Vasile Voiculescu
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Vasile Voiculescu (November 27, 1884 – April 26, 1963) was a Romanian poet, short-story writer, physician, and playwright.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life and education
Voiculescu was born in Pârscov, Buzău County, Romania, to a family of wealthy peasants. He attended primary school in Pleşcoi, a village near his home, for the first year, after which he was sent to a boarding school in Buzău. He attended high school in Buzău, and subsequently in Bucharest — the Gheorghe Lazăr High School, where he became friends with the future actor George Ciprian and the young writer Urmuz.
After graduating high school in 1902, he spent one year studying Philosophy at the University of Bucharest, before quitting and entering the Faculty of Medicine. He became a doctor of medicine in 1910.
[edit] Prominence
March of 1912 marked Voiculescu's debut as a poet with the poem Dor ("Longing"), first published in Convorbiri Literare. He managed to publish a volume of poems in 1916, but the German Empire forces occupying Bucharest (see Romanian Campaign (World War I)) destroyed all copies. In 1918, he published the volume Din ţara zimbrului ("From the Wisent's Land").
Between the two world wars, he lived in Bucharest and held a series of public conferences on medicine, broadcast on the radio and aimed primarily at a peasant audience. He wrote religious poetry, his main themes being the birth of Christ, the Magi, the Crucifixion. His creation slowly became Expressionistic.
Voiculescu published several short stories, such as Capul de zimbru ("The Wisent Head"), novels such as Zahei orbul ("Zahei the Blind"), and plays such as Duhul pământului ("The Earth's Ghost"), Demiurgul ("The Demiurge"), Gimnastică sentimentală ("Sentimental Gymnastics"), Pribeaga ("The Wanderer").
[edit] Imprisonment and release
After World War II, communist authorities attacked and punished Voiculescu for his religious and democratic ideals, and did not allow him to be published. He was imprisoned in 1958, at the age of 74, and spent the following four years in jail; he became ill during detention, and he died of cancer a few months after his release.
His final work Shakespeare's Last Imagined Sonnets in the Imaginary Translation of..., comprised 90 sonnets written between 1954 and 1958. An intricate portrayal of love in all its glory, it was published after his death.
He was posthumously elected a member of the Romanian Academy in 1990. His house in Pârscov is presently the Vasile Voiculescu memorial house; the Buzău county library is named after him.
