Dumitru Corbea

Dumitru Corbea (born Dumitru Cobzaru; September 6, 1910 – March 26, 2002) was a Romanian poet and prose writer.

Born in Sârbi-Vlăsinești, Dorohoi County, his parents Dumitru Cobzaru and Ecaterina (née Filipescu) were peasants.^[1][2] As summarized by literary critic Mihai Ungheanu, Dumitru Jr had a "bitter rural childhood".^[3] Having had to pay for his own tuition,^[4] he worked from early on—as a shop boy, then as a farmhand, apprentice chair-maker, and finally as a child soldier in the Romanian Land Forces.^[5] In the latter incarnation, he was reportedly subject to "beatings, abuse [and] terror".^[6] He began writing patriotic verse at the age of sixteen, having also embraced the tenets of Romanian nationalism.^[7] Early contributions included a humorous version of the carol Plugușorul, which was said to be widely popular in the Dorohoi area.^[4] His first publication was the 1929 poetry brochure Poezii patriotice.^[1] His formal education was initially handled by the Orthodox Church, which trained him as a choirboy;^[8] he is thought to have finished the lower-level course in Botoșani, at A. T. Laurian High School (1929).^[1] He finally graduated from the city's superior commercial school in 1935.^[1]

Young Cobzaru became politically and culturally active during his high-school years, traveling to Bucharest in 1934. Once there, he began a steady collaboration with publications such as Azi, Cuvântul Liber, Vremea, and Viața Romînească;^[9] he met and took advice from literary doyens such as Liviu Rebreanu, Cezar Petrescu, Gala Galaction and N. D. Cocea, also being allowed by Mihai Ralea to join him and others at Viața Romînească's staff meetings.^[4] He was also a regular attendee of the Sburătorul circle, which gathered in Eugen Lovinescu's home. Novelist I. Peltz, who met him there, recalls that he would join in the modernists' attack on traditional literature, but discreetly and reasonably, as a "well-mannered peasant" speaking in thick Moldavian dialect.^[10] His first volume of poetry, signed as "Dumitru Corbea", appeared in 1936 as Sânge de țăran ("Peasant Blood"). It carried a preface by the more senior poet Demostene Botez, who celebrated the work as a triumph for authenticity and primitivism, claiming Corbea as a new adherent to the Poporanist school of thought.^[11] Peltz similarly notes that such social poetry was an outlet for Corbea's inner revolt, clashing with his otherwise calm demeanor.^[12] Among the more modern critics, Marian Vasile agrees with Botez's assessment, noting that Corbea's Poporanist streak is also evident in his follow-up volumes, Război ("War", 1937), and Nu sunt cântăreț de stele ("I Sing Not to the Stars", 1940).^[13]

Cobzaru's first political article raised awareness about the goings-on in Ipotești, where a cottage once owned by the national poet Mihai Eminescu had been condemned and stood to be demolished.^[4] The young author was for a while affiliated with the left-wing club known as țțăăAmicii URSSîîțț, which advocated for a detente with the Soviet Union.^[4] He turned to the political right-wing, and was briefly affiliated with the fascist Iron Guard—but was shocked when Mihai Stelescu was assassinated by the Guardist Decemviri in mid-1936.^[14] For a while, he was attached to Stelescu's own Crusade of Romanianism, which circulated his thoughts on Orthodox-Church affairs. Cobzaru was criticizing priests for neglecting their duties, while also fending off accusations that the Crusade was an "anti-Christian movement."^[15] The young man then made his anti-Guardist sentiments known with a pamphlet, Acuz ("I Accuse"), which saw print in 1937.^[16] His drift into the far-left was unwittingly dated by Lovinescu in his diary entry for September 10, 1936: it details Corbea's visit and their conversation, during which Corbea declared that the Guardist leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, was "a cretin". Lovinescu described these as "the recollections of a communist", but then changed the last word to "Guardist".^[17]

Cobzaru joined the illegal Communist Party (PCR or PCdR), and, according to his standard biographies, found himself swiftly arrested by the authorities during a 1937 roundup.^[18] However, a contemporary note in Dreptatea paper reports that he had also joined the mainstream National Peasants' Party, organizing its youth section in Sârbi. This source places his arrest to January 1938, during campaigning for scheduled parliamentary elections, and reports that he was being charged with lèse-majesté. According to Dreptatea, Corbea was being framed by the local Gendarmerie.^[19] He was soon after released, and, in 1939, hosted meetings of the Cadran group of communists, including Miron Constantinescu, at his garret overlooking Gemeni Square.^[20] He continued to associate with the outlawed group during the early stages of World War II, and was rearrested in 1940.^[21] Sent before a military court, he was ultimately acquitted.^[1] After joining the Axis Powers in the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, Romania, ruled upon by Ion Antonescu, organized a Transnistria Governorate in its sphere of occupation. Corbea was allowed to join the Central Institute of Statistics and its projects in Transnistria, which included an ethnographic survey of the Romanians in Ukraine.^[22] He tried to publish a new selection of his poems, as Candele păgâne ("Pagan Candles"), "but the fascist military censorship had it banned."^[4] He was at Odesa during the Soviet breakthrough in early 1944. He followed the retreating Romanian Army, and, according to his memoirs, witnessed war crimes perpetrated against deserters and civilians alike.^[3]

Following an anti-fascist coup in August 1944, Cobzaru reemerged as a communist intellectual: a Scînteia editor, he was also sent as a war correspondent on the front, where Romanian forces had joined up with the Red Army.^[23] His pseudonym became his official name in 1945,^[1][24] when he also returned from the front. Also then, he spent some time in Timișoara, where a local PCR potentate, Alexandru Moghioroș, asked him talk the local poet, Petru Vintilă, into compliance with the party line.^[25] Alongside the PCR-sympathizing novelist Mihail Sadoveanu, he attended Antonescu's trial by the Romanian People's Tribunal, and gave his impressions of the proceedings; he was also present at the great communist rally in Palace Square, where unknown assailants shot on the crowd (he claimed to have stood by communist writer Mihnea Gheorghiu, who was left with a gaping leg-wound).^[3] Corbea returned to poetry with a selection of ballads (1946)^[4] and then with Hrisovul meu ("My Writ", 1947), described by Vasile as his last work as an authentic poet. In subsequent years, including a "plethora of booklets that appeared almost all at once", he was engaged in agitprop for the newly proclaimed communist state, versifying the life and works of Joseph Stalin, Ana Pauker, and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.^[26] As Vasile writes, these contributions were occasionally redeemed by notes of "vindictiveness", making them more valuable than mere encomiums.^[27] In 1946, Corbea published his first novel, Singura cale ("The Only Way"). Two years later, he also debuted as a dramatist, with Bălceștii ("The Bălcescus")—a three-act historical play.^[4]

According to his own recollections, Corbea became privately critical of the regime after witnessing firsthand the excesses of agricultural collectivization and their toll on peasant life in the Apuseni Mountains;^[3] as reviewer Cornel Ungureanu observes, the poet relied on his own background to understand that which other PCR men would not.^[25] Corbea was similarly irked by the issue of copyrights in Romania, since he now earned less than "before the war", finding the situation to be inadmissible. He presented his case to the Writers' Union, resulting in a generalized panic—those present feared that they would be arrested by the Securitate; instead, the regime agreed with Corbea, and the copyright law was ultimately amended.^[25] He himself claimed to have refused political advancement, even when it was directly offered to him by the regime.^[3]

In the 1950s, Corbea's poetry was collected in Pentru inima ce arde ("To a Burning Heart", 1955), but his output also included the screenplay Barbu Lăutaru (1954), a novel, Așa am învățat carte ("That's How I Learned to Read", 1955), a collection of short stories (1956), as well as conferences and travel accounts—Anotimpuri ("Seasons", 1956), De peste mări și țări ("Overseas and Overland", 1959).^[1][4][28] He remained indebted to Socialist Realism well into the 1960s, and, as Vasile notes, colored his own childhood in its literary tenets^[29] (though Peltz contrarily notes him as one of the "objective raconteurs", he also credits Așa am învățat carte as a politically useful text).^[30] While gaining traction in communist circles, Corbea publicly objected to the regime's marginalization of a major nonconformist poet, Tudor Arghezi, who, as Corbea reports, had been pushed into material want and had turned to goat-herding for survival. He rejoiced when he noticed his friend's progressive recovery, which began when Arghezi was invited over to meet his Yugoslav admirer, Josip Broz Tito.^[3] He credits the PCR's general secretary, Gheorghiu-Dej, with having personally ensured Arghezi's return as a poet laureate, suggesting that such rehabilitation could not have occurred sooner.^[25]

Following the change in stylistic guidelines, Corbea was mainly producing autobiographical prose, as in Puntea ("The Bridge", 1963) and Bădia ("Older Brother", 1966).^[1][31] His later works include a war-themed novel, Primejdia ("The Danger"), published in 1976. In this contribution, written as a communist's diary, the writer did away with heroism, and presented the protagonist as occasionally giving in to cowardice.^[32] Corbea returned with the reportage collection called Ritm și viteză ("Rhythm and Speed", 1980), as well as three volumes of memoirs (respectively published in 1982, 1984, and 1987);^[1] they are all reviewed by Vasile as belated manifestations of Socialist Realism.^[33] Ungheanu saluted Corbea as a memoirist, admiring him for his frank retelling of life under early communism (and especially for his details about Arghezi's persecution). Overall, however, such contributions were still "elliptic", with some episodes entirely absent, to the reader's bemusement.^[3] Ungureanu viewed the books as "obligatory reading" for researchers of the literary phenomenon in the 1950s, but observed that they were often "belabored" and aesthetically "gauche".^[25] Having witnessed the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Corbea died in Bucharest on March 26, 2002,^[1][34] leaving a daughter, Ileana.^[35]