Vladimir Colin
Vladimir Colin was a Romanian short story writer and novelist. One of the most important fantasy and science fiction authors in Romanian literature, whose main works are known on several continents, he was also a noted poet, essayist, translator, journalist and comic book author. After he and his spouse at the time Nina Cassian rallied with the left-wing literary circle Orizont during the late 1940s, Colin started his career as a communist and socialist realist writer. During the early years of the Romanian Communist regime, he was assigned offices in the censorship and propaganda apparatus. His 1951 novel Soarele răsare în Deltă was an early representative of local socialist realist school, but earned Colin much criticism from the cultural establishment of the day, for what it perceived as ideological mistakes.
Progressively after the mid-1950s, Colin concentrated on his literary career and abandoned communist ideology. He authored celebrated works such as the mythopoeia and fairy tale collections, making his debut in local science fiction literature with Colecția de Povestiri Științifico-Fantastice journal. His work in science fiction, culminating in the 1978 novel Babel, earned Colin three Eurocon prizes. He was given posthumous recognition for his contribution to the genre, and an award named in his honor is regularly granted to established Romanian science fiction authors. From 1970 until his death, he was one of the editors for the Writers' Union literary magazine, Viața Românească.
Biography
Early life
Born in Bucharest into a family of emancipated Romanian Jews. He was the son of Lazăr Colin, a civil servant, and his wife Ella. His mother was the sister of Ana Pauker, a prominent activist of the Romanian Communist Party and later one of Communist Romania's political leaders. On his paternal side, he was also the nephew of Liviu Cohn-Colin, who was a known lawyer employed by the Ministry of Commerce.During World War II and Ion Antonescu's dictatorial regime, as part of Romania's adoption of antisemitic policies, Colin was denied access into educational facilities. At the time, together with poet Nina Cassian, he attended informal lectures on the history of literature and the work of William Shakespeare, given by writer Mihail Sebastian. Both Colin and Cassian had by 1941 joined the then-illegal Communist Party, as activists of its Communist Youth wing—as Cassian recalled in 2008, they were motivated by a will to "change the world for the better", abhorring both antisemitism and fascism.
Colin married Nina Cassian in 1943. The two divorced five years later, and Cassian remarried Al. I. Ștefănescu. During their period together, both Cassian and Colin grew close to writer and literary critic Ovid Crohmălniceanu, later known as a Communist Party activist, as well as to future literary historian Geo Șerban and translator Petre Solomon. Later, Colin was again married, to graphic artist.
Communist writer
After the August 1944 Coup against the pro-Axis Antonescu and the start of Soviet occupation, Colin became a noted supporter of left-wing causes. That year, at the age of twenty-three, he also graduated from Bucharest's Cantemir Vodă High School and had his first poem published in Victoria journal. The piece was titled Manifest and signed Ștefan Colin. Colin studied at the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Letters, but left the institution after only one year, spending much of his time working for the UTC, which employed him as publisher of its books. Having served as an activist for the UTC's Central Committee in 1945–1946, Colin was later a broadcast editor for the Radio Company's Bucharest branch, worked as an editor for various left-wing magazines, including Orizont, Flacăra, and Revista Literară. In 1945, he published Poemul lui Octombrie, a translation of Russian-language poems by Soviet writer Vladimir Mayakovsky.As contributors to Orizont, Colin, Cassian and Solomon supported the view that writers were supposed to immerse themselves into social struggles, an attitude which represented one of the main literary tendencies in the post-war young literature of Romania. They were somewhat close to the group of writers gathered around Geo Dumitrescu, while contrasting with the bohemian group formed around Constant Tonegaru and the Kalende magazine, with the Sibiu Literary Circle, with the Surrealists, and with independent and distinct authors such as Paul Celan and Ion Caraion.
After the establishment of a Romanian Communist regime, Vladimir Colin became noted for his vocal support of the new authorities. In 2006, the Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania nominated him among the prominent Communist activists responsible for censorship. In parallel, he was pursuing a career as a poet: his debut volume 27 de poeme saw print in 1947. Soon after, Colin came to affiliate with the Romanian socialist realist current, at which time he published the short story Flăcări între cer și apă, followed in 1951 by the novella Cormoranul pleacă pe mare and, later that year, by Soarele răsare în Deltă. All three writings were set in the Danube Delta. Although they were largely compliant with the regime's cultural guidelines, these books were judged to be unsatisfactory by many who reviewed them in the communist press, becoming the subject of a lengthy literary debate. The Writers' Union convened a special session to review Colin's case. On that occasion, several of his writer colleagues expressed criticism on behalf of the Union, among them Ben Corlaciu, Petru Dumitriu, Alexandru Jar, and, most of whom expressed the view that Colin was indebted to "formalism".
1953–1980
After he made his fantasy and children's literature debut with Basme, which earned him the State Prize for Prose for 1953, Colin adopted the fantasy genre as his preferred means of expression, following up with Nemaipomenita bătălie dintre Papură-Împărat și Pintilie, Toroiman, Poveștile celor trei mincinoși, Zece povești pitice and Basmele Omului. These were accompanied in 1961 by mythopoeia, with Legendele țării lui Vam, also known as A Mythology of Man, which became one of his most popular works. In 1968, Geo Dumitrescu included his translation from French poet Charles Baudelaire into the luxury bilingual edition of Les Fleurs du mal, released under contract with Editura pentru literatură universală.Vladimir Colin made his science fiction debut contributing short stories for Colecția de Povestiri Științifico-Fantastice, which functioned as a literary supplement for the magazine Știință și Tehnică and was edited by. He became especially noted for his works in the science fantasy genre, beginning with the 1964 novel A zecea lume. It was followed by the short story volume of 1966, Viitorul al doilea, the 1972 sword and sorcery novel Divertisment pentru vrăjitoare and short story collection Capcanele timpului, and the 1975 novella Ultimul avatar al lui Tristan and short story volume Dinţii lui Cronos. One of the most successful books in this category was the 1978 novel Babel, which also established his reputation outside Romania. Colin also continued to publish non-science fiction works, such as the 1967 mythopoeic novel Pentagrama and the 1984 narrative poem for children, Xele, motanul din stele. Others include Povestea scrisului, Imposibila oază, povestiri fantastice and Timp cu călăreț și corb.
In 1970, Vladimir Colin became a member of the editorial staff for Viața Românească, an office which he held until his death. During that decade, he and Rogoz attended Cenaclul Marțienilor, founded by and grouping together other prominent Romanian science fiction authors and promoters—George Anania,, Ion Hobana, and Sanda Radian among them. He was also acknowledged as one of the few Romanian comic book writers, and for thus contributing to an art and literary genre which was just building a tradition in Romania under communism.
Final years
His work in science fantasy earned Colin three Eurocon awards during his lifetime. In addition to one of the 19 Awards at Eurocon 1976, he won the Best Novel Award, for Babel, and the Lifelong Literary Achievement Award. Babel was also the recipient of a 1978 award granted by the Bucharest section of the Writers' Union. In 1980, he received the EUROPA Prize, granted in Stresa, Italy. Also that year, University of Padua presented him with the Provincia di Treno European Award for his contributions to fantasy and children's literature.In addition to his own literary contributions, Colin completed other translations from French literature. In 1980, he published with Editura Ion Creangă a version of Jules Verne's Carpathian Castle, which is set in Transylvania and depicts several ethnic Romanian characters. His text is noted for having largely preserved Verne's original spellings of Romanian-language words, whereas later translations attempted to identify their supposed source variants. Among the other writers translated by Colin are Pierre-Jean de Béranger, André Gide and Gérard Klein. He also compiled a French science fiction literature anthology—Un pic de neant. O antologie a anticipaţiei franceze contemporane —, and a Romanian anthology published in France by Éditions Marabout—Les meilleures histoires de la Science Fiction roumaine. In 1984, Colin suffered a stroke, which permanently impaired his writing abilities.
Work
Debut works and connected debates
For much of his early career, Colin was known for his proletkult poems and agitprop articles in the official press. One of these literary pieces constituted praise for communization under Romania's first five-year plan: titled Cîntec pentru primul plan economic, it was one in a series of propaganda pieces on the same subject.Vladimir Colin's socialist realist prose debut was with Flăcări între cer și apă, a story about Communist Youth militants in the Danube Delta area, engaged in a struggle with demonized anti-communist forces. It was first reviewed in the press by Viața Românească journalist and critic Marin Vasilescu, who noted its depiction of "amplified class struggle in the period of passage between capitalism and socialism", praising Colin for "managing to show the intrigues of the class enemy as a conscious and organized action". However, Vasilescu also introduced criticism of Colin's style, claiming that it failed in "deepening central idea, the issue of vigilance", and that the investigations made by communist protagonists seemed "casual". Similarly, Cormoranul pleacă pe mare, which showed fishermen and sailors setting up a collective farm, was commended by Contemporanul journal for breaking with the tradition of Delta-themed "bourgeois literature", but disapproved for failing to show "that which is genuinely new about the communist sailor."
Soarele răsare în Deltă, also centered on the Danube Delta, and having the model-fisherman Artiom for a protagonist, prolonged the debate about the merits of Colin's literary contributions. Contimporanul 's Sami Damian opined that the writer "fails to portray in significant traits the complexity of new, advanced, phenomena which emerge in the Delta region", and that he lacked "profound knowledge of the new reality, he has distorted, falsified." This critique of Colin formed part of a larger piece about the low "ideological level" of various novels, to which Damian opposed examples of works by Petru Dumitriu and Ion Călugăru. Writing for Viața Românească, critic Eugen Campus stood against Damian's pronouncements, notably praising Soarele răsare în Deltă for its treatment of the "exploiter" as a person of "gluttonous idleness", "cruelty" and "lack of humanity". He also noted that, "in general, avoided clichés", but expressed criticism for the novel having little narrative focus and for a "conceptual deficiency" which, he argued, tended to favor "that which is old." This verdict was backed by the local literary review Iașul Nou, which, although viewing the novel as an authentic work, added similar topics of criticism.
By the time when the special Writers' Union meeting was convened to discuss Soarele răsare în Deltă, Colin's case was being analyzed by the Communist Party organ, Scînteia. Official critic Sergiu Fărcășan, himself later known as a since fiction author, contributed the Scînteia column of May 1952 in which he reacted against the supposed leniency on the part of other commentators. The article notably likened the appraisals found in Campus' review of the novel with "book advertisements that used to be made by bourgeois publishing houses". It concluded that, as a writer, Vladimir Colin had "broken away from the masses." Literary historian Ana Selejan defines this verdict as "the official recommendation within the discussion". The Writers' Union debate itself, involving primarily the Communist Party unit, was summarized in a report issued by the Party's Agitprop Directorate as follows: "Colin was criticized by Party members for the serious mistakes of his novel Soarele răsare în Deltă." In a 1953 article, Campus revisited Colin's novel, listing it among the "works which falsify reality, which are mistaken from an ideological point of view".