Lucian Blaga | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Blaga's portrait, Museum of the Romanian Peasant | |
| Born | 9 May 1895 |
| Died | 6 May 1961 (aged 65) |
| Resting place | Lancrăm, Sebeș Municipality, Alba County, Romania |
| Alma mater | University of Vienna (PhD) |
| Occupation(s) | linguist, poet, translator, philosopher, writer, journalist, diplomat |
| Notable work | Poems of light |
| Political party | National Christian Party |
| Movement | |
| Spouse | Cornelia Brediceanu |
| Children | Dorli Blaga |
| Parents |
|
| Awards | Hamagiu Award (1935) |
Lucian Blaga (Romanian: [lutʃiˈan ˈblaɡa] ⓘ; 9 May 1895 – 6 May 1961) was a Romanian philosopher, poet, playwright, poetry translator and novelist. He was a commanding personality of the Romanian culture of the interbellum period.
Blaga was born on 9 May 1895 in Lámkerék (now Lancrăm), near Gyulafehérvár (now Alba Iulia), Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary, his father being an Orthodox priest. He later described his early childhood, in the autobiographical The Chronicle and the Song of Ages, as "under the sign of the incredible absence of the word".
His elementary education was in Hungarian at Szászsebes (now Sebeș) (1902–1906), after which he attended the "Andrei Șaguna" Highschool in Brassó (now Brașov) (1906–1914), under the supervision of a relative, Iosif Blaga (Lucian's father had died when the former was 13), who was the author of the first Romanian treatise on the theory of drama. At the outbreak of the First World War, he began theological studies at Nagyszeben (now Sibiu), where he graduated in 1917. He published his first philosophy article on the Bergson theory of subjective time. From 1917 to 1920, he attended courses at the University of Vienna, where he studied philosophy and obtained his PhD.
Upon returning to Transylvania, now a part of Romania, he contributed to the Romanian press, being the editor of the magazines Culture in Cluj and The Banat in Lugoj.
In 1926, he became involved in Romanian diplomacy, occupying successive posts at Romania's legations in Warsaw, Prague, Lisbon, Bern and Vienna. His political protector was the famous poet Octavian Goga, who was briefly a prime minister; Blaga was a relative of his wife. He was elected a titular member of the Romanian Academy in 1936. His acceptance speech was entitled Elogiul satului românesc (In Praise of the Romanian Village).
In 1939, he became a professor of cultural philosophy at the University of Cluj, temporarily located in Sibiu in the years following the Second Vienna Award. During his stay in Sibiu, he edited, beginning in 1943, the annual magazine Saeculum.
He was dismissed from his university professor chair in 1948 because he refused to express his support to the new Communist regime and he worked as a librarian for the Cluj branch of the History Institute of the Romanian Academy. He was forbidden to publish new books, and until 1960 he was allowed to publish only translations. He completed the translation of Faust, the masterpiece of Goethe, one of the German writers that influenced him most.
In 1956, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature[citation needed] on the proposal of Bazil Munteanu of France and Rosa del Conte of Italy, but it seems the idea was originally that of Mircea Eliade. Still, the Romanian Communist government sent two emissaries to Sweden to protest against the nomination,[citation needed] because Blaga was considered an idealist philosopher, and his poems were forbidden until 1962.[citation needed]
He was diagnosed with cancer and died on 6 May 1961. He was buried on his birthday, 9 May, in the countryside village cemetery of Lancrăm, Romania.
He was married to Cornelia (née Brediceanu).[1] They had a daughter, Dorli, her name being derived from dor, a noun that can be translated, roughly, as "longing".
The University of Sibiu bears his name today.
Mirabila samanta:
His philosophical work is grouped in four trilogies:
The fourth work, Cosmologica, was completed but not published at the time because of communist regime censorship. Before death, Blaga left an editorial testament on how his works are to be published posthumously [2]
The novel Charon's Ferry is intended to be a companion to the philosophical trilogies. In it Blaga addresses some of the more problematic philosophical issues such as those pertaining to political, (para)psychological or occult phenomena, under the name of a fictive philosopher (Leonte Pătrașcu).[3]
