Gheorghe Bogdan-Duică

Gheorghe Bogdan-Duică (born Gheorghe Bogdan; –September 21, 1934) was an Imperial Austrian-born Romanian literary critic. The son of a poor merchant family from Brașov, he attended several universities before launching a career as a critic, first in his native town and then in Czernowitz. Eventually settling in Bucharest, capital of the Romanian Old Kingdom, he managed to earn a university degree before teaching at a succession of high schools. Meanwhile, he continued publishing literary studies as well as intensifying an ardently nationalistic, Pan-Romanian activism. He urged the Romanian government to drop its neutrality policy and enter World War I; once this took place and his adopted home came under German occupation, he found himself arrested and deported to Bulgaria. After the war's conclusion and the union of Transylvania with Romania, he became a literature professor at the newly founded University of Cluj. There, he served as rector in the late 1920s, but found himself increasingly out of touch with modern trends in literature.

Biography

Origins, education and early career He was born in Brașov, in the Transylvania region. Gheorghe Bogdan attended Romanian-language elementary and high school in his native city; his teachers at the latter institution included Ioan Meșotă, Ioan Alexandru Lapedatu, and Andrei Bârseanu. He started publishing criticism at an early age in the Romanian-language newspapers of Transylvania.

Subsequently entering the Austrian province of Bukovina, he settled in its capital of Czernowitz (Cernăuți), where he edited Gazeta Bucovinei from May 1893 to August 1894 and sought to raise popular interest in Romanian writers in a province that was fairly disconnected from the cultural life of the Old Kingdom. Also that year, he wrote a study of the Romanian Orthodox Church's autonomy in the province; while in 1895, he published a volume on Bukovina that was the first to closely analyze its economic, cultural and political profile. For political reasons, he remained there for a period of time following his graduation. From Bucharest, he was one of the chief contributors to Tribuna. His objectives included making the reading public aware of important literature published in the 1880–1888 period; sharply criticizing the pseudo-celebrities of the day; and especially the popularization of aesthetic writings such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Laocoön and Hippolyte Taine's The Philosophy of Art, which had both recently appeared in translation. He also returned to teaching in 1897, first offering German courses in Curtea de Argeș and then moving to Focșani and Galați. By 1899, he was desperate to relocate to the capital, with its rich institutions, worldly attractions, and diverse population. He wrote from Focșani asking his mentor Ioan Bianu to intervene on his behalf with Education Minister Spiru Haret. He was duly appointed to Bucharest's Dimitrie Cantemir High School, where he taught from 1899 to 1909, and finally ended his high school career at Mihai Viteazul High School in the same city, from 1909 to 1919. He eventually became director of the latter institution.

Together with Ioan Russu-Șirianu, he established the Cultural League for the Unity of All Romanians in 1891. He was a member of the "Tribunist" wing (so called after Tribuna) of the Romanian National Party (PNR), which strongly supported publication of the Transylvanian Memorandum. Upon the outbreak of World War I, together with fellow Transylvanians Octavian Goga and Vasile Lucaciu, advocated for neutral Romania's entry into the war on the side of the Allies. Initially held at Săveni, he was taken hostage and deported to Troyan in Bulgaria. Despite his older brother's intercessions on his behalf, he spent nine months in captivity before being freed near the end of the war. He became a titular member of the Romanian Academy in 1919. In 1919, at the first election following the union, he was chosen to represent his university in the Romanian Senate as a member of the Peasants' Party. Although he had led the party's Transylvania wing, he resigned during the acrimonious merger negotiations with the PNR, which led to the creation of the National Peasants' Party in 1926. Subsequently, he migrated to the National Liberal Party.

In a 1922 biography of Ion Ionescu de la Brad, he classified the latter as "the first Romanian peasantist", and synthesized his ideas on "progressive agriculture". He wrote a history of modern Romanian literature in 1923; George Călinescu dismissed this as being without aesthetic taste, calling its author "completely misunderstanding and disoriented". His conservative disposition, stubborn spirit, and scientist and historicist opinions stood in contrast with the poet's mysticism, and his intransigence grew as he aged. By 1931, he was writing a series of defamatory articles called Literatură fără rost (firește de Lucian Blaga) ("Pointless Literature (of Course by Lucian Blaga))", and his death three years later appeared to remove a major obstacle to the hire. According to a later critic, although Bogdan-Duică documented a series of remarkable figures, his cultural references were those of a 19th-century scholar, even though his most important work was written in the 20th century. In April 1892, at Brașov's St. Nicholas Church, he married Maria Done, a teacher of French from Lutran, Alsace. The couple had six children, just one of whom followed a literary career; their second son was the painter Catul Bogdan. Two of the children predeceased their father, with one dying at age 10. Maria died in 1917, while her husband was imprisoned in Bulgaria. After a relatively short interval, he married Constanța (, married Ingescu), who was educated in Sibiu, worked as a teacher in the Old Kingdom, and later headed a kindergarten in Cluj. Chronically poor at managing his money, he nevertheless lived during his Cluj years in a lavish apartment near the city's Central Park that had been requisitioned from a Hungarian owner. In his last years, he built an imposing house in Sibiu, intending to retire there. He died suddenly in a hotel in Brașov, where he was staying as head of a baccalaureate committee; the cause was an aneurysm brought on by diabetes. Taken to Sibiu, where he lay in state in the Astra Palace, his funeral was held at Sibiu Orthodox Cathedral and officiated by Nicolae Bălan. Among the eulogists were Alexandru Lapedatu, Florian Ștefănescu-Goangă, and Nicolae Colan.