Ion Agârbiceanu


Ion Agârbiceanu was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian writer, journalist, politician, theologian and Greek-Catholic priest. A native of Transylvania, he graduated from Budapest University, after which he was ordained. He was initially assigned to a parish in the Apuseni Mountains, which form the backdrop to much of his fiction. Before 1910, Agârbiceanu had achieved literary fame in both Transylvania and the Kingdom of Romania; his work was disputed between the rival schools of Sămănătorul and Poporanism.
Committed to social and cultural activism in Transylvania, Agârbiceanu spent the 1910s officiating near Sibiu, with a break during World War I that eventually took him deep into Ukraine. In 1919, he moved to Cluj, where he lived for most of the remainder of his life. After the war, he involved himself in both the political and cultural life of Greater Romania. He was voted into the Romanian Academy and assumed the office of Senate vice president under the National Renaissance Front dictatorship.
Agârbiceanu spent his last decade and a half under a communist regime that outlawed his church, an act in which he refused to cooperate. Much of his work, with its transparent Christian moralizing, proved incompatible with the new ideology, and was banned by communist censors; however, the regime found him useful for its image, and bestowed honors upon him. Agârbiceanu's full contribution has been made available since the 1990s, but he endures as a largely forgotten author, with the possible exception of his Apuseni-based novella, Fefeleaga.

Biography

Early life

Born in Cenade village in Transylvania's Alba County, Agârbiceanu was the second of eight children; his parents were Nicolae and Ana. His father and grandfather were both woodcutters, while he believed his great-grandparents were cowherds, as indicated by the surname of his grandfather, Vasile :wikt:bou#Romanian|Bouaru, who originated in the Sibiu area. The name Agârbiceanu came from the family's ancestral village, Agârbiciu. From about 1900, Nicolae became a respected forester and estate administrator, described upon his death in 1931 as a "cultured peasant". According to the novelist's own notes, his father subscribed to a number of Romanian-language publications that appeared in Transylvania. His mother, although a great lover of stories and storytelling, was illiterate.
Agârbiceanu recalled an idyllic childhood, with summers spent tending to his father's sheep and sleeping in a stick hut. An avid reader of stories by Petre Ispirescu, he attended school in his native village and in Blaj, graduating from the Superior Gymnasium in 1900. Literary historians describe this as the period of his literary debut, which was a collaboration with Unirea newspaper. There, Agârbiceanu published a feuilleton, poetry, and, in 1900, the short story În postul Paștelui. Agârbiceanu also served as secretary of the Blaj Literary Society, at the time the city's only Romanian-speaking literary body still tolerated by the Hungarian authorities. He soon became a correspondent of Răvașul, a Cluj-based newspaper, signing his first pieces there with the pen name Alfius, then as Agarbi or Potcoavă.
The Blaj-based Făgăraș and Alba Iulia Archdiocese arranged for Agârbiceanu to study at the theology faculty of Budapest University between 1900 and 1904. Publishing more works in Tribuna and Familia, he soon became a regular contributor to Luceafărul. Returning to Blaj after graduation, he supervised the local boys' boarding school, working there during the 1904–1905 academic year. Urged by friends and receiving a church scholarship, he returned to Budapest to study literature. He spent just one semester there, during which he also taught primary school catechism. In March 1906, he married Maria Reli Radu, the daughter of an archpriest from Ocna Mureș.

Priesthood and World War I

Also in 1906, following an ordination ceremony held on Easter Sunday, Agârbiceanu was appointed parish priest in Bucium, in the Apuseni Mountains. For four years, he observed the difficult lives of the mountain dwellers and the problems encountered in the nearby gold mines. During this time, he wrote several notices in the magazine Ramuri, later published as În întuneric, the novella Fefeleaga, and the novel Arhangelii, all of them based on the mining experience. He also started writing frequently for literary magazines that included Luceafărul, Unirea and Lupta. His other literary works of the period include De la țară, În clasa cultă, Două iubiri, Prăpastia, and a collection of Schițe și povestiri.
, where Agârbiceanu served during the 1910s
Agârbiceanu visited Bucharest, the Old Kingdom capital, in 1906, and sent enthusiastic travel notes for Unirea. He became a regular contributor to the Bucharest nationalist review Sămănătorul, which gave De la țară a sonorous welcome, and later to Sămănătoruls leftist rival, Viața Românească. From 1909, he was also one of the regulars at Neamul Românesc. For his literary activity, he was elected a corresponding member of Astra in 1912, and was promoted to full membership in 1925. From 1910 to 1919, he was parish priest at Orlat in Sibiu County. Agârbiceanu was also a member of Austria-Hungary's Romanian National Party, and supported PNR youth leader Octavian Goga, his colleague at Luceafărul and Tribuna. In 1910, he followed Goga as he parted from the PNR and launched his own independent faction.
By the time World War I broke out, Agârbiceanu had three sons and a daughter, including Ion, the future physicist. During 1914, the first year of war, he finally published Arhanghelii, as well as the stories in De la sate. These were followed, in 1916, by a work of Christian theology, Din viața preoțească.
In September 1916, when the Romanian Army withdrew from the Orlat area during the Battle of Transylvania, he fled Austria-Hungary with his family. Their first destination was Râmnicu Vâlcea in the Old Kingdom; they then headed for Roman in Western Moldavia. Evacuated to Russia in August 1917, they reached the vicinity of Yelisavetgrad in Ukraine. While there and alongside other refugee Transylvanians, he took part in a choir organized by Nicolae Colan, a future bishop in the Romanian Orthodox Church.
In November of that year, Agârbiceanu and his family found shelter with a Transylvanian family in Borogani village, near Leova in Bessarabia. The October Revolution soon broke out, and they made their way back to Moldavia, where he became a military chaplain for the Hârlău-based Romanian Volunteer Corps in Russia. He returned to Orlat in December 1918. In March 1919, following the union of Transylvania with Romania, he was named director of Patria newspaper, which was edited by the province's Directing Council.
In October 1919, the newspaper's headquarters moved to Cluj, and Agârbiceanu followed. Thanks to his literary activity, he was part of the leadership of the Romanian Writers' Society, and was elected corresponding member of the Romanian Academy in 1919. He also began contributing to the reviews Gândirea of Cluj, and Flacăra and Cuget Românesc of Bucharest. In 1922, he accompanied other Writers' Society members on a celebratory tour of Transylvania. Like several of his colleagues, Agârbiceanu preserved a bitter memory of the war, and his articles of the time make a point of referring to the Hungarians as a "barbarian horde".

1920s

While working on the Sibiu-based Astra magazine Transilvania, Agârbiceanu remained the editor of Patria until 1927, and also resumed his collaboration with Viața Românească. However, he was disappointed by the cultural and economic decline which came as a consequence of Transylvania's incorporation: the local press, he noted, had largely lost its purpose and could not hope to survive competition. As noted by reviewers from Ilie Rad to Răzvan Voncu, some of Agârbiceanu's more valuable work saw print in minor provincial reviews.
Despite such setbacks, Agârbiceanu published new works in quick succession: O lacrimă fierbinte, Popa Man, Zilele din urmă ale căpitanului Pârvu, Luncușoara din Păresemi, Păcatele noastre, Trăsurica verde, Chipuri de ceară. These were followed by Stana, Visările, Dezamăgire, Singurătate, Legea trupului, Legea minții, Ceasuri de seară, Primăvara, Robirea sufletului, and Biruința. His other works of the period include various tracts on biblical topics, including homilies and discussions of theodicy: Ieșit-a semănătorul, Rugăciunea Domnului, Răul în lume, Preacurata, Căile fericirii.
A member of the PNR Executive Committee in 1919, Agârbiceanu presented himself for the elections of November—the first ones following the creation of Greater Romania. He took a seat the Assembly of Deputies for in Târnava-Mare County. Elected again in 1922, he served until 1926. Initially joining the National Peasants' Party into which the PNR merged in 1926, the following year he defected to Alexandru Averescu's People's Party, of which Goga was also a member.
From 1927 to 1928, Agârbiceanu, a recipient of the National Prize for Literature, headed the Cluj chapter of Astra and edited Transilvania. It was in this magazine that he wrote a number of articles in support of eugenics, calling on priests to promote the movement in their parishes. Given the secular values of the movement's leaders in Romania, his participation was somewhat incongruous, but Agârbiceanu did not see a conflict between his religious creed and a current centered around supposedly objective natural laws. From 1930, he participated in Astra's literary section and headed its cultural congress, in which capacity he lectured on the organization's role in Romanian cultural life. Additionally, he played a prominent role during its annual congresses and committed himself to social activism. He was involved in Astra's literacy campaigns, inspecting and fundraising for village libraries in places such as Aleșd.

Maturity

Also in 1930, Agârbiceanu was elevated to the rank of archpriest for the Cluj district, and in 1931, he became canon for the Cluj-Gherla Diocese. In 1932, following schisms in the People's Party, he followed Goga into the new National Agrarian Party. In so doing, he lost control over Patria to Astra's Ion Clopoțel. After 1934, he was one of the noted contributors to the official literary magazine, Revista Fundațiilor Regale, put out in Bucharest by Paul Zarifopol.
In late 1938, following the establishment of the National Renaissance Front, King Carol II appointed him to the Senate, of which he also served as vice president. From 1938 to 1940, he edited a new edition of Tribuna in Cluj, as both the FRN's official paper and Transylvania's only daily. Toward the end of the 1930s, he wrote in opposition to the revisionist policy of the Kingdom of Hungary, and in August 1940, after the Second Vienna Award granted Northern Transylvania to Hungary, he fled Cluj for Sibiu. The new authorities called for his expulsion, but he received the order after he had departed Cluj.
With the downfall of the National Renaissance Front, Agârbiceanu withdrew from politics. However, in 1941, he supported Romania's war on the Eastern Front, including the occupation of Transnistria. In an official magazine that was itself named Transnistria, Agârbiceanu suggested that God had "even greater plans with us". Agârbiceanu continued to write and publish literature throughout the Carol regime and much of World War II: Sectarii, Licean... odinioară, Amintirile, Domnișoara Ana, alongside more theological and moralizing essays such as Din pildele Domnului, Meditații. Fața de lumină a creștinismului, Preotul și familia preoțească. Rostul lor etnic în satul românesc. The novel Vâltoarea was serialized by Convorbiri Literare and came out as a volume in 1944; another novel, Vremuri și oameni, being critical of Nazism, was not given imprimatur by the Ion Antonescu regime. Many more works, including Sfântul, were completed but also remained unpublished.

Under communism

Following the fall of Antonescu's regime and the campaign to recover Northern Transylvania, Agârbiceanu became a contributor to a new political weekly, Ardealul. He remained in Sibiu until 1945 and then returned to Cluj. He also contributed, in 1947, a religious tract on Familia creștină. In 1948, when the new communist regime outlawed the Greek-Catholic Church and forcibly merged it into the Orthodox Church, Agârbiceanu refused to join the latter denomination, thus setting himself up against the authorities. However, these found his reputation as a writer valuable for their own interests, and preferred to try and co-opt him. In 1953, after a five-year marginalization for his refusal to turn Orthodox, Agârbiceanu joined the editorial board of Anatol E. Baconsky's semi-official literary magazine, Steaua. He was granted the Order of Labor the following year, and promoted to titular member of the Academy in 1955. On the occasion of his 80th birthday in 1962, he was also awarded the Order of the Star of the Romanian People's Republic, first class.
Agârbiceanu's old and new writings came out in several editions: Pagini alese, Din munți și din câmpii, Din copilărie, File din cartea naturii, Povestind copiilor and Faraonii. Although formally congratulated by the regime, Agârbiceanu fell out with its censorship apparatus. According to various accounts, he allowed the censors to operate multiple changes, as long as the substance of his writing was not itself altered. Portions of his work were cut out during reediting, and a novel, Prăbușirea, serialized in Gazeta Literară, was so crudely handled that seven of its pages were lost forever.
Expecting to die soon, Agârbiceanu worked on a definitive corpus of his writings, which began printing at the state-run Editura pentru Literatură under the care of G. Pienescu and Mihai Șora. When he was led to believe that many of his works would not be allowed for publishing, he retook possession of all the manuscripts he had sent in, including some previously unpublished writings. The volumes were already available by that time. The writer died in Cluj in 1963, and was buried in the city's Hajongard Cemetery in a grave topped by a white marble cross.

Literary contribution

Ideology and style

Agârbiceanu entered literary life as a poet—according to his Sămănătorul patron, Nicolae Iorga, he was great as the author of ballades. Later in his career, he focused on vignettes, short stories and novels, intended to represent daily life in the Apuseni Mountains. His favorite theme was the life of a Transylvanian country priest at the turn of the 20th century, but his "gallery" of protagonists also included shepherds, foresters, rafters, thieves, teachers, village doctors, Romani metalworkers, and the rich industrialists. A prolific writer, possibly the most productive one in Romania before 1930, he completed some 65 volumes, by his own account, both long and short.
Ideologically, Agârbiceanu was most closely aligned with Sămănătoruls ethnic traditionalism, and was always a marginal among the Viața Românească Poporanists, who were rather more inspired by Marxism. However, Voncu believes, the similarities were only superficial: unlike the Sămănătorul school, Agârbiceanu was a professional of literary realism, who favored individual psychology over class identity, and would not condemn the city as a decomposed and decomposing environment. His stories, Voncu notes, had an "ethical, even philosophical, vision", and "the dignity of grand literature." His naturalness was even highlighted by Iorga, who praised Agârbiceanu as "the liveliest storyteller" of the early 20th century: "he doesn't go looking for the folkish ingredient; he just cannot separate himself from it, because he lives therein, heart and soul."
According to Eugen Lovinescu, the modernist literary critic and cultural theorist, Agârbiceanu is the "essential exponent" of Transylvanian Sămănătorists. His literature is one that "by the people and for the people". As Lovinescu puts it, his work blends an "aggressive affirmation of nationhood" and "healthy ethics pushed to the limit of tendentiousness and didacticism" with a cultivation of dialectal speech patterns. In this immediate context, Agârbiceanu seems to have been inspired by Ion Pop Reteganul and Ioan Slavici, the founders of Transylvanian realism. He himself inspired Liviu Rebreanu.
Traditionally, reviewers have been put off by Agârbiceanu's plot devices and epic mannerisms, and in particular by his explanatory comments and notes, which they deem superfluous and distracting. As Lovinescu notes, Agârbiceanu and other Transylvanian realists will "accumulate in details", but will remain "incapable of narrating on more than one level": "for all their dynamism, his sketches are not exciting in the dramatic sense." The moralizing aspect of Agârbiceanu's fiction makes it hard to separate between it and his purely theological productions: as Lovinescu notes, whenever Agârbiceanu depicts village drunks, it is as if "for an anti-saloon exhibition." Dragomirescu argues that Agârbiceanu's work amounts to a set of humanitarian "directives", although, he concludes, its depiction of "the bleak and mystical recess of life" is a fine literary contribution, "rising above" his generation's. He states: "Agârbiceanu is a socializing Poporanist or Sămănătorist only when he is at his weakest".
According to exegetes such as Iorga, Constantin Șăineanu and Voncu, the moral lesson of Agârbiceanu's lay works is only hinted at, with much subtlety. Voncu sees in Luncușoara din Păresemi the "refinement and objectivity" of novels by Georges Bernanos. On the other hand, Voncu observes that the writer uses his artistic talents in theological works such as Despre minuni and Din pildele Domnului, ably narrating simple texts that can appeal either to their intended audience of rural believers or to a more cultivated set of readers. As Z. Ornea notes, Agârbiceanu's least known works are particularly moralizing. This category includes two stories of moral redemption, the novel Sfântul and the short novella Pustnicul Pafnutie și ucenicul său Ilarion, which are "entirely tactless".

Major works

In Arhanghelii, the implicit Christian lesson is about the love of money and its devastation of an Apuseni get-rich mining community. At the heart of the novel is a former notary, Rodean, whose gold claim appears to be endlessly productive and corrupting. As Șăineanu writes: "with emotion and mounting interest, we witness here the ephemeral joys and disasters that this modern-day Moloch pours over this once-peaceful village." The novel, Lovinescu argues, is overall "awkward", but still interesting as a social fresco, called a "frightening human torment" by Iorga. Șăineanu deplores its "prolixity" and arcane mining terminology. As argued by Dragomirescu, the climax, where Rodean runs from the card table to see his mine collapsing, "has remarkable qualities of literary vividness and vigor." Nicolae Manolescu offers praise to the work, a "solidly realistic novel" that, although widely seen as a pastiche from Slavici, should still be taken into account for its "originality and newness". He sees Agârbiceanu as an "unlucky" novelist, whose work was eclipsed by that of Rebreanu, Mihail Sadoveanu, and Gala Galaction, which it only resembles coincidentally.
In Legea trupului, a psychological novel about a young man torn between the love for a mature woman and her daughter, Agârbiceanu turned his attention to the sins of the flesh. The erotic dilemma is one of several narrative threads: Legea trupului is also a story of inter-ethnic conflict, and a probe into the regional politics in Transylvania. Lovinescu sees Legea trupului as a "solid social and psychological study, for all its tendentiousness", but still harmed by Agârbiceanu's "lack of stylistic expressiveness and verbal insufficiency."
The narrative structure is alluded to in Legea minții, which is about discovering one's true calling. The plot follows its protagonist, a scholarly priest by the name of Andrei Pascu, as he finds himself in his work as a missionary of religion and cultural nationalism, despite being set back by poverty and revisited by his worldly past. Similar themes are developed elsewhere. In Popa Man, a lapsed priest and smuggler is suddenly confronted with the consequences of his actions, and destroys himself with drink. In Stana, named after its female protagonist, a war invalid is a passive witness to his wife's moral decay. When he dies, his wooden leg serves as a haunting reminder of his virtues, driving Stana to despair.
According to Manolescu, these stories were largely outdated by the time of their publishing, when more experimental work was being put out by Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu and Camil Petrescu; Agârbiceanu "could only strike the figure of a naive moralist, reeking of a parson's mindset, in all ways incompatible with the emancipated Romanian society of the interwar." The novella Fefeleaga, however, is largely seen as Agârbiceanu's true masterpiece—either his best story or one of two, alongside the short story Luminița. At the center of the story is a woman who makes a meager living quarrying stones for gold panning, with her many children killed off by a respiratory disease. She was based on a real-life Moț, Sofia Danciu, with only some details changed. In the defining moment of the narrative, seen by Dragomirescu as symbolic for the plight of Romanian Transylvanians, Fefeleaga sells off her emaciated draft horse and only friend, to prepare for her daughter's funeral. However, as Iorga notes, this is not a pessimistic outcome: "kindness is present, but hidden, in this world, but will reveal itself in the hours of pity and those of justice". Luminița shows the final moments in a woman's life, and her inability to grant herself one last wish, and, according to Dragomirescu, is a "universal" work, worthy of a Count Tolstoy.

Legacy

Under communism, Agârbiceanu's lay work began to be fully recovered in the late 1960s. An important effort in this process was undertaken by literary historian Mircea Zaciu, who had begun a critical re-evaluation as early as 1955, with a short monograph that took up George Călinescu's observation whereby Agârbiceanu was not a moralizer but an artistic narrator of moral situations. Zaciu went further, seeking to detach the Sămănătorist label and place him within the framework of ethical Transylvanian prose. His work, re-edited and amplified in 1964 and 1972, revived interest in the writer by precisely cataloguing his corpus and opening new directions for its critical analysis. The recovery was limited: according to Voncu, the arrival of national communism left critics unsure about whether to reintroduce Agârbiceanu's "uncompromising vision of rural life" into the literary canon.
Not long thereafter, the film-directing team of Dan Pița and Mircea Veroiu found that Agârbiceanu's short stories supplied ideal material for their interest in formal experimentation, leading to two films, each based on a pair of his stories: Nunta de piatră and Duhul aurului. In 1988, Nicolae Mărgineanu and Ion Brad also filmed their version of Arhanghelii, as Flames over Treasures.
It was not until 2004, fifteen years after the fall of the regime, that the theological writings started being reprinted. These events also signified that the full corpus of his literature could see print: work on his complete writings was taken up by Mariana and Victor Iova. Prăbușirea and other manuscripts only saw print in and after 1997. The project ended in 2002 and, Voncu notes, Agârbiceanu returned to a "discouraging anonymity" until 2014, when Ilie Rad began work on a revised critical edition. This also included material never published in the Pienescu edition—adding as much as 75% new content. As suggested by Manolescu in 2013, Agârbiceanu once seemed "the most promising Transylvanian writer of the dawn of a new century, after Coșbuc and before Rebreanu." However, and despite Fefeleaga being a constant feature of literature textbooks, Agârbiceanu became "two-thirds forgotten". According to Ornea, and to various others, Agârbiceanu mostly endures in cultural memory as a "second-shelf writer".
Ion I. Agârbiceanu was the author of pioneering work in spectroscopy, famed for his invention of a gas laser. His younger brother Nicolae was a sculptor, and in his youth studied composition at Schola Cantorum in Paris. Another one of the writers' sons, Tudor, was a surveyor. He and his family remained in possession of Agârbiceanu's large villa in Cluj, which was later declared a historic monument. The writer's grave was awarded the same status by Romania's Culture Ministry in 2012. Among the localities associated with Agârbiceanu's work, Bucium is home to a Fefeleaga Memorial House, a modern reconstruction which used Romanian folk houses as a blueprint; Sofia Danciu's actual home burned down in summer 2014.