Dumitru Theodor Neculuță

Born in Târgu Frumos, his parents were Toader Neculuță and Zamfira a Ciubotăriții. Some sources suggest that they were both poor peasants,[1][2] though, according to communist poet Dan Deșliu, Toader was in fact a shoemaker.[3] Dumitru was first registered with his matronymic, a Ciubotăriții, literally "of the cobbler's daughter".[4] The boy was passionate about music and had hopes of becoming a violinist; the circumstances of his birth made it impossible that he would afford tuition,[5] and instead he was pushed to earn a living from age ten, working as a shoemaker's apprentice. His formal education was limited to two grades of primary school.[2] He lived in the larger city of Iași, and working there around the time when Romanian poetry was being revolutionized by Eminescu; Neculuță's first-ever works were pastiches from Eminescu's work, with similar borrowings from Romanian folklore.[6]

Neculuță was drawn into radical politics from an early age—at some point, he confessed to Alecu Constantinescu that "I was born a revolutionary; I feel within me the hatred of so many generations of proletarians".[7] Proudly self-taught, he was familiarized with the work of Karl Marx, but also kept up with non-political literature. Uninterested in the Symbolist movement, he read from Eminescu and the classics of poetry—including Homer, Virgil, and William Shakespeare; he also knew the prose of realists such as Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola.[8] His friend A. Costin recalled in 1905 that Neculuță would spend his Christmas savings on books and plain bread, mocking party-goers; Neculuță also reportedly complained whenever he had to sell parts of his personal library, noting that "everything in today's society goes against men who seek to enlighten themselves!"[9] He made his literary debut in 1894 in Icoana Vremii, under the name D. Niculescu.[2]

As noted by Deșliu, the poet most of all feared living in an unheated room; this theme permeates his verse, wherein the chimney flame "celebrated as if a loved and longed-for human being".[10] His works were generally inspired by Eminescu and George Coșbuc, but, as the same Deșliu writes, they also had distinct echoes from left-liberal and socialist poets—Cezar Bolliac, Dimitrie Bolintineanu, Traian Demetrescu, and Alexandru Vlahuță.[11] As noted in the 2004 biographical dictionary of Romanian writers, they reach at least the average quality of contemporary verses, and along with discussing then-current themes (suffering brought about by love, melancholy, vibrations before nature), they bring new elements such as comradeship with those who suffer and an urging toward revolution and belief in the future.[2] His more contemplative poems describe the conflict between the quiet beauty of rural landscapes and the inner turmoil of proletarians who witness them.[12] While acknowledging the "gaucherie" of various poems by Neculuță, Deșliu highlights their overall primordialism in a Marxist setting: "Before Neculuță's time—and even for a long time after him—the most gifted poets of social rebellion worked with vague terms, with generalized and imprecise notions: people, justice, liberty, truth etc. The grounded, class-based position, only makes its first appearance in verse by D. Th. Neculuță".[13]

Moving to Bucharest, the national capital, "toward the turn of the century", Neculuță joined the newly formed Social Democratic Workers' Party of Romania (PSDMR), becoming its "poet-activist".[14] The movement's historiographer, Constantin Titel Petrescu, places him at Bucharest's Sotir Hall, the socialist club, in or shortly after 1895—noting that he was one of two "poet-cobblers" that the PSDMR could count as its own—the other one was Arghir Parua.[15] During the antisemitic agitation of November 1897, Neculuță took the side of Romanian Jewish victims. His La un vandalism antisemit ("Regarding an Act of Antisemitic Vandalism") appeared in a single-issue socialist paper, known either as Vă Înfrățiți, Noroade! ("Come Together as One, Peoples!")[16] or Jos Vandalii! ("Down with the Vandals!").[17]

Neculuță remained loyal to the Marxist faction led by I. C. Frimu following an 1899 split in the movement—a "revolutionary appeal" he published that year, called Spre țărmul dreptății ("Toward the Shores of Justice"), implicitly condemned PSDMR centrists (known as the "generous ones").[18] In Icoana Vremii, he also published two prose pieces which later critics describe as being without particular artistic value, as well as several articles that put forth his credo of a politically engaged poet. His work also appeared in Lumea Nouă, România Muncitoare, and Viitorul Social.[2] One of Neculuță's final assignments, from 1902, was as co-chair of the România Muncitoare club, alongside Constantinescu and Frimu.[19] Some two years later, he hosted in Bucharest George Bacovia, the younger socialist poet, with whom he attended the May Day celebrations at Dacia Hall.[20]

"Impoverished and lamented by the proletariat as a whole",[21] the poet died at his one-room home on Bucharest's Ștefan cel Mare Highway shortly after his 46th birthday (on October 17, 1904 in New Style dates); he had suffered a fatal heart attack.[22] An inventory carried out on the same day records that he only owned an iron bed and mattress, a table, a coat hanger, a coffer filled with books, one shirt, plates, and some other items. His definitive manuscript, which he kept under the mattress, went unreported.[23] His only book appeared posthumously in 1907 as Spre țărmul dreptății.[2][24]

Grave at Bellu Cemetery

Neculuță's book was in print shortly after the peasants' revolt of 1907. According to a Gendarmerie report, during the subsequent clampdown socialists made efforts to reach out to peasants with their propaganda. In March 1908, a Gorj County activist was held in custody for distributing Neculuță's poems, alongside pamphlets by Christian Rakovsky, Toma Dragu, and Peter Kropotkin.[25] Neculuță's volume was also circulated in Austria-Hungary by the Social Democratic Party of Hungary and its Romanian section, which recommended it as "not [to be] left out of any enlightened worker's personal library".[26] In October 1911, Arad's socialist club commemorated Neculuță with public readings from his work. The meeting was attended by poet Sándor Csizmadia, who expressed his belief in proletarian internationalism as a cultural bridge between Romanians and Hungarians.[1] A reprint of Spre țărmul, curated by Barbu Lăzăreanu,[27] appeared in 1919.[28]

According to Petrescu, Neculuță was personally responsible for rekindling socialist agitation after the "generous ones" had split the movement. Overall, he notes, "Neculuță failed to achieve his definitive accomplishment as a poet, since the hurdles of his existence never gave him time to follow the path of an artist."[29] In 1925, the communist novelist Panait Istrati, who had achieved international fame, paid homage to Neculuță as a precursor: "the Romanian labor movement has had its poet, a man called Neculuță, the soul of a man who should have lived with other horizons, and in another time, in order to express all of what he felt. [...] Neculuță lived in some shack, unknown to all, yet, had they brought him Paris on a platter, he would not have been surprised: he'd have accepted it as his rightful belonging!"[30]

In a 1926 piece on the standards of Romanian "proletarian literature", Ion Mehedințeanu argued that "bourgeois criticism" had both Neculuță and his younger colleague, Ion Păun-Pincio, "buried in the tomb of silence". As he notes: "Shoemaker Neculuță's poetry volume is the shrieking anguish of a prostrating and obscured class. His eyes set on the shores of justice, he awakens the proletariat to the coming age."[31] Deșliu similarly claims that "bourgeois criticism and historiography [...] weaved around Neculuță's work that familiar conspiracy of silence", leaving socialist gatherings as the only venue which still cultivated his verse. He argues that this underground fame helped to establish a style of radical poetry, including anonymous interwar hymns by Communist-Party militants.[32] Some other works of this nature had known authors: as one of the Communist Party founders, Mihail Cruceanu wrote "poetry in the manner of lyrical cobbler Theodor Neculuță".[33] Paul Niculescu-Mizil, later a Party eminence, recalled that in his 1930s childhood he "loved Neculuță, a socialist poet", which contributed to his political choices.[34]

Neculuță was first afforded attention by the National Renaissance Front regime of 1938–1940, which reclaimed him for its brand of corporate statism. Its official magazine, Muncă și Voe Bună, reported that this "poet-cobbler" had lived during an era of slavery, and praised him for his take on the social landscape of ca. 1900.[35] Shortly after the coup of August 1944, the General Confederation of Labor issued a volume of "labor poetry", which included Neculuță's Cor de robi ("A Slaves' Choir"). It earned attention from poet Camil Baltazar, who called the piece "vigorous" and "predictive".[36] In October 1948, when it revamped the Romanian Academy, the new communist regime selected Neculuță as a post-mortem member. The proposal was submitted on behalf of the academicians by novelist Mihail Sadoveanu.[37]

This inaugurated what the Communist Party newspaper, Scînteia, described as a "work to restore the cultural treasure of the past", which included "bringing out to light the work of our first worker-poet".[38] A monograph on Neculuță, written "in the spirit of the times", was completed and published in 1950 by Ion Vitner, a dentist turned literary critic.[39] Such reassessment was critically reviewed by literary historian Matei Călinescu as "aberrant": "in poetry, for instance, alongside Eminescu, and at some point even above him, they worked to establish the reputation of the 'cobbler-poet' D. Th. Neculuță as a proletarian classic".[40] In the early 1950s, samples of Neculuță's poetry were included in the Romanian high-school curriculum, initially as "provisional theses".[41]

The 50-year commemoration of Neculuță's death was marked by the Writers' Union of Romania with an official ceremony: Mihu Dragomir gave a lecture, while Demostene Botez and Ioanichie Olteanu read out from Spre țărmul.[42] At that moment in Romanian history, which came with the embrace of socialist realism, official publishing houses put out editions of his works, some of which ran at 100,000 copies.[43] This trend was again curbed in the mid 1960s, with the advent of national communism. As noted by critic Tudor Opriș, it saw the "reduction to their normal dimensions of writers whom Proletkult apologetics had hypertrophied"—Neculuță and Vlahuță, but also Bolliac and Alexandru Toma.[44] Reportedly, the last piece to include Neculuță within the "commandeered and colonized canon" was put out by Emil Boldan in 1961.[45] During the later stages of Romanian communism, he was still honored in Scînteia as one of the earliest Romanian authors to have embraced the social, "with their still-modest means".[46]

• Dan Deșliu, "D. Th. Neculuță, primul poet muncitor din literatura romînă. Cu prilejul aniversării a 100 de ani de la naștere", in Lupta de Clasă, Vol. XL, Issue 1, January 1960, pp. 59–67.
• Constantin Titel Petrescu, Socialismul în România. 1835 – 6 septembrie 1940. Bucharest: Dacia Traiana, [n. y.]