Natalia Negru

"Visurile" ("The Dreams"), a 1908 poem that appeared in Sămănătorul, signed "Natalia Iosif" Natalia Negru (December 5, 1882 – September 2, 1962) was a Romanian poet and prose writer. Although her literary contributions were relatively minor, she is noted for being at the center of a love triangle involving her first husband, Ștefan Octavian Iosif, and her second, Dimitrie Anghel. The men were close friends, but Anghel seduced her, she divorced Iosif, who died of his grief, and then Anghel shot himself during a quarrel with her, dying of the wound two weeks later. Two years after Anghel's death, her daughter with Iosif was killed by a German bomb during World War I. She lived for four and a half decades after these turbulent events, in relatively uneventful fashion.

Biography

Early life and first marriage Born in Buciumeni, Tecuci County, her parents were Avram Negru, a teacher, and his wife Elena (née Dumitrescu). Anghel eventually convinced her to move in with him,

Subsequent life and writings In September 1916, shortly after Romania entered World War I, her daughter was killed by shrapnel from a bomb dropped by a Zeppelin. With the Central Powers rapidly approaching Bucharest, she moved to Tecucel, living there exclusively from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s. After 1945, she moved seasonally between Tecucel and a town house in Tecuci, where she died in 1962.

She signed her early writings Natalia Iosif. Negru's work was published in Cumpăna, Junimea literară, Minerva literară ilustrată and Profiluri feminine, where she wrote the literature column. She was a founding member of the Romanian Writers' Society. Her output includes poems collected in the book O primăvară (1909), a dramatic poem (Legenda, 1921), a dramatized legend (Califul Barză, 1921) and two autobiographical novels (Mărturisiri, 1913; Helianta, 1921).

Critical opinion of Negru's poetry has tended to be negative. Eugen Lovinescu placed her "in the unoriginality competition of Sămănătorist poetesses", noting she "concocted little sentimental exuberances" out of typical and already stale Sămănătorist material. Constantin Ciopraga found the poems in O primăvară "saturated with idyllism.... easily confused with analogous productions of the period". Commenting on the same work, Alexandru Piru found that "one can remember nothing of her elegies [there]". A slightly more appreciative Victor Durnea finds "a certain lyrical, ingenuous sensibility" that can be "glimpsed.... in the recovery of certain childhood and adolescent memories". However, he finds her prose more redeeming. Alex. Cistelecan labels the poems "childish", speculating they may date to Negru's high school days.