Lucian Blaga


Lucian Blaga was a Romanian philosopher, poet, playwright and novelist.

Biography

Lucian Blaga was a commanding personality of the Romanian culture of the interbellum period. He was a philosopher and writer highly acclaimed for his originality, a university professor and a diplomat. He was born on 9 May 1895 in Lancrăm, near Alba Iulia, Austria-Hungary, his father being an Orthodox priest. He later described his early childhood, in the autobiographical The Chronicle and the Song of Ages, as "under the sign of the incredible absence of the word".
His elementary education was in Hungarian at Sebeș, after which he attended the "Andrei Șaguna" Highschool in Brașov, under the supervision of a relative, Iosif Blaga, who was the author of the first Romanian treatise on the theory of drama. At the outbreak of the First World War, he began theological studies at Sibiu, where he graduated in 1917. He published his first philosophy article on the Bergson theory of subjective time. From 1917 to 1920, he attended courses at the University of Vienna, where he studied philosophy and obtained his PhD.
Upon returning to Transylvania, now a part of Romania, he contributed to the Romanian press, being the editor of the magazines Culture in Cluj and The Banat in Lugoj.
In 1926, he became involved in Romanian diplomacy, occupying successive posts at Romania's legations in Warsaw, Prague, Lisbon, Bern and Vienna. His political protector was the famous poet Octavian Goga, who was briefly a prime minister; Blaga was a relative of his wife. He was elected a titular member of the Romanian Academy in 1936. His acceptance speech was entitled Elogiul satului românesc.
In 1939, he became professor of cultural philosophy at the University of Cluj, temporarily located in Sibiu in the years following the Second Vienna Award. During his stay in Sibiu, he edited, beginning in 1943, the annual magazine Saeculum.
He was dismissed from his university professor chair in 1948 because he refused to express his support to the new Communist regime and he worked as librarian for the Cluj branch of the History Institute of the Romanian Academy. He was forbidden to publish new books, and until 1960 he was allowed to publish only translations. He completed the translation of Faust, the masterpiece of Goethe, one of the German writers that influenced him most.
In 1956, he was nominated to the Nobel Prize for Literature on the proposal of Bazil Munteanu of France and Rosa del Conte of Italy, but it seems the idea was Mircea Eliade's. Still, the Romanian Communist government sent two emissaries to Sweden to protest against the nomination, because Blaga was considered an idealist philosopher, and his poems were forbidden until 1962.
He was diagnosed with cancer and died on 6 May 1961. He was buried on his birthday, 9 May, in the countryside village cemetery of Lancrăm, Romania.
He was married to Cornelia. They had a daughter, Dorli, her name being derived from, a noun that can be translated, roughly, as "longing".
The University of Sibiu bears his name today.

Literature

Poetry

His philosophical work is grouped in four trilogies:
The fourth work, Cosmologica, was completed but not published at the time because of communist regime censorship. Before death, Blaga left an editorial testament on how his works are to be published posthumously
The novel Charon's Ferry is intended to be a companion to the philosophical trilogies. In it Blaga addresses some of the more problematic philosophical issues such as those pertaining to political, psychological or occult phenomena, under the name of a fictive philosopher.

Philosophical works