Samuil Lehtțir

Samuil Rivinovici Lehtțir, also rendered as Lehțir, Lehtțâr, Lekhttsir, Lekhtser, and Lehitser ( or Лехтцер; October 25, 1901 – October 15, 1937), was a Moldovan poet, critic, and literary theorist. Of Bessarabian Jewish origin, he rejected Romanian nationalism as a youth, and fled to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Returning to complete his studies at Cernăuți University in the Kingdom of Romania, he was regarded as a political suspect, and again escaped to the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR) in 1926—soon after that polity had been created within the Soviet Union. He was employed as a book publisher and journalist, emerging as an authority on literary matters. Lehtțir adopted Proletkult ideas about the need to destroy and rebuild cultural traditions; on such grounds, he and his colleague Iosif Vainberg came to deny that there was a Bessarabian literature that was worth preserving, and that Moldavian literary tradition could be built up from proletarian identity and Soviet patriotism. This sparked a special controversy within a larger debate about Romanian and Moldavian identity.

Lehtțir's ideas were disregarded by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which, in 1932, ordered writers to search for inspiration in their local traditions. As a result, Lehtțir revised his theory, and began hosting selective samples of older Romanian literature in Octombrie magazine. He became a founding figure of Moldavian theater, first with a historical play that was never performed in his lifetime, and later with a political play, Biruința. By that point, Lehtțir had also publicly welcomed the Latinization of Soviet alphabets, which had reduced to a minimum the differences between the Romanian and Moldavian literary standards. This position made the Stalinist regime take notice of Lehtțir, and contributed to his downfall and execution by the NKVD. Shortly before his death, he had been tortured into confessing that he was a Romanian spy. He was largely rehabilitated, alongside other Great Purge victims, by the early 1960s, but the details of his biography were purposefully hidden from the reading public by continued Soviet censorship.

Biography Early life Lehtțir belonged to the Bessarabian Jewish community. He was born on October 25, 1901, at Otaci, in the Russian Empire's Bessarabia Governorate (Soroksky Uyezd). His father was known in Yiddish as "Ruvin-Chaim", a variant of the Hebrew "Reuben-Chaim"; the surname "Lehtțir" is of likely German origin, from lecht ("light") and zier ("ornament").

After fleeing Greater Romania, Lehtțir completed his secondary education at Mohyliv-Podilskyi, in what was already Soviet Ukraine. The collection included a river-themed nocturne:

Lehtțir contributed translations of works by Aleksandr Bezymensky, Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Pushkin, and Sergei Yesenin; perhaps fluent in Hungarian, he published some translations from Sándor Petőfi. Lehtțir's early contributions to literary criticism include articles in Plugarul Roșu newspaper. One such piece, appearing in November 1928, offered some praise to the cultural tradition of Bessarabia, described as distul di bogatî ("pretty extensive") and as worthy of imitation. At that stage, he was taking a direct interest in popularizing Romanian literature for a Soviet audience, especially through the magazine Moldova Literarî (of which he was the editor).

At that stage of his career, Lehtțir was endorsing the project to create a separate "Moldovan" or "Moldavian" language, part of which relied on establishing the Moldavian accent as standard pronunciation. He criticized translators working in the MASSR for using the "tough Romanian–Moldavian language, which Moldavian early readers have a hard time comprehending." He soon became interested in creating political neologisms. The latter imitated Russian lexemes (bronzîinic, "of the Bronze Age", fărăclasnic, "classless", mîncătorie, "canteen" etc.), and, as argued by historian Maria Vieru-Ișaev, "belong to the annals of absurdity". By 1930, the orders he received from the Scientific Center staff were issued in the same form: Di poruncit tov. Lehtțir grabnic sî muti jurnalurili în păstralițî, slobozind loc în bibliotecî pentru monografii ("Ordering Comrade Lehtțir to quickly move the newspapers into the storage room, with the library thus cleared for the monographs").

Latinization turn The neologistic current, formed around Leonid Madan, was eventually curbed by the Soviet authorities, resulting in a selective purge at the Scientific Center. As reported by Smochină, the post-backlash Center was entirely controlled by Lehtțir and Naum Nartsov, both of whom were Jewish; Nartsov's contribution was symbolic, since he was a "tinsmith and cobbler by trade". Smochină similarly commended Lehtțir for his collecting an "immense volume of documents", but noted that he kept all "in the messiest way possible, in one unlocked room, so that anyone can lose or steal them". Moreover, he claimed that Lehtțir had kept for himself "almost all Romanian books in the library of that section he runs." The tract is remembered for Lehtțir's own chapter, Literatura moldoveneascî'n Basarabia ("Moldavian Literature in Bessarabia"), which, according to social historian Petru Negură, was written in an ironic key. In it, Lehtțir expressed the opinion that Bessarabia was lost for a workers' literature—to which Vainberg added his claim that Soviet Moldavians, though of more meager talents, could constitute a bulwark against the "bourgeois" themes of Romanian literature. The authors polemically argued: If other literatures have left us any sort of literary inheritance, of the kind that may be of some use after the revolution [of October 1917], Moldavian literature has had no such thing. And if we may address the question: what could we select from our literature of yesterday?, well, there is only one answer to give — nought.

According to literary historian Mihai Cimpoi, Întrebări literari, along with similar contributions by Milev and Pavel Chioru, evidences the poor state of literary culture in the MASSR: "[they are] quite modest, and slavish [...] toward the official ideology. [...] The dogmatic, vulgarized sociological spirit, with its purpose of detecting class enemies among the writers, as instructed by the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, is dominant in that era, crushing nuances and all creative aspect of criticism." Negură notes that Întrebări literari was immediately superseded by two events, both of which took place in 1932: one was the castigation of Proletkult's legacy by the Soviet Central Committee; the other was the regime's talk of a "Moldavian language" that now "differed only in its name from the Romanian literary language". The change of vision was also underscored with the Latinization of Soviet alphabets. As Smochină reports: "If the Soviets have accepted a national culture, it was over communist fundamentals. Yet it seemed like things were clearing up. [...] The name of Latinization allowed the people its freedom to adapt its national culture to the fundamentals of communist doctrine."

These developments sent MASSR writers to study old forms of Romanian literature, with samples of 19th-century Romanian authors appearing in the official literary magazine, Octombrie ("October"). Lehtțir himself became affiliated with that magazine, serving as its managerial secretary. His lyrical works therein include a 1931 piece, also called Octombrie, which, Negură argues, was a celebration of Soviet patriotism. The Soviet Union "appears as a country of gigantic proportions, animated by a universal effervescence and enthusiasm."

Lehtțir's poetry is described by Colesnic as "politically engaged" and mostly "minor", with the exception of one Octombrie poem which anticipated the first crewed space flight by over 25 years. The latter piece "amazes in its selection of a theme and the precision of its poetic description". It generally failed to meet up Soviet demands, since it retained such "bourgeois" influences. In late 1931, the staff at Octombrie embarked on a "defamation campaign" against Lehtțir, as well as against his colleagues Mihai Andriescu and Leonid Cornfeld, forcing them to publish self-criticism in a special issue of 1932. Their reintegration by the revamped communist-and-Latinist establishment was marked later that year, when the three of them, alongside Ion Ocinschi, curated a Latin-script translation of The Communist Manifesto. Also in 1932, Lehtțir alone was "art editor" for B. I. Borisov's propaganda book on the Tatarbunary Uprising—which was published in a language nearly identical to modern Romanian, and could therefore be understood by readers on the other bank of the Dniester.

Further "deviations" and downfall

Most of Lehtțir's poetic works appeared as a quick succession of volumes. Poezîi ("Poems") of 1929 and other themes in the history of "feudal Moldavia"—this is probably why the work was never shown in MASSR theaters, which still followed proletarian commands. is largely about "the shock worker movement and the most recent socialist labor methods".

Lehtțir's published contributions came to include 12 volumes, Such influences appear in De pază, which eulogizes Soviet Border Troops using metaphors which, as historian Marius Tărîță observes, were directly lifted from Eminescu and Grigore Alexandrescu. Also published in 1935, the epic poem Ostașul roșu ("The Red Soldier") similarly celebrated Soviet defense capabilities; its characteristic note was in comparing young recruits with the bogaturs of Russian folklore. Smochină also mentions a "series of poems", Lupta de clasă în Basarabia ("The Class Struggle in Bessarabia"), which appeared in late 1935. Journalist David Khakham argues that a fellow Jewish dramatist, whom he identifies only with the initials "L. B." and the detail of his survival into the 1970s, acted as an informer on Lehtțir's own activities. Records consulted by Colesnic indicate that Lehtțir was in fact sentenced to death by shooting on October 10 of that year; the sentence was carried out on October 15. Following a Soviet occupation in June 1940, the MASSR and Bessarabia were fused into the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Romanian retaliation came in 1941, when, as part of Operation Barbarossa, Bessarabia and lands further east were reoccupied by Romania—with Tiraspol included in the Transnistria Governorate. Writing shortly after this, in August 1941, Romanian scholar Sergiu Grossu referred to Lehtțir, Milev, Cornfeld and Culai Neniu as "dubious" non-Romanians pushed into the MASSR's literary culture by "Judeo-communist ideas". He contrasted them with more recoverable individuals, namely MASSR Romanians such as Nistor Cabac and Filimon Săteanu. Lehtțir was "fully rehabilitated" after De-Stalinization in 1956; in 1967, Yevgenia, who had returned from the camps some 20 years before, launched a public appeal for her late husband's recovery, including clarification regarding the circumstances of his death.

No existing record clarifies what happened to Myud Lehtțir after his state kidnapping in 1937; In July 2022, Lehtțir had his name inscribed on a votive cross in Chișinău, alongside Cabac, Chioru, Milev, Săteanu, and 28 other writers described as "massacred or deported by the diabolical communist-Stalinist regime."