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Of peasant ancestry on his father’s side and boasting aristocratic (boyar) maternal roots, the Romanian poet, prose writer, and editorialist Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889) had not put his modest inherited wealth to waste. Educated in the German language since childhood, Eminescu was culturally — if not always geopolitically — an enthusiastic Germanophile. (more…)
Mihai Eminescu
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Nineteenth-century Romanian poet and editorialist Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889) studied in Bismarck’s Prussia, where he immersed himself in Schopenhauer and studied under Eugen Dühring. His essays attack liberalism, usury, immigration, and the prospect of Jewish civil rights in Romania. The tone of his philosophically-driven poems, which are modeled after the golden age of German Romantic poetry, ranges from endearing to brutal. Adored in Romania, but without much of a reputation outside of his own country, he was killed by medical malpractice at the age of 39. (more…)
Michael the Brave, savior of Europe?
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The history of Romania as a concrete country is generally assumed to have started with the Romanian, or Danubian, principalities, similarly to how the history of Russia as a concrete country starts with Muscovy. Both of these histories are of late medieval origin, having come into being in the wake of the Mongol invasions of Europe. In both comparable cases, however, the concrete starting point is not the same as the ethnologically related spiritual precursor from which the original states derived their patronage. In the case of Russia, the spiritual precursor was the Kievan Rus’, which was situated in present-day Ukraine. (more…)
1,190 words
When Alexandru C. Cuza was born in Iași, Moldavia in 1857, Romania was not yet a unified country fully freed from Ottoman vassalage. Turkish rule had not been as direct or oppressive here as in the lower Balkans, but it left the young state and ancient nation with a host of social problems. Cuza was a child when Wallachia and Moldavia were united in 1866 (more…)