Paul Georgescu
Paul Georgescu was a Romanian literary critic, journalist, fiction writer and communist political figure. Remembered as both a main participant in the imposition of Socialist Realism in its Romanian form and a patron of dissenting modernist and postmodern literature, he began his career in politics during World War II, when he sided with the anti-fascist groups and the underground Romanian Communist Party in opposition to the Axis-aligned Ion Antonescu regime. During the first twenty years of Communist Romania, Georgescu assisted Leonte Răutu in exercising Stalinist control over local literature, but also published young nonconformist authors, beginning with Nichita Stănescu and Matei Călinescu, in his Gazeta Literară. Sidelined over his own incompatibility with the Socialist Realist dogma, and returning to public life during the 1960s liberalization enforced by Nicolae Ceaușescu, he became openly adverse to Ceaușescu's variety of national communism and clandestinely cultivated the prohibited ideology of Trotskyism.
During the final part of his life, Paul Georgescu became especially known as an experimental novelist, among the first postmodernists on the local scene, and, although physically impaired, one of the most prolific Romanian authors of the late 20th century. His main works of the time, including the critically acclaimed Vara baroc, deal with urban and suburban life on the Bărăgan Plain, creatively parodying the work of 19th and early 20th century writers. While admired for his contribution to fiction and his lifelong promotion of anti-dogmatic literature, Georgescu remains controversial for his political affiliations and his early participation in censorship.
Biography
Early life and World War II
Georgescu was born in Țăndărei, a commune on the Bărăgan. Both his parents were middle-class ethnic Romanians, his father having set up practice as a physician. From early on, he was alarmed by the rise of fascist groups, primarily the Iron Guard, adopting a Marxist perspective in reaction.Involved in anti-fascist circles during World War II, the future writer is believed to have joined the then-illegal Romanian Communist Party as an adolescent, and reportedly fought against the Nazi-supported Ion Antonescu regime. Although affiliated with a party which followed a Stalinist and pro-Soviet line, the young activist may have been appreciative of Trotskyism, and this sympathy is known to have surfaced in his later years. Georgescu was a political prisoner of the Antonescu regime, said to have been because he had given shelter to a Soviet spy. He was, according to legend, sentenced to death by the authorities before turning nineteen, but managed to evade execution. His later friend and fellow author Radu Cosaşu writes that " had been in danger of a court-martial".
During the early stages of Soviet occupation, and before the official establishment of Communist Romania, Paul Georgescu took an active part in communization at a cultural level in general, and the establishment of a local Socialist Realist trend in particular. Researcher Ana Selejan thus lists him in the "first generation of creators, tailors and propagandists of the new literary order."
Political preeminence
In the 1950s, Georgescu became an activist of the PCR Central Committee's Agitprop section, an office which reportedly led literary circles to perceive him as the éminence grise of chief ideologues Leonte Răutu and Iosif Chişinevschi. After a restructuring of the education system, he also advanced hierarchically to the position of lecturer at the University of Bucharest Faculty of Letters. A member of the newly created Writers' Union of Romania, Georgescu was first elected to the head bureau of its Prose Section in October 1952. He was also rapporteur at the 1956 Writers' Union Congress, during which the Communist Party, using Stalinist rhetoric, condemned the cultural aspects of De-Stalinization as "formalism" and "vulgar sociologism". His texts, offering endorsement to the Romanian Socialist Realist current, were published as Încercări critice. In March 1954, he was co-founder of Gazeta Literară, inaugurated as a Romanian equivalent to the Soviet Union's Literaturnaya Gazeta. The new publication was initially led by aging writer Zaharia Stancu, whose disagreements with the PCR leadership made the latter withdraw him from public life and assign him the honorary position of magazine director. Georgescu, who took over for Stancu as editor, published articles in the other venues of the Socialist Realist press: Contemporanul, Viaţa Românească and the PCR platform Scînteia. With Ovid Crohmălniceanu, Sergiu Fărcăşan and Petru Dumitriu, he contributed the sporadic literary chronicles at Scînteia.Paul Georgescu assumed a first-hand position in directing and promoting a young generation of writers during 1952, when he became one of the main lecturers at the newly founded School of Literature, a Writers' Union venture. In 1954, Georgescu hired Valeriu Râpeanu, at the time a student and later known for his scholarly works on 19th century poet Mihai Eminescu, to a position at Gazeta Literară. Among the other essayists specialized in literary criticism who were promoted by Georgescu as head of the magazine were Gabriel Dimisianu, Ştefan Cazimir and Nicolae Velea. By 1957, he was also in touch with Matei Călinescu, future critic and novelist, whom he first employed as Gazeta Literară proofreader. At that stage, Călinescu recalls, Georgescu developed a fondness for both him the young modernist poet Nichita Stănescu, as well as with their literary friends Cezar Baltag, Nicolae Breban, Grigore Hagiu, Modest Morariu and Petre Stoica. Although the group soon after migrated toward Anatol E. Baconsky's Cluj-based rival magazine Steaua, Georgescu is occasionally credited with having launched Stănescu by welcoming him among the prominent poets of his day. He is believed to have had a similar role in the careers of Matei Călinescu and Călinescu's Gazeta Literară companions, as well as in those of Ştefan Bănulescu and Marin Preda.
Conflicts with other sections of the Socialist Realist cultural establishment surfaced in the 1950s, when the tolerance of modernism by Gazeta Literară was officially condemned as "escapism" by Crohmălniceanu. In 1957, he further upset communist decision-makers by agreeing to publish article Incomparabilul by Constantin Ţoiu, which lampooned his fellow Socialist Realist author Dumitriu. Eventually, ideological disagreements with the communist apparatus made his colleagues subject him to a censure vote, and Georgescu was removed from his position at Gazeta Literară. Călinescu, who records both his disgruntlement and the definition he gave to his new condition: scriitor la domiciliu. His editorial office at Gazeta Literară was assigned to Aurel Mihale, himself succeeded by Tiberiu Utan.
1960s transition
With the rise to power of Nicolae Ceauşescu and the onset of relative liberalization, Romanian Socialist Realism came to an end. During that stage, although hostile to the new leadership, Georgescu adapted to the requirements, a change exemplified by his 1967 collection of essays, Polivalenţa necesară, and by his 1968 novel Coborînd. In parallel, he published two collections of short stories: Vîrstele tinereţii and 3 nuvele, the latter of which featured his acclaimed story Pilaf. Gazeta Literară was itself a victim of the liberalization climate, and, in 1968, was closed down to be replaced with România Literară, edited by Geo Dumitrescu.Georgescu continued to play an important part in launching the careers of young writers. Beginning 1969, he helped novelist Norman Manea establish himself on the local scene. Between 1976 and 1986, Georgescu was in correspondence with Ion Simuţ, an aspiring critic whom the educational system of the day had assigned to a schoolteacher's position in the remote commune of Ţeţchea, Bihor County. He helped Simuţ publish his contributions in Bucharest journals, personally intervening with editors. He was in the meantime engaged in a rivalry with some main figures of the neorealist tendency, who were traditionally closer to the Ceauşescu regime: Preda, Eugen Barbu, Petru Dumitriu and Titus Popovici. During that time, he ended his collaboration with Scînteia and began contributing to România Liberă daily, which, under Octavian Paler's direction, took a certain distance from the official line. According to Manea, Georgescu's contributions to România Literară, which also hosted writers diverging from the PCR-imposed course, were "never refused". He also published two other novels: Înainte de tăcere and Doctorul Poenaru, followed in 1977 by Revelion.
Final years
By the late 1970s, Georgescu had entered his most fecund stage as a prose writer, regularly publishing his novels at one-year intervals. At the same time, his life and career were being changed by disease. He had a malformation of the vertebral column and was already walking with a limp; in old age, his limbs were affected by ankylosis, which greatly reduced his mobility, and he developed a tendency for obesity. According to his friend Manea, "the assault of diseases and age", coupled with resentment from Ceauşescu's "functionaries of the Dogma", had physically isolated Georgescu from his peers.The acclaimed novels Vara baroc and Solstiţiu tulburat saw print in 1980 and 1982 respectively. The former earned him the Writers' Union Prize for Prose in 1981, a ceremony which, due to his declining health, he could not attend in person. Vîrstele raţiunii, a book of interviews Paul Georgescu granted to poet Florin Mugur, was also published in 1982. At that time, Georgescu was cultivating some apolitical or anti-communist authors of modernist or avant-garde literature, preferring them over the revival of nationalist and traditionalist literature in Ceauşescu's Romania. He became interested in the works of a new subversive and lyrical generation of writers, collectively known as Optzecişti, playing a special part in the promotion of their representatives Ştefan Agopian and Mircea Cărtărescu. Agopian credits the review of his 1981 novel Tache de catifea, published by Georgescu in România Literară, with having established his reputation on the literary scene. Georgescu also took a sympathetic view of Târgovişte School authors such as Radu Petrescu and Mircea Horia Simionescu, of poet Mircea Ciobanu, of independent literary critic Dan C. Mihăilescu, and of modernist novelist Virgil Duda.
In 1984, Georgescu finished the first of his novels having for a common setting Huzurei. Titled Mai mult ca perfectul—lit. "The More than Perfect", after a term most commonly used for the pluperfect in Romanian grammar—, it was followed two years later by Natura lucrurilor, in 1987 by Pontice, and in 1988 by Geamlîc.
Paul Georgescu died in October 1989, some two months before the Romanian Revolution toppled communism. He was buried on the outskirts of Bucharest, at the cemetery in Străuleşti. According to writer Bedros Horasangian, the funeral ceremony was interrupted in the hope that more people would turn up. Columnist and literary historian Nicolae Manolescu signed Georgescu's obituary in România Literară, voicing a call for moderation in assessing his colleague's career. A final volume of the Huzurei series, titled Între timp, was published posthumously in 1990.