. He was using the pen name Endymon. He was notably present (in 1897) on the writing staff of Noutatea, published in Iași by Avram Steuerman-Rodion and various others. Toma was progressively involved with the far left circles and the Romanian Kingdom's labor movement. However, in 1897, he is known to have authored a Romanian-language translation of poems by Elisabeth of Wied, the wife of King Carol I—this detail was later expunged from his official biographies. In his own recollections, Toma admitted having met the Queen-consort and, in her entourage, the celebrated dramatist Ion Luca Caragiale.

Toma's literary debut was associated with Symbolism, and critics traditionally include him among the "proletarian" wing of the Romanian Symbolist movement. In 1902, he began corresponding with Symbolist poet Elena Farago, whose career he closely followed; Moscovici-Monda also adopted Symbolism, representing its late stages in local literature. By the early 1910s, Toma had also been published by the prestigious Iași review, Viața Românească. By 1912, he was exploring Romanian nationalist themes, deploring the fate of Romanians in the Bessarabia Governorate in a doina "for our lost brothers".

Shortly after World War I, Toma returned with a translation from Molière's Tartuffe, published in 1918, and staged by the National Theatre Bucharest a year later. In 1925, Viața Românească released his brochure Zi de vară până'n seară ("One Full Summer's Day"). Toma's first edition of collected works, bearing the title Poezii ("Poems"), was published by Editura Cultura Națională in 1926. The volume was paid for by Toma's friends and collaborators, but received much critical interest, and was positively reviewed by modernist theorist Eugen Lovinescu in his History of Contemporary Romanian Literature. It earned Toma the Romanian Academy's Ion Heliade Rădulescu Award. As his wife Sidy later recounted to Communist Party officials, both she and her husband helped hide Party members in their home during the interwar period, when the movement had been outlawed. She also noted that it was Alexandru Toma who introduced his son Sorin to Marxism. In Romania, the fascist and antisemitic National Legionary government expelled Toma from the Romanian Writers' Society (SSR), together with all other Jewish members (October 1940). Later, the Ion Antonescu dictatorship included both Alexandru Toma and Moscovici-Monda on a nationally circulated list of banned Jewish authors.

Official endorsement Alexandru Toma's moment of preeminence occurred by the time he was in his seventies, when the newly established Communist regime came to promote him as a paramount representative of Proletkult literature and as the greatest Romanian poet alive. He was readmitted into the reformed SSR during September 1947, shortly after an inner purge of writers perceived as fascist. This review coincided with a cultural campaign partly replicating the Soviet Zhdanov Doctrine, during which Romanian culture was purged of influences deemed reactionary (see Socialist realism in Romania). Thus, Toma's works were for the first time introduced in the school textbooks, where, alongside those by Communist short story writer Alexandru Sahia and the left-leaning novelist Sadoveanu, they stood as the sole samples of 20th-century Romanian literature. The three figures were also among the few interwar authors to be frequented by official works of criticism. Both he and Sadoveanu, together presiding over the 1949 establishment of a politicized Writers' Union, were paid homage with special festivities, which, according to literary critic Florin Mihăilescu, evidenced a personality cult equivalent only to those of Joseph Stalin and local Party leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. The regime also awarded Toma its State Prize First Class for Poetry.

Virtually all of Toma's literary contributions were published in one volume, titled Cîntul vieții ("The Song of Life") and prefaced by the Communist essayist Ion Vitner, which went through three editions between 1950 and 1954. According to literary historian Ion Simuț, the 1951 print reached 15,000 copies, which was exceptional for its time. Also unusually for the period, the book was also circulated abroad, in state-sponsored translations (Hungarian in 1955 and 1955, German and Russian in 1956; an English-language translation saw print in 1951). In addition to Cîntul vieții, some of Toma's poetry was collected in Poezii alese ("Selected Poems"), published in 1952 and 1953. The original edition featured a preface by Sergiu Fărcășan, and was printed in 10,150 copies, while the second one, issued for schoolchildren by the specialized publisher Editura Tineretului, reached 30,000 copies. His works for children were featured in various separate editions. and contributed to a 1956 anthology of poems translated from the work of Heinrich Heine.

A peak in Alexandru Toma's career occurred on February 14, 1950, when the Romanian Academy celebrated his 75th birthday (with a three-day delay). The occasion was marked by the speeches of Academy President Traian Săvulescu, literary historian George Călinescu, and Mihai Beniuc, and culminated with the poet's own address. Toma, who displayed a dose of self-criticism over various moments of weakness in his career, underlined his own role in "the careful, masterful, cultivation of a renewed, simple, clear form, well-suited to Socialist Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism." The last words of his speech were comments on Stalin and the Soviet claim to stand against nuclear armament: "Only the titan-like hands of Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, as a trustee of his people and of the entire human race, can stop the monstrous atom bomb in flight, can envelop it, can suffocate it, can extinguish it." In 1952, some of Toma's poems were published in the volume Poezie nouă în R.P.R. ("New Poetry in the P[eople's] R[epublic of] R[omania]"), together with those of Anatol E. Baconsky, Maria Banuș, Dan Deșliu, Mihu Dragomir, Eugen Frunză, Ștefan Iureș, Eugen Jebeleanu, Veronica Porumbacu and twenty-four others.

In the 7th grade textbook of 1953, local literature was represented by twelve writers: alongside the writers considered classics before and since (Eminescu, Ion Luca Caragiale, Alexandru Vlahuță, Grigore Alexandrescu, George Coșbuc, Vasile Alecsandri, Ion Creangă, Nicolae Bălcescu and Sadoveanu himself), Toma, Sahia and Dumitru Theodor Neculuță were selected for their political convictions. Toma was not allocated as much space as Eminescu and Sadoveanu, but his entry matched those on Caragiale and Alecsandri. Official endorsement of Toma's work continued in 1953–1954, when the Romanian regime reacted against the first generation of Socialist realists by imposing the cultural doctrines of Georgy Malenkov.

Late in life, Toma headed Editura de stat pentru literatură și artă, an official publishing house tasked with enforcing the main editorial policies, and, according to philologist and memoirist Gheorghe Pienescu, was "its last (or so I thought) dogmatic Stalinist director." One of the last campaigns which made use of his poems was the 1953 World Festival of Youth and Students, hosted in Bucharest. Toma died in Bucharest the following year, his body cremated at Cenușa Society. According to another contemporary voice, that of essayist Constantin Șăineanu, Toma was in fact outlining a slightly pessimistic worldview. As depicted by Toma, mankind was wasting its energies in the vain search for salvation and beauty. Still, Toma did not see human suffering as an inescapable reality, but wrote:

Noting the similarities between Toma's concepts and the ideas voiced, in the same generation, by poet Haralamb Lecca, Lovinescu argued that Poezii evidenced "a great and honest professional consciousness, an inspiration of intellectual quality, laid out in impeccable volutes".

Communist verse Early in the 1950s, Toma was especially known for poems illustrating the communist regime's ideological priorities. According to Ion Simuț, Cîntul vieții, whose title alluded to "the necessity of optimistically singing hymns to life and completely ignoring the theme of death", was a repository for "opportunistic literature" and "all sorts of clichés." One writing in this series, the 1950 Silvester Andrei salvează abatajul ("Silvester Andrei Rescues the Coal Face"), depicted Stakhanovite socialist emulation and heroic self-sacrifice, while alluding to inter-ethnic brotherhood among mine workers. Part of it read:

Some of his works dealt with moments that the Communist regime considered emblematic, such as the October Revolution, the Grivița Strike of 1933, and World War II Soviet entry into Romania. Eminescu's work was therefore not made available to the public in its entirety, while some of the Romantic poems of his youth were presented as evidence that he was actually progressive and a believer in class struggle.

One of Eminescu's most famous poems, Glossă, dominated by skepticism and recommending aloofness, opened with the lyrics:

Toma, whom the regime often described as a new Eminescu, Historian Vladimir Tismăneanu, who referred to Toma as "the official bard of the Stalinist epoch in Romania", described him as "a poet of meager talent but huge ambitions". Also according to Lucian Boia, Toma's belonging to one of Romania's ethnic minorities was of further interest to the regime, at a time when proletarian internationalism was highlighted in official discourse: "the recourse to 'other nationalities' seemed to the new masters as an ideal method to crush the traditional cultural patterns." the poet himself was fading out of official discourse by the moment of his death. He happened to die in August, at a time when the regime was preparing to celebrate the 10th anniversary of an event which it considered its founding moment, the King Michael Coup of 1944. It was largely as a result of this that his obituary was not featured on the front page of cultural magazines such as Contemporanul, and its text was both cut short and less complimentary than many previous articles. In 1984, under Ceaușescu's national communist leadership, literary critic Mircea Scarlat spoke of "illogical overbidding" in respect to Toma's encouragement during the 1950s. Also according to Scarlat, Marin Sorescu, a critically acclaimed poet who debuted in the post-1955 years, was "irritated by the method" of official poets such as Toma and Eugen Frunză, and contributed ironic pastiches of their work. Toma's Cîntecul bradului enjoyed more genuine success, and was famous for a while. According to Ovid Crohmălniceanu, the dissenting communist and literary critic, the younger Toma simply acted on his father's "senile ambition" to replace Arghezi as the nation's leading poet. The episode had a perverse effect in liberal circles: Crohmălniceanu claims that he himself avoided ever citing Toma in his critical columns.

Arghezi's eventual rehabilitation, Florin Mihăilescu writes, came as both "an immediate effect" of Alexandru Toma's death and a sign of "progressive Destalinization." Sorin Toma also fell out of favor with the Communist Party (of whose Central Committee he had been a member in 1949–1960). Speaking during the 1950s, he indicated that he had since come to "understand" the poet, and that he had been helped in this "by the lesson of the times".

Boia argued that other samples of Călinescu's address may have been evidence of "mockery", hidden among eulogistic arguments—while noting that these did little to shadow his role in promoting Toma as a major poet, and that his overall attitude reminded one of "doublethink" (a concept coined by George Orwell in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four).

In the same context, Călinescu himself endorsed the parallel drawn between Alexandru Toma and Eminescu, while comparing the difference between their attitudes on life to Toma's advantage. Boia considered this stance especially problematic, given that the speaker was, at the time, the undisputed authority on Eminescu, and "the greatest literary critic alive". The revised edition of his History of Romanian Literature, written during the 1960s and republished by Alexandru Piru in 1982, included an abrupt mention of Toma, simply indicating his family and place of birth. According to Lucian Boia, this was Călinescu's way of "avenging his own cowardice from the years when he had contributed to launching 'the new Eminescu'."