Ștefana Velisar Teodoreanu

Ștefana Velisar Teodoreanu (born Maria Ștefana Lupașcu, also credited as Ștefania Velisar or Lily Teodoreanu; October 17, 1897 – May 30 or 31, 1995) was a Romanian novelist, poet and translator, wife of the writer Ionel Teodoreanu. Encouraged to write by her husband, she was a late representative of Poporanist traditionalism, which she infused with moral themes from Romanian Orthodoxy, and also with echos of modernist literature. Her works of youth, coinciding with World War II, comprise mainly novels centered on the internal conflicts and moral triumphs of provincial women such as herself. Forming a counterpart to her husband's own books, they won praise in their day, but were later criticized for being idyllic and didactic.

An anti-communist like her husband, Velisar helped writers and political figures persecuted by the communist regime. She continued to publish, switching mainly to collaborative translation work until the late 1960s, and earned acclaim for her renditions of Russian literature classics. During the same interval, she was left a widow by her husband's death, which occurred at the height of communist pressures on the family; her brother in law Păstorel was imprisoned, as was her friend Dinu Pillat, while others in her circle fled Romania. Returning to more favor in the late 1960s, Velisar lived a mostly quiet life, and eventually withdrew to Văratec Monastery. Her late work comprised a celebrated memoir of her relationship with Teodoreanu, as well as letters she sent to the Pillat family, which were collected in a 2010 book.

Biography

Origins and debut Born in the Swiss resort of St. Moritz, her parents were diplomat Ștefan Lupașcu (1872–1946) and his French wife Maria Mazurier. Her father, a high-ranking Freemason, He was the paternal uncle of French philosopher Stéphane Lupasco. She graduated from the central girls' school in Bucharest, headed by her aunt Maria, wife of the novelist Barbu Ștefănescu Delavrancea. According to her own account, he was instantly attracted to her dark complexion and "shiny black eyes", but also admired her literary attempts, and encouraged her to continue.

She married Ionel in 1920, She thus became sister in law of the humorist Păstorel, whom she greatly admired, although, according to poet Ștefan I. Nenițescu, she herself was now the most talented Teodoreanu. She soon after gave birth to twins Ștefan "Cefone" (or "Afane") and Osvald "Gogo". The new family lived in a home on Kogălniceanu Street in Iași, and were for long neighbors with Ibrăileanu, Petru Poni, and Alexandru Philippide. They had a close friend in the novelist Mihail Sadoveanu, with whom they traveled to Turkey in 1934; at the time, Sadoveanu joined the same Masonic Lodge as Lupașcu.

World War II novels Ștefana and Ionel Teodoreanu in 1931. Drawing by Ștefan Dimitrescu Relocating to Bucharest in 1938, the family now owned a mansion on Romulus Street, west of Dudești. They also owned a house on Mihai Eminescu Street, Dorobanți, which Ionel reportedly received from the Federation of the Jewish Communities, for his services as a lawyer. Velisar herself became a published novelist shortly before World War II, with the 1939 Calendar vechi ("Old Calendar"), which won her a prize from the Romanian Intellectuals' Association.

Her prose, seen by critics as of quintessentially "feminine perfume", had noted tendencies toward ornamentation and lyricism. According to researcher Elena Panait, at both a character construction level and in terms of literary message, the works display Velisar's readings from Rabindranath Tagore, Leo Tolstoy, and Ivan Turgenev.

Viața cea de toate zilele, written in the first person, shows the muted torment of Baba, a homemaker trapped in a provincial setting, and injured in an accident. The sterility of her life in the târg ends with Baba's gesture of liberation, a return to the freedom and self-imposed discipline of the countryside. This provincial and earthbound note has been read by scholar Aurel Martin as a regionalist ethos, showing Velisar's own cultural attachment to Western Moldavia. Rich in Christian symbols, down to the final scene (featuring an "inadvertent" sign of the cross), Viața cea de toate zilele is seen by Panait as "communicating [Velisar's] faith in general human values such as solidarity, tolerance, power of maternal and marital love." That optimistic message is toned down in Cloșca cu pui, which includes depictions of women in unresolved despair. Also focusing on a-temporal elements, Panait sees Velisar's as a "retro-modernist", in that she applies modern writing techniques to an old literary ideology—"reconditioning outdated literary conventions", but with some "very timid innovations". She also argues that whole fragments were direct allusions to La Medeleni. while Teodoreanu and his wife wrote texts deploring the destruction of Greater Romania in 1940. Both crossed over official lines in discussing Northern Transylvania, ceded as a result of Nazi pressures: Ionel with novels which made it past official censorship, Velisar with a letter of support for exile magazine Gazeta Transilvaniei.

Communist clampdown and translation work As a novelist, Velisar was published again after the coup of August 1944, with Acasă ("Home", 1947). Also centered on a woman protagonist, it was noted by critic Liana Cozea for its "cruelty [...] doubled by understanding and sad compassion". At the time, her marriage to Teodoreanu was becoming strained, as he became known for his sexual escapades, then fell passionately in love with Bessarabian actress Nadia Gray. Gray did not answer to his advances, which caused Teodoreanu to start drinking heavily.

By then, both Teodoreanus were witnessing with worry the rise of the Romanian Communist Party. Around 1946, their home on Romulus Street was hosting members of the National Liberal Party and other anti-communists, including Mihail Fărcășanu and their godson, Dinu Pillat; it was the last Romanian domicile of Fărcășanu and wife Pia before they defected to the West. The couple's house was eventually confiscated during the 1947 nationalizations. A cousin of the Teodoreanus, Alexandru Teodoreanu, was arrested for "high treason" in 1948. Ionel visited him at Uranus prison, and defended him in court, but Alexandru was sentenced and sent to Aiud Prison.

The Romanian communist regime allowed Velisar to write, but she was forced to adapt to the new political requirements; Like her marginalized brother in law, she became a translator. In the 1950s, she authored collaborative translations of Russian literature: in 1953, a collection of Russian fairy tales, with Xenia Stroe; in 1955, Alexey Morozov's short prose, with Domnica Curtoglu; in 1955, Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, with Tatiana Berindei, and other such versions from Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak; in 1956, stories by Maxim Gorky, with Ada Steinberg. The following year, Velisar completed Anna Karenina (on which she worked with Mihail Sevastos and I. Popovici) and Resurrection (with Ludmila Vidrașcu); then returned with versions of Vsevolod Garshin's "Four Days" (in 1962, again with Xenia Stroe), and Leonid Andreyev's novellas (with Isabella Dumbravă, 1963).

Return and final decades At the time, Velisar had rekindled her friendship with Sadoveanu, visiting him during the final months of his life. It was also there that, in the new climate of détente, she welcomed Pia Pillat, whom the communists allowed to revisit Romania, and her brother Dinu, who had also been released from jail. Velisar had also begun writing memoirs, which appeared as Ursitul ("The Fated One", 1970). Republished in 1979, It showed her coming to terms with her "fated" late husband's philandering, and her vision of him as her one true, ideal, love. As a guest of the Writers' Union, she often wintered at the Mogoșoaia Palace, as her home was made uninhabitable by Nicolae Ceaușescu's cutbacks on heating expenditures; during summers, she often wrote at the Pillats' ancestral home in Izvorani.

Velisar eventually died five years after the end of communism, on May 30 and 2006. In 2010, Humanitas publishing house also issued her correspondence with the Pillats as part of the collective volume Minunea timpului trăit ("The Miracle of Time Spent"). She is commemorated with a plaque mounted on her 1940s home on Mihai Eminescu Street.