Urmuz
Urmuz was a Romanian writer, lawyer and civil servant, who became a cult hero in Romania's avant-garde scene. His scattered work, consisting of absurdist short prose and poetry, opened a new genre in Romanian letters and humor, and captured the imagination of modernists for several generations. Urmuz's Bizarre ''Pages were largely independent of European modernism, even though some may have been triggered by Futurism; their valorization of nonsense verse, black comedy, nihilistic tendencies and exploration into the unconscious mind have repeatedly been cited as influential for the development of Dadaism and the Theatre of the Absurd. Individual pieces such as "The Funnel and Stamate", "Ismaïl and Turnavitu", "Algazy & Grummer" or "The Fuchsiad" are parody fragments, dealing with monstrous and shapeshifting creatures in mundane settings, and announcing techniques later taken up by Surrealism.
Urmuz's biography between his high school eccentricity and his public suicide remains largely mysterious, and some of the sympathetic accounts have been described as purposefully deceptive. The abstruse imagery of his work has produced a large corpus of diverging interpretations. He has notably been read as a satirist of public life in the 1910s, an unlikely conservative and nostalgic, or an emotionally distant esotericist.
In Urmuz's lifetime, his stories were only acted out by his thespian friend George Ciprian and published as samples by Cuget Românesc newspaper, with support from modernist writer Tudor Arghezi. Ciprian and Arghezi were together responsible for creating the link between Urmuz and the emerging avant-garde, their activity as Urmuz promoters being later enhanced by such figures as Ion Vinea, Geo Bogza, Lucian Boz, Sașa Pană and Eugène Ionesco. Beginning in the late 1930s, Urmuz also became the focus interest for the elite critics, who either welcomed him into 20th-century literature or dismissed him as a buffoonish impostor. By then, his activity also inspired an eponymous avant-garde magazine edited by Bogza, as well as Ciprian's drama The Drake's Head''.
Name
Urmuz's birth name was, in full, Dimitrie Dim. Ionescu-Buzeu, changed to Dimitrie Dim. Dumitrescu-Buzeu when he was still a child, and later settled as Demetru Dem. Demetrescu-Buzău. The Demetrescu surname was in effect a Romanian patronymic, using the -escu suffix: his father was known as Dimitrie Ionescu-Buzău. The attached particle Buzău, originally Buzeu, confirms that the family traced its roots to the eponymous town. According to George Ciprian, the names Ciriviș and Mitică were coined while the writer was still in school, whereas Urmuz came "later".The name under which the writer is universally known did not actually originate from his own wishes, but was selected and imposed on the public by Arghezi, only one year before Urmuz committed suicide. The spelling Hurmuz, when used in reference to the writer, was popular in the 1920s, but has since been described as erroneous. The variant Ormuz, sometimes rendered as Urmuz, was also used as a pen name by the activist and novelist A. L. Zissu.
The word urmuz, explained by linguists as a curious addition to the Romanian lexis, generally means "glass bead", "precious stone" or "snowberry". It has entered the language through oriental channels, and these meanings ultimately refer to the international trade in beads centered on Hormuz Island, Iran. Anthropologist and essayist Vasile Andru highlights a secondary, scatological, meaning: in the Romani language, a source of Romanian slang, urmuz, "bead", has mutated to mean "feces". An alternative etymology, exclusive to the author's pseudonym, was advanced by writer and scholar Ioana Pârvulescu. It suggests the combination of two contradictory terms: ursuz and amuz.
Biography
Childhood
Mitică was the eldest son of a middle class nuclear family: his father, described by Ciprian as "short and mean", was the director of Curtea de Argeș Hospital in the 1890s. In his spare time, Ionescu-Buzeu Sr. was also a classical scholar, folklorist and active Freemason. His wife, the writer's mother, was Eliza née Pașcani, sister of the doctor, chemist and University of Paris professor Cristien Pascani. Urmuz had numerous other siblings, of whom most were daughters. One of Urmuz's sisters, Eliza was later a main source of information on the author's childhood and adolescence.The future Urmuz was born in the northern Muntenian town of Curtea de Argeș, and, at age five, spent one year in Paris with his parents. The family eventually settled in Romania's capital, Bucharest, where his father was hygiene teacher at Matei Basarab National College, later city health inspector, and rented houses in Antim Monastery quarter. Young Mitică was described by his sister as mainly unpretentious and introverted, fascinated by scientific discovery and, in his childhood years, a passionate reader of Jules Verne's science fiction books. At a later stage, he was also possibly familiarized with and influenced by German idealism and by the philosophical views of 19th-century poet Mihai Eminescu. A more evident influence on the future writer was Ion Luca Caragiale, the main figure in early 20th-century Romanian comic theatre.
Ionescu-Buzău's family had artistic interests, and Urmuz grew up with a fascination for classical music and fine art, learning to play the piano and taking up amateur oil painting. He got along best with his mother, who was also a pianist. The devout daughter of an Orthodox priest, she was unable to instill in her young son the same respect for the Church.
Urmuz's arrival to literary history took place in the atmosphere of Bucharest gymnasia. It was at this junction that he became a mate of Ciprian, who later described their encounter as momentous: "I don't much believe in destiny. Yet I find it such an odd incident that my bench mate, from my failing grade year through to my high school graduation, was this tiny man of a rare originality, who had a massive say on how my life would turn up." Ciprian describes what follows as his own "initiation in artistic matters": he recalls conversations with "Ciriviș" where they debated the "perfection" of Ancient Greek sculpture, and mentions that young Urmuz, unlike himself, regarded theater as a "minor art". Instead, Urmuz preferred to attend concerts at the Romanian Atheneum, and, Ciprian writes, had an advanced understanding of absolute music even at age thirteen. Reportedly, the young man was also in the attendance at lectures given by Titu Maiorescu, a philosopher and aesthete who had influenced both Eminescu and Caragiale.
''Pahuci'' brotherhood
Some years later, while enrolled at the Gheorghe Lazăr National College, Urmuz turned his interest toward mocking the severity of his teachers and challenging the dominance of artistic traditionalism. One such early episode is attested by Ciprian: amused by the creation of a Vivat Dacia association of nationalist students, Urmuz subverted its meetings, and, with deadpan snark, suggested that membership fees should be paid in duck heads. Also according to Ciprian, these events soon lost their shock value, leading him and Urmuz to "take to the streets", where they began their activity as pranksters. Their initial experiment was to pressure law-abiding and credulous passers-by into presenting their identity papers for inspection, and the apparent success earned Urmuz an unexpected following in school. Another colleague, future traditionalist poet Vasile Voiculescu, recalled young Urmuz as "genially knavish", his humor being "cerebral, harder to detect and appreciate".The core group of Urmuzian disciples, organized as a secret society, comprised Ciprian, Alexandru "Bălălău" Bujoreanu and Costică "Pentagon" Grigorescu, together known as the pahuci. Allegedly, the obscure word originated from the Hebrew for "yawns". Their activity centered on daring pranks: Urmuz and the other three young men once made an impromptu visit to the isolated Căldărușani Monastery, in Ilfov County, where the deposed and disgraced Metropolitan Ghenadie was living in banishment. Passing themselves off as newspaper editors, they demanded honored guest treatment, tested the monks' patience, and were later introduced to a well-disposed Ghenadie. Ciprian also recalls that Urmuz's philosophical musings or deadpan surreal humor were a direct inspiration for other pranks and experiments. He describes how Ciriviș acted out sadness for the plight of a screechy sledge, but then duped onlookers into believing that the squeaks came from a woman somehow trapped under the vehicle. Reportedly, Urmuz also approached his seniors training at seminaries or other traditionalist institutions, earned their attention by claiming to share the nationalist agenda, and then began reciting them nonsense lyrics such as an evolving draft of his mock-fable "The Chroniclers".
Outside school, the young man was still introverted, and, Sandqvist notes, "extremely shy, especially with girls." Ciprian recalls Ciriviș's engrossing pick-up lines: he acted familiar to any young woman who caught his eye, assuring her that they had met once before, and, having stirred her curiosity, falsely recounting how they both used to kill flesh-flies for sport.
The pahuci welcomed their graduation with one final act of defiance against the school principal, whom they visited in his office, where they began hopping about in circles. Even though their group did not survive once its members took different career paths, they had regular reunions at the Spiru Godelea tavern, where they earned notoriety for their rude and unconventional behavior. Urmuz enrolled at the Bucharest Medical School, allegedly after pressures from his stern father. According to Ciprian, this training did not agree with his friend, who would complain of being "unable to make himself understood by the cadavers." This was probably a sign that the young man could not bear to witness dissection. He eventually entered the University of Bucharest Faculty of Law, which was to be his alma mater, while also taking lectures in composition and counterpoint at the Music and Declamation Conservatory. Additionally, he completed his first service term in the Romanian Infantry.
Urmuz became head of his family in 1907. That year, his father and two younger brothers died, and his sister Eliza was married. He also continued to take the initiative in daring acts of épater le bourgeois. Ciprian recalls the two of them renting a carriage which Urmuz would order around, making a right at every junction, and effectively going around in circles around the Palace of Justice. Urmuz then proceeded to pester the street vendors, stopping over to buy a random assortment of useless items: pretzels, a pile of charcoal, and an old hen which he impaled on his walking cane.