Dan Simonescu
Dan Simonescu was a Romanian literary historian, bibliographer, folklorist, and librarian. His debut was in his late teens, when he accompanied Constantin Rădulescu-Codin during fieldwork in Muscel County, publishing his first contributions in the field of Romanian folklore. After graduating from the University of Bucharest in 1925, and publishing his first book, a collection of articles, in 1926, he became an assistant professor at his alma mater, and was also employed as a librarian by the Romanian Academy. Simonescu joined an editorial team headed by senior scholars Ioan Bianu and Nicolae Cartojan, and, in the 1930s and 1940s, became a major contributor to the collection and publication of old Romanian literature; he was also Cartojan's disciple, though the two disagreed on a parallel project, namely the publication of Mihail Kogălniceanu's collected works, with Simonescu favoring, and eventually putting out, a topical selection of Kogălniceanu's social-themed essays. His own first major contributions were his doctoral thesis, which explored court ceremonials in the Danubian Principalities, and a paper on the emergence of historiography in Early Modern Romania.
Having obtained a professorship at Iași University during World War II, Simonescu joined the Social Democratic Party in the late 1940s, and was briefly employed as a department head by the Education Ministry. He became marginalized during the early stages of Romanian communism: sent to do work at the Nicolae Iorga Institute of History and the Technical School for Librarians, he was involved in the technical aspects of bibliographic work. By 1956, he could return with more editions of Kogălniceanu, and more secretly networked with other old-regime intellectuals, including G. T. Kirileanu; they ensured the preservation and eventual resumption of cultural research that went against the official interpretation of Marxism–Leninism.
In the 1960s, the regime allowed Simonescu to teach at the Bucharest Pedagogical Institute, and then granted him a Bucharest University chair, which he preserved to his official retirement in 1972. He is widely seen as responsible for the definitive Kogălniceanu edition, while also contributing studies of ancient literature, including romances and rhyming chronicles, with additional returns to both bibliography and folkloristics. Simonescu was additionally instrumental in the rediscovery of historical writings by Balthasar Walther, though also criticized for allowing communist censors to remove a fragment referencing Michael the Brave's antisemitism. Organizing a specialized class for antiquarian booksellers when he was already in his late eighties, he continued to write into the early 1990s. Three years after the Romanian Revolution of 1989, and four months before his death, he was made an honorary member of the academy.
Biography
Beginnings and interwar
Dan Simon was born on December 11, 1902, in Câmpulung, which was back then the seat of local government for Muscel, in the Kingdom of Romania. His parents, who adhered to the Romanian Orthodox Church, were the civil servant Ion Simon and his wife Ecaterina. The couple had eleven other children, including Romanian Land Forces Colonel Constantin Simonescu. The Simons, all of whom later used the name "Simonescu", had deeper ties to Muscel, with Ion being born at Suslănești village, near Mateiaș Hill; a local legend has it that Dan's grandfather, Simon of Suslănești, had spared the village devastation by pleading with the brigand Radu Anghel. Dan himself recalled being involved in village life from his early years, "with a sort of liberty that was rarely impinged upon by pedagogic principles."The future scholar lived out World War I and occupation by German troops in that region. In late 1916, he had boarded with the mayor of Mioveni, witnessing first-hand the town's takeover by the Imperial German Army. He later referred to this period, which lasted down to the creation of Greater Romania in 1918, as one of wanton destruction. His early education was completed in Câmpulung and Pitești, where, according to his own recollections, he became more disciplined and began modelling himself on his teachers, especially Alexandru Bărcăcilă and Mihai Mihăileanu, who taught him Latin. After completing Ion Brătianu High School, Simon enrolled in the University of Bucharest in September 1921. He was initially drawn by classical scholarship, in the same class as Alexandru Graur, but was put off by professor Dumitru Evolceanu, whose teaching methods he regarded as superficial; he was instead impressed by Iuliu Valaori, who introduced him to Latin literature. According to his own recollections, in 1922 he met Constantin Rădulescu-Codin, a clerk and schoolteacher who was traveling throughout Muscel and Argeș Counties, collecting Romanian folklore; one such trip took them to Suslănești.
Looking back in 1981, Simonescu described Muscel and Argeș as a "region with old, and, it seems to me, unaltered traditions." As noted by folklorist Mihail M. Robea, he was one of the young intellectuals who did much of the uncredited fieldwork, with the results of their research being effectively exploited by Codin. A fellow literary historian, G. G. Ursu, dates Simonescu's writing debut to 1923, noting his "unrelenting passion for books". These early contributions were published by Arthur Gorovei's specialized magazine of folkloristics, Șezătoarea. According to Gorovei's recollections, his first signature was Dan Simionescu, with Simonescu eventually settled as his definitive surname. He sometimes alternated it with a pen name, Simon Dănescu. "Student Dan I. Simonescu, originally from Câmpulung" was cited as an informant by the folklorist Ioan Aurel Candrea, referencing a Muscel legend which claimed that brigand Gheorghe Fulga had escaped from jail using a miraculous week called iarba fiarelor. He also rediscovered a collection of primary sources on Câmpulung's history, attributing it to the clerk Dumitru I. Băjan.
Simonescu was trained in palaeography, and in 1924–1925 held a job at the National Archives. He graduated university in 1925, when he also became a substitute high school teacher; he held a permanent position in 1929–1931. His first published volume was the 1926 Încercări istorico-literare. Done from papers he presented at university seminars, it formulated Simonescu's identification of Alecu Russo as the author of a Romanian nationalist essay, Cântarea României, and presented Udriște Năsturel's translation of Barlaam and Josaphat. A separate chapter discussed Gheorghe Asachi's poetic debt to Adam Mickiewicz. Încercări was followed that same year by a monograph on the Câmpulung Monastery—Viața literară și culturală a Mănăstirii Câmpulung în trecut, which was essentially his final dissertation, with scholar Ioan Bianu as the supervisor. Drawing praise from the establishment historian Nicolae Iorga, it was rated as "excellent" by Ursu. Also in 1926, Simonescu arranged for print the late Rădulescu-Codin's final manuscript, a monograph of Câmpulung.
Upon Bianu's recommendation, and upon finishing his mandatory military service in December 1927, Simonescu became a teaching assistant at Bucharest's Faculty of Letters and Philosophy. He replaced Nicolae Cartojan, who had been advanced to lecturer, and was originally a substitute for Iorga. He was later accepted as a provisional and permanent assistant; from 1931, he was also a librarian at the Romanian Academy collections and the manuscript section of the Central University Library. His first tasks were in cataloguing Teodor Burada's documentary fund. His second specialization was in Byzantine studies, after attending a seminar held by philologist Demostene Russo in 1933–1934. Collaborating with senior bibliographers such as Bianu and Cartojan, who informed his approach to historiography, he became fascinated with incunabula; on behalf of the academy, he was editor of the well-received third-volume of Bibliografia românească veche, which came out in 1936. Also that year, his own literary reviews were collected into a single volume. From 1935, he also taught at a pedagogical high school in Bucharest—a stint which ended in 1938 or 1940.
Researcher Nicolae Scurtu notes that Simonescu's enduring admiration for Bianu and Cartojan were "of a rare kind in the Romanian cultural space." He maintained his admiration of Cartojan throughout his life, calling him a "perfect man", as well as "just, decent, humane, self-effacing". Cartojan, alongside Bianu, Russo and others whom he met at the academy, gave him living proof that "one cannot complete a thorough paper without sacrificing one's hours of leisure and entertainment, one's personal and family interests, one's health and friendships." As Cartojan's assistant at the Bucharest faculty of letters, Simonescu held two seminars—one teaching students the minutiae of the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet, and the other familiarizing them with the major works of old Romanian literature. Spurred on by Cartojan, he attended specialized courses at Athens and Istanbul, followed by an extended stay as a visiting scholar at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Also in 1937, he issued a monograph called Dela istorie la istorie literară, which discussed Alexandru Lapedatu's contribution as a historian. On May 16 of that year, he published in Curentul an article which announced the first efforts to establish comparative literature as an independent academic domain.
Wartime and communist repression
Simonescu took a doctorate of letters in 1938, with a paper on the court ceremonial in the old Danubian Principalities. Its starting point was a Moldavian codex of 1762, compiled in Greek and identified as the work of Logothete Georgiaki. This had been first issued in print in the 19th century by scholar Mihail Kogălniceanu, whose errors he was forced to correct as part of his commentary. Simonescu's first article on this subject had been published by Cartojan's Cercetări Literare magazine, which had him as a contributor into the 1940s; according to Scurtu, it was this collaboration which fully consolidated his reputation. A younger literary historian, Dimitrie Păcurariu, rates his definitive, published thesis a work of reference for the study of older Romanian literature; another scholar, Mircea Anghelescu, sees it as "marking a date in Romanian medieval studies". Historian Emil Lăzărescu took a reserved view, noting that Simonescu had failed to reveal some of his sources, and that the paper contained too few direct citations from Georgiakis. He believed that the work was rather a "point of departure" for later investigations. Also in 1938, Simonescu and Emil Murcade put out an introduction to books of Arabic literature appearing in Wallachia, followed in 1939 by their study, Tipar românesc pentru arabi în secolul al XVIII-lea. Simonescu underwent further training in France during 1939.During World War II and the Ion Antonescu dictatorship, Simonescu was substitute professor at the Higher School of Archives and Paleography. In early 1941, after a brief civil war against the Iron Guard, Antonescu and his new Education Minister, Radu R. Rosetti, proceeded with a purge of known Guardists in academia. As part of this maneuver, Giorge Pascu was forced to resign from the Bucharest University's Chair of Old Literature; Cartojan tried to get Simonescu nominated for that position, but failed to obtain relevant support. Simonescu functioned instead as a substitute professor at the Letters and Philosophy Faculty of Iași University, but no longer employed by the Central Library after 1942. Alongside Ion C. Chițimia and Alexandru Rosetti, and under Cartojan's guidance, he began publishing a corpus of old Romanian literature, of which only three volumes came out. During his tenure, Romania entered the war as an ally of Nazi Germany, participating in the invasion of the Soviet Union. In December 1941, Convorbiri Literare hosted Simonescu's homage to three of his seminar students who had since been killed on the Eastern Front; it referred to the "Eastern enemy" as "a dispenser of human misery and a persecutor of the cross". In October–November 1943, he visited the Transnistria Governorate, established by Antonescu in former Soviet territory, and lectured at Odesa University. By then, he was also affiliated with Victor Papacostea's Balcania group, which, although well received by Antonescu, conflicted with the Greater Germanic Reich by reviving Balkan federalism.
Simonescu was the first expert to investigate the collection of Romanian manuscripts that scholar Moses Gaster had bequeathed to the academy, publishing his results in a 1940 issue of Viața Romînească. His other research at the Higher School was taken up in print with a 1943 tract on the emergence of a critical dimension in Romania's history-writing. It detailed the old chroniclers' emancipation from the standards imposed by Constantine Manasses, dwelling on Grigore Ureche and Miron Costin's effort to distinguish propaganda and calumny from historical truth. Taking over as head of Iași University's Chair of Old Romanian Literature in mid-1942, Simonescu successfully proposed that George Călinescu become his counterpart at the Modern Literature Department. This proposal was vetoed by government overseers, who viewed Călinescu as politically suspect, and Simonescu retained that chair as well, as a substitute. Cartojan's death in 1944 left Simonescu in charge of another project, namely the publication of works by Kogălniceanu. He was also the sole editor of an addendum to Bibliografia românească veche. The book was completed under duress, with Simonescu showing up for work at the academy throughout the air raids on Bucharest; though commended for the effort, he was criticized by classical scholar Nestor Camariano for not including a number of works, such as Rigas Feraios' maps of the Principalities.
The turn of tides on the Eastern Front saw the scholar's brother Constantin killed in action during Operation Little Saturn of late 1942. In August 1944, Antonescu was deposed by coup, and Romania was placed under a Soviet occupation. In February 1945, Simonescu was lecturing at the newly formed Romanian Society for Friendship with the Soviet Union of Bucharest, discussing Dimitrie Cantemir's activity in the Russian Empire. That August, ARLUS' Iași chapter hosted his presentation of Nikolai Spathari, a Moldavian soldier and geographer in service to the Tsardom of Russia. He continued to publish articles, including, in 1946, one detailing the spread of Baltasar Gracián's El Criticón in 18th-century Moldavia. He was elected a regional delegate of the Democratic Students' Front, and, at a congress held on June 18, 1946, joined the national executive board of the Union of Teachers' Syndicates. By October 1946, Simonescu had set up a private school for boys in Bucharest, called "Mihail Kogălniceanu High School". Exactly a year later, during the Week of Romanian–Soviet Friendship, he spoke at ARLUS' library on Calea Victoriei about the Soviet tradition in book editing "for the masses". Also then, he and Sergiu Calmanovici co-authored and published secondary-school textbooks for both Romanian and French.
During the early stages of Romanian communism, Simonescu focused mainly on his work as a bibliographer. As recalled by Anghelescu, who was at a time a student of literature, the senior scholar had been barred from teaching by the communist censors—a lesser punishment than those reserved for other specialists, whose work was entirely purged from academia. By January 1948, he had joined the Social Democratic Party, and was writing for its journal, Viitorul Social. From 1947, he was employed by the Education Ministry's Study Offices, and by February 1948 was collecting statistical data from the various schools. That year, a book collection put out by Vatra magazine hosted his edition of Kogălniceanu's "social writings". In his introductory study, Simonescu explained that this was a spin-off from Cartojan's own Kogălniceanu corpus, which, he argued, had neglected the Kogălniceanu's social directives. He was moved to Iași University Philology Section where, in February 1949, he and Alexandru Dima established a study circle which took inspiration from Soviet historiography. As noted in 1977 by Ursu, the "demands of the cultural revolution in our country" also led Simonescu to participate in popular education, with lectures at the Bucharest people's university. His works of the time include a May 1951 article which discussed the governing Workers' Party as depicted "in new works of folk literature". He made returns to his native area, and in 1953 stayed with teacher Vasile Marin at Mușătești.