Quick Facts
Biography
Ion Vinea (born Ioan Eugen Iovanaki, sometimes Iovanache; April 17, 1895 – July 6, 1964) was a Romanian poet, novelist, journalist, literary theorist, and political figure. He became active on the modernist scene during his teens, his poetic work always indebted to the Symbolist movement, and first founded, with Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco, the review Simbolul. The more conservative Vinea drifted apart from them as they rose to international fame with the Dada artistic experiment, being instead affiliated with left-wing counterculture in World War I Romania. With N. D. Cocea, Vinea edited the socialist Chemarea, but returned to the international avant-garde in 1923–1924, an affiliate of Constructivism, Futurism, and, marginally, Surrealism.
Vinea achieved his reputation as the co-founder and editor or Contimporanul, Romania's major avant-garde publication throughout the 1920s, where he also published his fragmentary prose. He expounded his social critique and his program of cultural renewal, fusing a modernist reinterpretation of tradition with a cosmopolitan tolerance and a constant interest in European avant-garde phenomena. He drifted away from artistic experimentation and literature in general by 1930, when he began working on conventional newspapers, a vocal (but inconsistent) anti-fascist publicist, and a subject of scorn for the more radical writers at unu. After a stint in the Assembly of Deputies, where he represented the National Peasants' Party, Vinea focused mainly on managing Cocea's Facla. By 1940, he was an adamant anti-communist and anti-Soviet, ambiguously serving the Ion Antonescu dictatorship as editor of Evenimentul Zilei.
Spending his final two decades in near-constant harassment by communist authorities, Vinea was mostly prevented from publishing his work. Driven into poverty and obscurity, he acted as a ghostwriter for, then denouncer of, his novelist friend, Petru Dumitriu. He held a variety of employments, making his comeback as a translator of Edgar Allan Poe and William Shakespeare. He died of cancer just as his own work was again in print. Vinea had by then been married four times, and had had numerous affairs; his third wife, actress-novelist Henriette Yvonne Stahl, was still redacting his unpublished novels. These fictionalize episodes of his own life in the manner of decadent literature, establishing Vinea's posthumous recognition as an original raconteur.
Biography
Simbolul years
Born in Giurgiu, the future Ion Vinea was the son of Alexandru Iovanaki and Olimpia (née Vlahopol-Constantinidi). Although, in adulthood, Vinea categorically denied his Greek ethnicity, both his parents were of documented Hellenic origins. Both also belonged to the upper strata: Alexandru, a nephew of Prince Careagdi (and his protegé, after Alexandru's parents committed suicide), took an engineer's diploma from the École Centrale, but always lived off on a country estate in Drăgănești; Olimpia, a classics teacher, was born to Graeco–Ottoman immigrants in Romania. According to one account, Ioan was Iovanaki's son in name only, conceived by Olimpia, a woman of outstanding beauty, with Henry C. Dundas, the British consul in Galați.
When Vinea was still an infant, the Iovanakis moved from Giurgiu to Bucharest, capital of the Romanian Kingdom, where, in 1905, they had another son, Nicolae. In his childhood, Ioan trained himself to read in both Romanian and French, also speaking good Latin and German; he much later taught himself English. While attending primary school at Sfânta Vineri Institute from 1902, he also discovered his talent for the piano, and later took private lessons alongside Clara Haskil and Jacques G. Costin, who remained his friends for life. From 1910, when he enlisted at Saint Sava National College, Vinea applied himself to philology, covering modern French literature—then Symbolism, which became his main focus. He had the older Symbolist Adrian Maniu for a school tutor.
In October 1912, together with Saint Sava colleague Marcel Janco and Tristan Tzara, he set up the literary magazine Simbolul. Although juvenile and short-lived, it managed to attract contribution from some of Romania's most visible Symbolists: Alexandru Macedonski, N. Davidescu, Emil Isac, Ion Minulescu, Claudia Millian, Al. T. Stamatiad, and Maniu. Simbolul was also a public signal of Vinea's anti-establishment fronde, openly taunting writers associated with traditionalism or ruralizing Poporanism. Nevertheless, his own poems, published therein, were generally tame, heavily indebted to the likes of Macedonski, Minulescu, and Albert Samain. Shortly after the Simbolul episode, Vinea vacationed in Gârceni, on Tzara's estate, and at Tuzla. The Tzara–Vinea collaboration produced a new species of self-referential modernist poetry, which transcended the Symbolist conventions.
Post-Symbolist "new faith"
From mid 1913, Iovanaki was a columnist and left-leaning lampoonist at N. D. Cocea's Facla and Rampa, working under a variety of pen names: "Ion Iovin", "Evin", "Ion Japcă", "Ion Eugen Vinea", "Crișan", "I. Iova", and, possibly, also "Stavri" or "Puck". Constantin Beldie took him on board at Noua Revistă Română. Finally adopting the Ion Vinea signature in 1914, he quickly matured into a "feared and merciless" polemicist with "infallible logic", writing "texts of elegant vehemence, bearing the clear imprint of his intellect." As noted by literary historian Paul Cernat, he took care not to define himself not as a professional and "classifying" critic, but rather as an independent thinker in the manner of Remy de Gourmont and Charles Baudelaire; however, his efforts were aimed at compensating for the lack of Symbolist critics and exegetes. Looking for references outside Symbolism, then finding them in Walt Whitman, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Henri Bergson, he prophesied that a "new faith" and an anti-sentimental literature were in the making.
As a culture critic and artistic doctrinaire, he found affinities with the Western European Futurists, Cubists, and especially Simultaneists, whose non-static art, he believed, was a more accurate representation of the human experience. Like the Futurists, young Vinea cheered for industrialization and Westernization, giving enthusiastic coverage to the Young Turk Revolution. He was thus also an advocate of social realism, praising Maxim Gorky and, in later years, Dem. Theodorescu, Vasile Demetrius, Ion Călugăru, and Panait Istrati. Vinea's hobbyhorse was defending cosmopolitanism against traditionalist nationalism: he publicized the formative contribution of Greeks, Jews and Slavs to old and new Romanian literature, and ridiculed the conservative antisemitism of critics such as Ilarie Chendi, Mihail Dragomirescu, and Nicolae Iorga. Other noted targets were moderate "academic" Symbolists, including Anna de Noailles, Dimitrie Anghel, and especially Ovid Densusianu; and modernists of uncertain convictions, among them Eugen Lovinescu—to whom Vinea reserved some of his more bitter sarcasm. In a 1916 piece, he imagined Lovinescu as "a youth, already a bourgeois, already bloated and probably soft".
Vinea was himself greatly charismatic, variously described by his peers as "enviable", "beautiful and serene", but also "spoiled". According to fellow modernist Felix Aderca, Vinea sacrificed himself to "originality" and "style", mocking his inferiors and only picking up on "the finest poetic waves". He made a point of showing that he despised literary cafés, the gathering spots of "poets with no muse". He did however attend Terasa Oteteleșanu and other such bars, mixing in with the literary crowd. Consumed by his involvement in public life, he graduated from Saint Sava in 1914 with the mediocre average of 6.80.
This period saw the start of World War I, with Romania settling into a tense neutrality that lasted to August 1916. Vinea involved himself even more in political and social debates: writing for Tudor Arghezi and Gala Galaction's Cronica, he defended a schoolgirl accused of fornication, and helped propel the issue to national prominence. He kept a lasting grudge against Arghezi, who frequently censored his "revolutionary" outbursts; for his part, Arghezi noted in 1967 that he always "loved and admired" Vinea. Also at Cronica, he published praise for poets Maniu and George Bacovia, who best agreed with his ideal post- and para-Symbolist aesthetics.
Vinea was also featured in Alexandru Bogdan-Pitești's dailies, Libertatea and Seara, where he also inducted Costin. He preserved a keen interest in wartime politics, but did not explicitly share the "Germanophile" agenda that supported the Central Powers, although it was prevalent at Cronica, Seara, and Libertatea. Like Arghezi, Bogdan-Pitești and Cocea, he maintained a lasting hatred for the establishment National Liberal Party (PNL), which translated into sympathies for either conservatism or socialism. At the time, he decried Romanian politics as one of intrigues and "latrines", caricaturing Ion I. C. Brătianu and Take Ionescu as egotistical tyrants.
Chemarea and World War I
From October 4 to October 11, 1915, together with Demetrius, N. Porsenna, and Poldi Chapier, Vinea directed his own review, Chemarea, best remembered for hosting Tzara's radical poetry. It also issued Vinea's Avertisment ("Warning") a "clearly iconoclastic" art manifesto. As the unsigned columnist, Vinea briefly discussed the "stupid war" and mocked those who supported the Entente powers as "jackals", calling out their support for the annexation of Transylvania and Bukovina as hypocritical and imperialistic; he praised pacifist socialists for their "civic courage". He reserved scatological outbursts for the Ententist Vasile Drumaru and his "National Dignity" paramilitaries, also decrying the "populist imbecility" of nationalist authors such as Popescu-Popnedea or Constantin Banu.
Once Romania declared war on the Central Powers, Vinea was drafted into the Romanian Land Forces. Serving continuously, but behind the lines, from August 1916 to 1919, he followed the army on its hasty retreat to Western Moldavia, settling for a while in Iași, the provisional capital. In his spare time, he resumed work in the press, initially at Cocea's newspaper Omul Liber, but also in Octavian Goga's nationalist propaganda paper, România. His absence from the front was later used against him by the nationalist press, which referred to him as a "wartime truant".
From June 1917, he and Cocea, alongside various Simbolul writers, reissued Chemarea as a radical-left and republican newspaper. Its rhetorical violence made it an object of scrutiny for military censors, and Chemarea avoided closure only by regularly changing its name. He and Cocea alternated as editors-in-chief: under Vinea's management, the paper was more artistic than political, but (according to his own claims) Vinea also conspired with Cocea and others on a "revolutionary republican committee". Vinea married a Chemarea colleague, Maria Ana Oardă (known then as "Tana Quil"), whose estate helped fund the magazine, but shortly separated from her; in 1922, they were divorced.
While Vinea struggled at Chemarea, Tzara and Janco found international success with the Cabaret Voltarie in Switzerland, birthing the anti-art movement known as "Dada". Vinea was kept informed about the developments by Tzara himself, and sent in congratulatory letters which, according to researchers, give clues that he was envious; he also sent Tzara a poem of his, but this proved too tame for Dada standards, and was never taken up. Vinea boasted that he was working on a Dada-like collection of stories, Papagalul sfânt ("Holy Parrot"). This promise also failed to materialize.
In early 1918, following disagreements with Cocea, Vinea left Chemarea and joined the staff of Arena, a daily put out by Alfred Hefter-Hidalgo. In April, as Romania contemplated surrender to the Central Powers, he wrote his most pessimistic editorial of the era, suggesting (wrongly) that the Entente was losing on all fronts. He soon regretted his Arena affiliation, confirming Hefter's bad reputation as a blackmailer, and returned to Chemarea.
Setting up Contimporanul
Later that year, shocked by his brother's death in a freak riding accident (which he would always refer to as "the onset of loneliness"), Vinea took a sabbatical. He studied off and on at the University of Iași Law School alongside Costin, only graduating in 1924, without ever becoming a practicing attorney. Returning to Bucharest, he edited for a while at Facla: with Cocea jailed for lèse-majesté, the newspaper was overseen his father, Colonel Dumitru Cocea. Vinea mediated between this autocratic manager and the liberal staff.
Before 1922 Vinea became a regular contributor to central dailies such as Adevărul and Cuget Românesc. His literary chronicles attest his positive reevaluation of selected, "fanfare-less", traditionalists, from Mihail Sadoveanu to Victor Eftimiu, from Lucian Blaga to Ion Pillat. Vinea was also an occasional contributor to Gândirea, the Transylvanian modernist-traditionalist review. Later, he was even featured in Viața Românească, a magazine established by the Poporanists, which was itself becoming a soft promoter of modern literature. He was still a vocal opponent of the academic traditionalists, satirizing Dragomirescu and the Romanian Writers' Society for their purge of Germanophile talents such as Arghezi. With an acid editorial in Chemarea, he tackled the creation of a Romanian Upper Dacia University in Transylvania, describing it as fake and overconfident.
At Luptătorul newspaper, he resumed earlier discussions about the "parasitical" nature of literary criticism. These claims were soon completed by sarcastic notes on the inflation of novels and novelists in Western countries, and their relative scarcity in Romania. Vinea argued that Romanian literature could develop without the novel: "its absence isn't necessarily a reason to feel melancholy." He envisaged a literature of the lampoon, the prose poem, the reportage, and the greguería. His columns on Dada moved from half-hearted support, visibly annoyed by Tzara's "buffoonery", to chronicling of the movement's "ephemeral" nature and inevitable demise. Ignored by Tzara, Vinea began reciprocating: he claimed that Dada was not Tzara's making, but had deeper Romanian roots in the avant-garde stories of a (still obscure) suicidal clerk, Urmuz, and in the work of sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. He depicted the primitivist streak of high modernism as a more authentic current than traditionalism, in particular Transylvanian traditionalism, and saw Muntenia as the cradle of authentic urban culture. This led to publicized polemics with Alexandru Hodoș, the nationalist columnist at Țara Noastră, but also with Benjamin Fondane, the more cautious Moldavian modernist.
In June 1922, accompanied and sponsored by the returning Janco, he set up Contimporanul, a review of art and, "rather implicitly", left-wing politics: its "not quite dogmatic" socialist militancy targeted the PNL's continuous dominance. The money came from Costin, who was also its most constant intellectual affiliate. From the onset, the magazine was not just cosmopolitan, but also antifascist and anti-antisemitic, lampooning the "hooliganism" of the National-Christian Defense League (LANC) and the far-right tinges of the People's Party. Its original contributors included Nicolae L. Lupu of the left-leaning Peasants' Party.
Vinea railed at "reactionary" forces that crushed European revolutions, spoke out against Italian fascism, gave ambiguous support to communism in Soviet Russia, and decried the persecution of Romanian Communist Party activists by PNL governments. He produced an editorial eulogy to Karl Marx, and, as he later noted, supported "all the rallies and campaigns organized by the labor movement", being a combatant for Dem. I. Dobrescu's League for Human Rights. Returning to Iași in 1922, he and Ion Marin Sadoveanu were injured in a scuffle with LANC students.
Between Constructivism and Surrealism
The longest-running avant-garde publication, Contimporanul openly affiliated with "Constructivism" after 1923. This move showcased not merely modernism, but also Janco and Vinea's disillusionment with Dada. Vinea explained that true modernism included a search for authenticity and a "creative path" forward, not the deconstruction of tradition. Still eclectic, the journal acquired international ambitions, reprinting pieces by Tzara (which had been backdated by Vinea) and letters from Ricciotto Canudo, together with advertorials and reviews for 391, Der Sturm, De Stijl, Blok, Ma, and Nyugat.
This activity peaked in May 1924, a watershed moment for Romanian modernist history: Contimporanul issued its "activist" manifesto, with principles ranging from primitivist anti-art and Futurism to constructive patriotism and the taking up of modern city-planning. It demanded that Romanians topple art, "for it has prostituted itself", and also "dispatch [their] dead". Vinea, Janco, M. H. Maxy, and Georges Linze were curators of the Contimporanul art show, which opened in November 1924, bringing the group to national attention, and sampling the major tendencies of European Constructivism. That year, Contimporanul was joined by Ion Barbu, who soon became its poet laureate, alongside the more senior Arghezi and Vinea himself. Vinea shared with Barbu a favorite pastime, the consumption of recreational drugs, most probably cocaine and sulfuric ether, but was less keen on frequenting literary hospots such as Casa Capșa. For decades, they would compete not just as poets, but also as womanizers, keeping score of their sexual conquests. Răsturnica ("Miss Tumble-over"), Barbu's ribald ode to a dead prostitute, was published by, and is sometimes attributed to, Vinea.
With Contimporanul launched, Vinea declared himself a member of Romanian and Balkan artistic-revolutionary elite, which was to educate the passive public and bring into the modernist fold—as argued by Cernat, this showed Vinea's "peripheral complex", his feeling of being stuck in an "accursed" cultural backwater. He delved in art criticism, with short essays on exhibits by Janco and Maxy, and with eulogies for folk and abstract art. He continued to deride, or simply ignore, Lovinescu, whose Sburătorul competed for the role of modernist guardian. As Cernat notes, his scorn had a personal and political, not artistic, motivation. Contimporanul managed to neutralize and absorb smaller Futurist magazines such as Scarlat Callimachi's Punct. However, it was chronically plagued by financial setbacks, and almost shut down several times; during such episodes, Vinea took up work for Cocea at Facla.
At Contimporanul and, for a while, at Eugen Filotti's Cuvântul Liber, Vinea diversified his literary contributions. He gave a mixed review to the Surrealist Manifesto, praising the surrealists' focus on "organic" revolt against "the hegemony of the conscious mind", but noting that its debt to psychoanalysis was defeating the purpose. In 1925, he put out the sketch story volume Descântecul și Flori de lampă ("Incantation and Lamp Flower"), followed in 1927 by the embryonic piece of his novel Lunatecii ("The Lunatics"), printed in Contimporanul as Victoria sălbatică ("Savage Victory"). His father, with whom Vinea had had a conflicted relationship, died that year, leaving him to look after Olimpia Iovanaki; an adoring son, he remained by her side and closely followed her advice. For some ten years, he was unhappily married to actress Nelly Cutava, divorcing her ca. 1930.
Deradicalization
In his articles and interviews, Vinea complained that independent journalism was a dying art, but also an exhausting occupation. His socialist radicalism slowly discarded and his literary activity curtailed voluntarily, Vinea courted, and eventually joined, the centrist National Peasants' Party (PNȚ) and began a two-year stint at Nae Ionescu's Cuvântul, a right-wing (later fascist) daily. It was there that he met the newspaper impresario Pamfil Șeicaru, who would offer him employment later in life. Vinea seemingly grew tired of Futurism, publishing in 1925 a French anti-manifesto for la révolution de la sensibilité, la vraie ("that true revolution, of sensibility").
In conversation with Aderca, he demanded that Contimporanul be remembered not for "political fighting", but for "its influence on out artistic life". The magazine was taking a more conciliatory view of Italian fascism, while also praising the council communists at Die Aktion and pushing for a détente with the Soviet Union (although remaining critical of Soviet totalitarianism). Vinea claimed to have been in Paris when Tzara and the Surrealists expressed their disagreements with the French Communist Party. He still issued the occasional anti-bourgeois satire, notably in I. Peltz's Caiete Lunare, which resulted in a conflict between Peltz and the Censorship Directorate.
Running in the December 1928 and June 1931 elections, Vinea represented the constituency of Roman in the Assembly of Deputies to 1932. A story rendered by the maverick leftist Petre Pandrea, places Vinea at the center of intrigues between the PNȚ factions: allegedly, Vinea and Sergiu Dan conspired to deceive Mihail Manoilescu, the corporatist theoretician, into buying a forged anti-monarchy document that they attributed to Virgil Madgearu. Manoilescu paid them some 150,000 lei before the forgery could be exposed.
In 1930, Vinea published his volume Paradisul suspinelor ("A Haven for the Sighs") with Editura Cultura Națională, illustrated by Janco. By then, Vinea had made a publicized return to the mainstream press, with opinion pieces and lampoons in Adevărul, Cuvântul, and the PNȚ organ Dreptatea, and with literary prose in Mișcarea Literară. His links with the avant-garde were waning: he still published Romanian or French-language poetry in Contimporanul, and prose in more radical magazines such as Punct, 75HP, and unu, but his modernist credentials were coming under critical scrutiny. At Contimporanul, he organized a lavish reception to the former Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who was also an official celebrity of Italian fascism.
There followed a split between Contimporanul and unu: at age 35, Vinea came to be denounced as the prototype "Old Man" whom the avant-garde wanted silenced. The controversy was political rather than artistic: unu, dominated by communist hardliners Sașa Pană and Stephan Roll, was perplexed by the ambiguity surrounding Marinetti's politics, and also by the acceptance at Contimporanul of "reactionaries" such as Mihail Sebastian and Sandu Tudor. Instead, Vinea reconciled with Lovinescu, with whom he now shared a moderate outlook and liberal agenda. His friendship with Barbu cooled after 1927, when the latter left Contimporanul for Sburătorul. Vinea never allowed him to return.
Vinea continued to write prose, and, in 1931, with the celebratory 100th issue of Contimporanul, announced that he was putting out Escroc sentimental ("Philanderer"), an early draft of Lunatecii. According to researcher Sanda Cordoș: "Decades before it was an actual book, Vinea's novel was a legend in the Romanian literary milieu." Critic George Călinescu noted at the time that "Ion Vinea [...] enjoys the nimbus of poets who do not publish, surrounded by that mysterious air." Peltz also writes that "rarely have I met a writer who appeared so indifferent about his own work", noting that Vinea had planned to publish more systematically only after turning 60.
Vinea led a bohemian lifestyle, which, together with his lasting passion for chess, made him a friend and confidant of a fellow aristocrat, Gheorghe Jurgea-Negrilești. From 1930 or 1931 to 1944, Vinea was married to Henriette Yvonne Stahl, an actress and award-winning novelist, as well as a famed beauty. They lived a largely secluded life in Brașov, owing to Henriette's health problems. Unbeknown to the world, the couple were recreational morphine users and avid oneiromants.
Facla years
Contimporanul went bankrupt in 1932, by which time Vinea had by then replaced the retiring Cocea as editor of Facla, and was writing for the minor political newspaper Progresul Social. He was either using his own name or resorting to familiar pen names: "B. Iova", "Dr. Caligari", "Aladin". The newspaper politics changed to reflect the PNȚ line. Vinea renounced his republicanism and paid homage to the returnee King Carol II. For a while in 1929 and 1930, Vinea was in France on an extended trip, and later bragged about making friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald. During his leave of absence, he assigned Olimpia Iovanaki as manager of Facla and its dwindling finances; Lucian Boz was the literary columnist.
Despite having promoted Marinetti and "tend[ing] to align himself with right-wing intellectuals", Vinea expressed his leftist antifascism to such degrees that the editorial office was repeatedly vandalized by either the LANC or its younger rival, the Iron Guard. He also drifted away from PNȚ politics, deploring the party's failure to address the Great Depression, giving his endorsement to the Grivița Strike of 1933. A vocal adversary of Nazi Germany, Vinea described Hitler as a "half-learned hunchback", deeming the Soviet Union a "natural ally of all those who support peace without [territorial] revisions." Facla opened its pages to Communist Party militants Alexandru Sahia and Petrescu-Ghempet, also hosting fragments from Aragon, Lunacharsky, Pozner, and polemics regarding A. L. Zissu's defense of Trotskyism. Vinea still argued that communism and "Romanianism" were irreconcilable, but suggested that Romania had nothing to fear from the Soviet Union—the Iron Guard, Vinea contended, was much more dangerous. Ideologically, he was closest to the moderate-left Social Democrats, and, unlike the unu group, was never placed under surveillance by Siguranța policemen.
In March 1934, after the Iron Guard assassinated Premier Ion G. Duca, Vinea opined in Facla that fascism's quest for a dictatorship was senseless: Romanian democracy, being "corrupt and catastrophic", was "in reality a dictatorship". (As noted by historian Zigu Ornea, Vinea "consciously exaggerated" the point, so as to attack both fascism and his old National Liberal enemies.) On October 5, 1934 (or in 1936, according to Vinea), Facla was nearly destroyed by the LANC, an attack which left Vinea physically injured. In 1936, Stahl was disfigured in a road accident. Vinea became unfaithful, pursuing "complicated" affairs with other women, but also frequenting the Bucharest brothels.
Critical recognition of Vinea's work first peaked in 1937, when Șerban Cioculescu penned a monograph on him and the "centrist position" of his poetry, calling him "a classic of the literary movement." Spurred on by Alexandru Rosetti, Vinea worked on a definitive edition of his verse, to be published by Editura Fundațiilor Regale as Ora fântânilor ("The Hour of Fountains"). He soon tired of the project, and the manuscript lingered in the archives for three more decades.
Also in 1937, the far-right National Christian Party came to power, censoring Facla's content. A quasi-fascist National Renaissance Front (FRN), presided upon by King Carol II, took over in 1938, with all other parties outlawed and freedom of speech curtailed. Facla survived this stroke, but the regime reduced its circulation, forcing it to become a weekly. Starting that year, however, Vinea served several terms as president of the Union of Professional Newspapermen (UZP), continuously to 1944.
The start of World War II isolated Romania from the Allies, but also brought shocking revelations about a Nazi–Soviet Pact. As reported by unu's Miron Radu Paraschivescu, Vinea reacted by sealing down his communist contacts and regretfully expressing his preference for the Nazis: "I would rather be a lackey of some prestigious house than the servant of yokels like Molotov and Stalin." Troubled by the inaccuracies of his earlier predictions, Vinea was reading and reviewing "great" Trotsky's anti-Stalinist texts. Later that year, the Nazi–Soviet dissolution of Greater Romania also resulted in FRN downfall and the inauguration of Iron Guard rule: a "National Legionary State", aligned with the Axis powers and having Ion Antonescu as Conducător. This signaled the end of Facla, forcefully shut down in September 1940.
World War II career and controversy
In January 1941, Antonescu and the Iron Guard fell out with each other, which led to a brief civil war—Vinea witnessed from the side (and with some amusement) as fascist Barbu was convened to patrol a Guard precinct; in Bucharest, a pogrom erupted, during which Vinea time hid and protected Sergiu Dan. Costin's brother Michael was captured and lynched by the Guard; both Costin and Janco fled to Palestine later that year.
In June, Romania became a participant in Germany's attack on the Soviet Union. Vinea was again drafted in the army (mostly stationed on the Black Sea coast), and assigned editor of Evenimentul Zilei, a propaganda daily published by Șeicaru, while also working at Șeicaru's Curentul. He was followed there by one of his Facla subordinates and a close friend, Vlaicu Bârna. According to the latter, Evenimentul Zilei existed as a "somewhat democratic version" of the pro-fascist Curentul. His activity over the next three years became a subject for scholarly scrutiny and political disputes. In the 1970s, Vinea biographer Elena Zaharia-Filipaș argued that Vinea largely remained "his own man", who refused to publish "eulogies to tyranny and murder as one finds in the aggressive editorials of other official newspapers published during the epoch." Vinea himself claimed that he "sabotaged" war propaganda and censorship. However, according to literary historian Cornel Ungureanu, he had transformed himself "into an ace of official politics".
Vinea's columns display a rejection of Stalinism and suggests that Nazism, a more palatable successor of revolutionary socialism, would eventually liberalize in the wake of Soviet defeat. According to Monica Lovinescu, daughter of Vinea's competitor, such pieces are praiseworthy, "lucid [and] courageous". During the battle for Moscow, he received attention for his retrospective editorial on Lenin, "the Mongol revolutionist" and his "desperate, moronic" followers, including "the Great Priest" Stalin. However, Vinea also found himself in trouble with the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda for eulogizing Swiss neutrality and journalistic objectivity. Vinea endorsed the annexation of Transnistria, but, later in life, also took credit for helping rescue Jews slated for extermination at Tiraspol and elsewhere.
After the turn of tides on the Eastern Front, Vinea debated with members of the democratic opposition who were willing to accept a Soviet occupation, noting that Stalin was set on "enthroning a communist regime". Meanwhile, in Curentul, he published thinly veiled criticism of Nazi terror in occupied France. In August 1944, a coalition of monarchists and communists removed and arrested Antonescu, denouncing the Axis alliance. In October, Revista Fundațiilor Regale carried his disquieted poem, Cobe ("Jinx"). A few months later, he received an interdiction to publish from the Propaganda Ministry, and was even threatened with prosecution for war crimes, but the order was revoked by Premier Petru Groza in 1946.
His hopes of reviving Facla were quashed. An "utterly discreet" presence while the country underwent rapid communization, Vinea focused almost entirely on his new career, that of a translator from English and French. Returning from Palestine in 1945, Costin also took up that "obscure activity". Vinea, "panicked by the prospects of old age and failure", changed his lifestyle drastically, giving up smoking and drinking. He returned for a while to writing Lunatecii, but found himself rejected by two publishing houses, and exasperated by misunderstandings "with the three women I love, and with those other women who will not leave me alone." Henriette, who was told of his philandering, took the much younger writer Petru Dumitriu as her lover and then, divorcing Vinea, as her second husband.
Banishment and arrest
Vinea and Tzara met a final time when the latter came to Romania on an official visit, in 1947. That year, having resumed friendly contacts with the PNȚ, his work hosted by Nicolae Carandino at Dreptatea, Vinea narrowly escaped arrest during the Tămădău Affair clampdown. The full proclamation of a Romanian communist regime in 1948 drove Vinea into the cultural underground. For a while, he earned a meager living as a ghostwriter, but also as a warehouseman and porter. In 1949, sculptor Oscar Han briefly employed him as his plasterer. While working for the candlemaker Aliciu, alongside other disgraced wartime journalists, Vinea was periodically harassed by agents of the Securitate, who were reexamining his Evenimentul Zilei material.
Vinea's final romantic relationship was with Elena Oghină. He moved with her from his mother's home on Uranus Hill to a townhouse on Braziliei Street, Dorobanți, thus "covering his tracks". The couple befriended Dumitriu, by then a lionized communist author, hosting the Dumitrius, as well as Bârna and Costin, in his new home, where they secretly discussed their hopes that communism would fall. Vinea even sold Dumitriu his wife's treasure of gold coins, thus breaking nationalization laws. After 1947, he no longer left Bucharest, preoccupied with providing for his ailing mother. He was unconsoled when she eventually died, under his watch, ca. 1952.
Himself diagnosed with liver cancer, Vinea was finally employed to write for the folding carton makers at Progresul Cooperative while also picking up a pension. He was also allowed to join the Writers' Union of Romania, and assigned to its "prose writers' section", studying and assimilating the aesthetic guidelines of socialist realism. However, Vinea was suspected of having spied for British Intelligence, and avoided by members of the interwar left, with whom he had been friendly before—most glaringly, Zaharia Stancu.
In 1956, ESPLA, the state publishing house, signed contracts with Vinea for his drawer novels, but did not deliver. Instead, it hired him on its team of translators and philologists. Vinea produced Romanian versions of Edgar Allan Poe's romantic stories, especially Berenice, Ligeia, and The Fall of the House of Usher, and was involved in ESPLA's Shakespeare translation project, applying his poetic skill to Henry V, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and The Winter's Tale. Additionally, he corrected for print Costin's draft of Les Misérables, and completed other translations from Balzac, Romain Rolland, Washington Irving, and Halldór Laxness. Some of these were issued under Dumitriu's signature, which Vinea grudgingly allowed in exchange for money.
Reputedly, Vinea was being coerced to join the Communist Party and become a Securitate informant, but stood his ground. He and Elena were arrested and held in custody for several months in 1959, his gold coins having resurfaced (although possibly also because of Vinea's contacts with Dumitriu and other "revisionists"); her conversations with Vinea wire-tapped by the Securitate, Henriette herself was imprisoned for several months in 1960. In confinement, Vinea was reportedly bastinadoed so that he temporarily lost control of his limbs; Elena also fell ill. They were eventually released following supplications from Nicolae Gh. Lupu, personal physician of communist dictator Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, with additional interventions from Rosetti and, possibly, Arghezi.
Final years and death
Having made efforts to make his style palatable to the ideological censors, Vinea burned his more revealing manuscripts. He was allowed to publish in the literary magazines. His work was mainly taken up by Anatol E. Baconsky's Steaua, which also interviewed him in 1963, but also by Gazeta Literară and Orizont. Together with Henriette, he was also made to write for Glasul Patriei, a communist propaganda magazine aimed at the Romanian diaspora, which strangely reunited them with former traditionalist enemies such as Hodoș, also undergoing communist "recovery".
At Glasul Patriei, Vinea finally turned to reportage writing, describing scenes from rural Romania in socialist realist style. In most of their contributions, he and Stahl censured or simply mocked Dumitriu, who had since defected to the West, and who stood accused of having plagiarized in most of his work, including from Vinea's own unpublished stories. This account contradicted Vinea's own deposition to the Securitate, where he only noted having helped Dumitriu with his writing. Late in her life, Stahl also dismissed the articles as "utterly unconvincing, painful". In 2005, researcher Ion Vartic confirmed that the allegations were partly substantiated, but suggested a more "nuanced" verdict: Dumitriu's work as a sample of collaborative fiction and intertextuality, involving both Vinea and Stahl.
In these late stages of his career, Vinea befriended the traditionalist poet Vasile Voiculescu, who was bedridden after a prolonged imprisonment, but also Călinescu, who had become the country's official literary historian. He secretly envied those who had left, feeling abandoned after Costin, who also spent time in communist prisons, emigrated in 1961. He wrote to Clara Haskil that "my life is with you two. What I still have left to live is quite insignificant." He asked Haskil to send him Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, which he read avidly, rekindling his own creative energies.
Vinea eventually succumbed to cancer, having suffered "horrific agony". In 1963, already on his deathbed, he registered his civil marriage with Elena, also adopting her niece Voica as his own daughter. Shortly before his death on July 6, 1964, he was given for review a rough draft of Ora fântânilor, which finally saw print later that year. His body was for a while on display at the Writer's Union House, which, Bârna argues, was a "sign of munificence" from his communist critics; it was afterward buried at Bellu Cemetery. On July 10, Geo Bogza, of unu fame, wrote in Contemporanul a posthumous homage to his former rival, the "prince of poets". On August 1, the exiled Monica Lovinescu honored Vinea with a broadcast on Radio Free Europe, calling attention to his modernist anti-communism.
In 1965, having been polished by Stahl and Mihai Gafița, Lunatecii was also issued as a volume, followed in 1971 by the unfinished Venin de mai ("May Venom") and in 1977 by the anthology Publicistica literară, containing part of his literary criticism. The corpus of his works, put out by Editura Dacia in the 1970s, had important omissions and, Ungureanu notes, presented Vinea as "a star among the underground communists whom the new epoch had honored time and again." Various other editions appeared sporadically. Another selected prose volume was put out by Dumitru Hîncu in 1984, as Săgeata și arabescul ("The Arrow and Arabesque"), but had to feature samples of his Glasul Patriei propaganda. The same year, Zaharia-Filipaș also began issuing a new edition of Vinea's complete writings, supervised by Zigu Ornea at Editura Minerva.
Literary contribution
Poetry
In his earliest Simbolul work, Vinea sided with the "soft-tempered" side of the Symbolist movement, displaying the conventional influence of Alexandru Macedonski, Ion Pillat, and even Dimitrie Anghel. This trait was soon, but not fully, abandoned. According to Cernat, young Iovanaki shared with Tzara and Tzara's mentor Adrian Maniu an "acute awareness of the literary convention" and a bookish boredom with aestheticism; the three also borrowed "obviously" from Alfred Jarry and Jules Laforgue. The Gârceni poems show that Vinea was a step behind Tzara's anti-art and hedonistic tendencies: they wrote about exactly the same subjects, and in much the same way, notably sharing between them the "hanged man" metaphor, borrowed from Laforgue; but Vinea was more "crepuscular" and "elegiac". One of Vinea's pieces, still evidencing "conventional poetic rhetorics", is mostly as an ode to the fishermen of Tuzla:
seara bate semne pe far | the evening stamps signs on the lighthouse |
Influences from Maniu were read by George Călinescu in a 1916 poem that depicts King Ferdinand I ordering the general mobilization:
Regele, l-am văzut — pe calul cum sunt brazdele câmpului | The king, I saw him—on his horse, the color of furrows |
As Cernat notes, Vinea only embraced Futurism because it resembled his own "simultaneist" art, which nonetheless remained "controlled by artistic intelligence, far removed from the anarchic radicalism of Futurism". The same had been argued by Lovinescu Sr, who saw Vinea as an "extremist", but a "restrained" and "intellectual" one. Never adopted by the Dadaists, he felt naturally affinities with the conservative side of Dada, illustrated by the "beautiful and virginal" poetry of Hugo Ball. His comparative moderation was even esteemed by traditionalists such as Const. I. Emilian, who treated many other avant-garde writers as a threat to social hygiene.
Vinea's 1920s poetry was more evidently connected with Surrealism and Expressionism, with echoes from Apollinaire and Georges Linze, superimposed over a classical Symbolist structure. In Lamento, which sets the tone for his 1920s poetry, the setting is Symbolist:
Ploi de martie, tragedie citadină, | Rains in March, an urban tragedy, |
Despite their many differences in style and ideology, Vinea, Barbu and Mateiu Caragiale shared a passion for Poe, a debt of inspiration to Romania's "obscure" Balkan substratum, and various other mannerisms. In 1928, Barbu, turning to a cerebral hermeticism, had settled on the notion that Vinea was his inferior, one of the "lazy" and "hybrid" poets, who relied on spontaneity and whim; as noted by Nicolae Manolescu, there was "nothing hermetic" about Vinea, the "pretentious troubadour". Călinescu also described Vinea as an author of "loosened sentimentality" and a Romanian Cocteau, while Tudor Vianu argued that Vinea's lyrical poetry was symptomatic for a new poetic consciousness, with poets as "empty vessels" for "the ineffable". Vinea was not, however, the purely impulsive modernist: evidence suggests that he dissembled surrealist automatism by simply rearranging consciously written poetry into unusual formats.
Main prose
Following his own critical blueprint during his Contimporanul years, Vinea moved between conventional storytelling and modernist, often autofictional, short prose that was heavily indebted to Urmuz. Examples include, in 1922, a parody of Hamlet; in 1923, a Futurist prose poem about the coming world revolution (signed as "Ivan Aniew"); and, in 1927, Victoria sălbatică. According to Manolescu, Descântecul și Flori de lampă is a failed work, ranking below models such as Macedonski and Anghel, and announcing Vinea's turn to the "unbearable kitsch".
These traits he integrated in Paradisul suspinelor, one of the most experimental (and possibly the earliest) avant-garde novel or novella by a Romanian—although it remains shadowed by Caragiale's Craii de Curtea-Veche. He added to the mix psychoanalytical and sexual themes, with an unreliable narrator that hinted the influence of André Gide. According to Vianu, much of the novel is also an imagist rearrangement of borrowings from Arghezi's prose, with echoes from Baudelaire's synaesthesia.
Often compared with Craii..., and possibly hinting at it, Lunatecii is, in part, a standard decadent novel which discusses degeneration theory and the "thinning" of aristocratic blood. It lacks a true dramatic structure, leading Manolescu to argue that Vinea did not have "a sense of the epic": "The value [rests] in the slowness of its narrative, in its poetic suggestion." His storytelling techniques were criticized by commentators such as Eugen Simion and Ovid Crohmălniceanu, who assessed that the central conflict was rather simplistic. Vinea himself described the novel as "fantasy realistic" and "social realistic", but, as Zaharia-Filipaș suggests, any sort of realism was "tentative, not vocational." According to philologist Angelo Mitchievici, Vinea was "ironic" and "camp" in reusing decadent conventions from Poe, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Huysmans and Wilde, "inventing himself as a character". There are also direct and indirect echoes from Fitzgerald's novels: themes that recall Tender Is the Night, and a motto from The Great Gatsby.
Vinea shows up in the protagonist Lucu Silion: an effeminate superfluous man in his thirties, inactive as a lawyer and has-been as a writer, dreaming of a never-ending twilight in his luxurious mansion. He is a last male descendant of an illustrious and principled family (its story, Simion writes, is "thrilling"), but surrounds himself with misfits, and pursues three women at once: a Greek belle, a delicate Catholic, and a secretive lady who stands for "Byzantinism tainted by the occult". The latter is Ana Ulmu, whose affair with Silion drives fiancé Arghir to a grotesque suicide. Ana also attempts to kill herself, and fails, leaving Silion to ruin himself paying for her recovery in hospital. Lunatecii reaches its climax when Silion attempts to kidnap Ana from her new husband, and ends up being shot and injured by him. Lucu experiences a rapid descent into poverty, alcoholism, and vagrancy, only commending the respect of fellow drunks.
Part of the novel is Vinea's barely disguised confession to Stahl about his philandering, with recounts of sexual debauchery. Critics have dismissed such episodes as "in bad taste" and "penny dreadful". Alexandru Bogdan-Pitești is a major character here (as well as in Venin de mai): as "Adam Gună", he sponsors libertine escapades and subversive literary societies, cultivating concupiscence and amoralism. Lunatecii also reveals Vinea's fascination and disgust with Nae Ionescu, the far-right journalist and philosopher. He appears as "Fane Chiriac", the man with "devilish jade eyes" and "cynical lucidity". Tzara may also have been caricatured here as the thick-skinned charlatan, "Dr. Barbu", while Alexandru Rosetti is seemingly the heroic "Filip", who offers Silion his care and protection.
Fragments and apocrypha
The unfinished Venin de mai, described by Manolescu as a "failed Bildungsroman", has for a protagonist the painter Andrei Mile, another Vinea alter-ego. Rather than aboulic, like Silion, Mile is driven by the thrill of extreme experiences, only to find himself clueless and desperate. He falls under Gună's spell at an early stage in his life, which allows Vinea to explore legends surrounding Bogdan-Pitești's interloper status. Sexual initiations occupy a central part of the narrative, and, Manolescu argues, are of no stylistic importance; overall, the book is "more somber" than Lunatecii, but "lengthy and boring". Part of the plot is localized on the (fictional) Danube islet Vadul Istrului, a magical but malaria-stricken place.
In depicting Andrei as a Constructivist, Venin de mai settles Vinea's scores with Tzara, hinting that Dada poetry is simply "illegible", and Constantin Brâncuși, depicted as the tedious sage "Gorjan" (his portrayal, Manolescu notes, "could have been better"). Although including precise episodes in the author's life, such as Nicolae Vinea's accidental death, its narrative, reconstructed from disparate notes, was greatly affected by editorial choices in which Vinea had no say.
In addition to his signed work, Vinea authored passages of texts which survive in Dumitriu's novel, Family Chronicle, and its spin-off cycle. They include a fragment about fugitive serfs on the Danube, the history of revolutionary conspiracies in 1917 Iași, and scathing memoirs about Nae Ionescu and Ion Călugăru. Vinea publicly complained that Lunatecii had to be rewritten because of these borrowings, but, according to Vartic, the claim should be treated with skepticism.
Legacy
In the 1980s, Stahl worried that Vinea's late publication had rendered him insignificant to Romanian letters, his novels "problematizing defects and qualities that are antique, and therefore uninteresting." Contrarily, Monica Lovinescu asserted that Vinea's "frozen evolution" during socialist realism had rendered him "this paradoxical service: Ion Vinea is perhaps more relevant today than ever before." He was "young, the same age as those young people who cannot but search for new ways ahead, who cannot but recall with nostalgia [Vinea's] itinerary for poetic revolt." Unwittingly, however, Vinea's pronouncements on folk tradition and Romania's primacy in modern art were recycled during the late stages of communism by the Protochronist nationalists, who used them against the West. By the 1980s, his contribution to Evenimentul Zilei was being officially placed among the acts of infiltration "by journalists of democratic and anti-fascist orientation".
Widow Elena Vinea inherited his collection of manuscripts, and helped to publish the lesser known Tzara pieces from the Gârceni era. Following the anti-communist revolt of 1989, Vinea's work returned to fuller recognition. A reissue of his complete works was being put out by Elena Zaharia-Filipaș, at her own expense, at the George Călinescu Institute and, later, the Museum of Romanian Literature. Writers Nicolae Tzone and Ion Lazu founded an eponymous publishing house and also took his works, putting up a memorial plaque on Braziliei Street; these projects earned endorsement from Voica Vinea, who inherited the Braziliei Street home.
Fictionalized elements of Vinea's life was recorded not just in his own prose, but also in that of his peers. As early as 1927, he was a possible inspiration for "Șcheianu", the drug-addicted protagonist of Cezar Petrescu's Întunecare ("Darkening"); he may also be the Romanian intellectual briefly mentioned in Tender Is the Night. Vinea is an easily recognizable presence in Family Chronicle—the part of it that was certainly authored by Dumitriu. Posthumously, Vinea also became the basis for several characters in Henriette Stahl's novels, beginning with a vengeful portrayal, as "Camil Tomescu", in Fratele meu, omul ("My Brother Man").