Ion Creangă (; also known as Nică al lui Ștefan a Petrei, Ion Torcălău and Ioan Ștefănescu; March 1, 1837 – December 31, 1889) was a Moldavian, later Romanian writer, raconteur and schoolteacher. A main figure in 19th-century Romanian literature, he is best known for his Childhood Memories volume, his novellas and short stories, and his many anecdotes. Creangă's main contribution to fantasy and children's literature includes narratives structured around eponymous protagonists ("Harap Alb", "Ivan Turbincă", "Dănilă Prepeleac", "Stan Pățitul"), as well as fairy tales indebted to conventional forms ("The Story of the Pig", "The Goat and Her Three Kids", "The Mother with Three Daughters-in-Law", "The Old Man's Daughter and the Old Woman's Daughter"). Widely seen as masterpieces of the Romanian language and local humor, his writings occupy the middle ground between a collection of folkloric sources and an original contribution to a literary realism of rural inspiration. They are accompanied by a set of contributions to erotic literature, collectively known as his "corrosives".
A defrocked Romanian Orthodox priest with an unconventional lifestyle, Creangă made an early impact as an innovative educator and textbook author, while pursuing a short career in nationalist politics with the Free and Independent Faction. His literary debut came late in life, closely following the start of his close friendship with Romania's national poet Mihai Eminescu and their common affiliation with the influential conservative literary society Junimea. Although viewed with reserve by many of his colleagues there, and primarily appreciated for his records of oral tradition, Creangă helped propagate the group's cultural guidelines in an accessible form. Later critics have often described him, alongside Eminescu, Ion Luca Caragiale and Ioan Slavici, as one of the most accomplished representatives of Junimist literature.
Ion Creangă was posthumously granted several honors, and is commemorated by a number of institutions in both Romania and neighboring Moldova. These include the Bojdeuca building in Iași, which, in 1918, was opened as the first memorial house in Romania. His direct descendants include Horia Creangă, one of the leading Romanian architects during the interwar period.
Biography
Background and family
Ion Creangă was born in Humulești in the Principality of Moldavia, a former village which has since been incorporated into Târgu Neamț city, the son of Orthodox trader Ștefan sin Petre Ciubotariul and his wife Smaranda. His native area, bordering on heavily forested areas, was in the Eastern Carpathian foothills, and included into what was then the Principality of Moldavia. The surrounding region's population preserved an archaic way of life, dominated by shepherding, textile manufacturing and related occupations, and noted for preserving the older forms of local folklore. Another characteristic of the area, which left an impression on Creangă's family history, was related to the practice of transhumance and the links between ethnic Romanian communities on both sides of the mountains, in Moldavia and Transylvania: on his maternal side, the writer descended from Maramureș-born peasants, while, according to literary historian George Călinescu, his father's origin may have been further southwest, in Transylvania-proper. Proud of this tradition, she insisted that her son pursue a career in the Church. According to his own recollection, the future writer was born on March 1, 1837—a date which has since been challenged. The exactitude of other accounts is equally unreliable: community registers from the period gave the date of June 10, 1839, and mention another child of the same name being born to his parents on February 4, 1842 (the more probable birth date of Creangă's younger brother Zahei).
Childhood, youth and ordination
thumb|230px|[[Ion Creangă House|Casa din Humulești ("The House in Humulești"), painting by Aurel Băeșu]]
After an idyllic period, which is recounted in the first section of his Childhood Memories, Ion Creangă was sent to primary school, an institution then in the care of Orthodox Church authorities, where he became noted for his rebellious attitude and appetite for truancy. He was taught reading and writing in Cyrillic alphabet through peer tutoring techniques, before the overseeing teacher, Vasile Ilioaiei, was lassoed off the street and conscripted by the Moldavian military at some point before 1848. Ion Creangă spent several months at Irinuca's remote house on the Bistrița River, before the proximity of goats resulted in a scabies infection and his hastened departure for Pipirig, where he cured himself using birch extract, a folk remedy mastered by his maternal grandmother Nastasia. After having been registered as Ioan Ștefănescu (a variant of his given name and a family name based on his patronymic), the adolescent student eventually adopted his maternal surname of Creangă. In August 1855, circumstances again forced him to change schools: confronted with the closure of his Fălticeni school, Ștefan sin Petre's 1858 death left him without means of support, and he requested being directly ordained, but, not being of the necessary age, was instead handed a certificate to attest his school attendance. signed a complaint addressed to Metropolitan Sofronie Miclescu, denouncing his father in law as "a killer", claiming to have been mistreated by him and cheated out of his wife's dowry, and demanding to be allowed a divorce. Embittered by his own experience with the education system, Creangă became an enthusiastic promoter of Maiorescu's ideas on education reform and modernization, and in particular of the new methods of teaching reading and writing. During and after completing normal school, he was assigned to teaching positions at Trisfetite. While there, he earned the reputation of a demanding teacher (notably by accompanying his reports on individual students with characterizations such as "idiot", "impertinent" or "envious"). Accounts from the period state that he made use of corporal punishment in disciplining his pupils, and even surpassed the standards of violence accepted at the time. were working on a new primer, which saw print in 1868 under the title Metodă nouă de scriere și cetire pentru uzul clasei I primară ("A New Method of Writing and Reading for the Use of 1st Grade Primary Course Students"). It mainly addressed the issues posed by the new Romanian alphabetical standard, a Romanization replacing Cyrillic spelling (which had been officially discarded in 1862). Largely based on Maiorescu's principles, Metodă nouă ... became one the period's most circulated textbooks. In addition to didactic texts, it also featured Creangă's isolated debut in lyric poetry, with a naïve piece titled Păsărica în timpul iernii ("The Little Bird in Wintertime"). It included several prose fables and a sketch story, "Human Stupidity",
In February 1866, having briefly served at Iași's Pantelimon Church, he was welcomed by hegumen Isaia Vicol Dioclias into the service of Golia Monastery. and rumors spread that Ileana's lover was a high-ranking official, the protopope of Iași. An agitator for his party, Creangă became commonly known under the nickname Popa Smântână ("Priest Sour Cream"). In April 1866, shortly after Domnitor Cuza was toppled by a coup, and just before Carol I was selected to replace him, the Romanian Army intervened to quell a separatist riot in Iași, instigated by Moldavian Metropolitan Calinic Miclescu. It is likely that Creangă shared the outlook of other Factionalists, according to which secession was preferable to Carol's rule, and was probably among the rioters. At around the same time, he began circulating antisemitic tracts, and is said to have demanded that Christians boycott Jewish business. He is thought to have coined the expression Nici un ac de la jidani ("Not even a needle from the kikes"). The episode is supposed to have taken place at the earliest during the 1871 suffrage. The latter incident, which some commentators believe fabricated by Creangă's detractors, The latter gesture scandalized his superiors, particularly since Creangă explained himself using an ancient provision of canon law, which stipulated that priests were not supposed to grow their hair long. He relinquished his clerical clothing altogether and began wearing lay clothes everywhere, a matter which caused public outrage. The virulent text notably accused the church officials of being his enemies on account of his "independence, sincerity, honesty" in supporting the cause of "human dignity". After the gesture of defiance, the court recommended his defrocking, its decision being soon after confirmed by the synod. he was living there with his lover Ecaterina "Tinca" Vartic. A former laundress who had earlier leased one of the Bojdeuca rooms, His voracious appetite, called "proverbial gluttony" by George Călinescu,
In May 1874, soon after taking over Minister of Education in the Conservative Party cabinet of Lascăr Catargiu, his friend Maiorescu granted Creangă the position of schoolteacher in the Iași area of Păcurari. During the same period, Ion Creangă met and became best friends with Mihai Eminescu, posthumously celebrated as Romania's national poet. This is said to have taken place in summer 1875, when Eminescu was working as an inspector for Maiorescu's Education Ministry, overseeing schools in Iași County: reportedly, Eminescu was fascinated with Creangă's talents as a raconteur, while the latter admired Eminescu for his erudition.
Junimea reception
thumb|260px|Page from a [[Romanian Cyrillic alphabet|Romanian Cyrillic book in Creangă's collection. Creangă's 1878 marginalia identify it as a gift from Mihai Eminescu, referred to as "the eminent writer and the greatest poet among Romanians"]]
At around the same time, Creangă also began attending Junimea, an upper class literary club presided upon by Maiorescu, whose cultural and political prestige was increasing. This event, literary historian Z. Ornea argued, followed a time of indecision: as a former Factionalist, Creangă was a natural adversary of the mainstream Junimist "cosmopolitan orientation", represented by both Maiorescu and Negruzzi, but was still fundamentally committed to Maiorescu's agenda in the field of education. Literary historians Carmen-Maria Mecu and Nicolae Mecu also argue that, after attending Junimea, the author was able to assimilate some of its innovative teachings into his own style of pedagogy, and thus helped diffuse its message outside the purely academic environment.
The exact date of his reception is a mystery. According to Maiorescu's own recollections, written some decades after the event, Creangă was in attendance at a Junimea meeting of 1871, during which Gheorghe Costaforu proposed to transform the club into a political party. The information was considered dubious by Z. Ornea, who argued that the episode may have been entirely invented by the Junimist leader, and noted that it contradicted both Negruzzi's accounts and minutes kept by A. D. Xenopol. According to Ornea's assessment, with the exception of literary critic Vladimir Streinu, all of Creangă's biographers have come to dismiss Maiorescu's statement. This and other details lead Ornea to conclude that membership was granted to Creangă only after the summer break of 1875.
Gradually Creangă made a positive impression by confirming with the Junimist ideal of authenticity. He also became treasured for his talkative and jocular nature, self-effacing references to himself as a "peasant", and eventually his debut works, which became subjects of his own public readings. His storytelling soon earned him dedicated spectators, who deemed Creangă's fictional universe a "sack of wonders" Although still in his forties, the newcomer was also becoming colloquially known to his colleagues as Moș Creangă ("Old Man Creangă" or "Father Creangă"), which was a sign of respect and sympathy. Among Ion Creangă's most dedicated promoters were Eminescu, his former political rival Iacob Negruzzi, Alexandru Lambrior and Vasile Pogor, as well as the so-called caracudă (roughly, "small game") section, which comprised Junimists who rarely took the floor during public debates, and who were avid listeners of his literary productions By that the late 1870s, he was secretly redirecting political support from the former Factionalists to his new colleagues, as confirmed by an encrypted letter he addressed to Negruzzi in March 1877. In all, Convorbiri Literare would publish 15 works of fiction and the four existing parts of his Childhood Memories before Creangă's death. Reportedly, the decision to begin writing down his stories had been the direct result of Eminescu's persuasion. His talent for storytelling and its transformation into writing fascinated his new colleagues. Several among them, including poet Grigore Alexandrescu, tasked experimental psychologist Eduard Gruber with closely studying Creangă's methods, investigations which produced a report evidencing Creangă's laborious and physical approach to the creative process. In addition to his fiction writing, the emerging author followed Maiorescu's suggestion and, in 1876, published a work of educational methodology and the phonemic orthography favored by Junimea: Povățuitoriu la cetire prin scriere după sistema fonetică ("Guide to Reading by Writing in the Phonetic System").
After losing his job as school inspector following the decisions of a hostile National Liberal executive, Mihai Eminescu spent much of his time in Bojdeuca, where he was looked after by the couple. For five months after quarreling with Samson Bodnărescu, his fellow poet and previous landlord, Eminescu even moved inside the house, where he reputedly pursued his discreet love affair with woman writer Veronica Micle, and completed as many as 22 of his poems. Eminescu was especially attracted by their variant of simple life, the rudimentary setting of Creangă's house and the group's bohemian escapades. Circumstances drew the two friends apart: by 1877, Eminescu had relocated in Bucharest, the capital city, regularly receiving letters in which Creangă was asking him to return. In 1879, as a sign that he was formalizing his own affair with Tinca Vartic, Creangă purchased the Bojdeuca in her name, paying his former landlord 40 florins in exchange. He was also severely overweight, weighing some 120 kilograms (over 250 pounds), with a height of 1.85 meters (6 feet), After one of the meetings, he recorded that the delusional poet was carrying around a revolver with which to fend off unknown attackers—among the first in a series of episodes which ended with Eminescu's psychiatric confinement and death during June 1889. Around that time, Creangă, like other Junimists, was involved in a clash of ideas with the emerging Romanian socialist and atheistic group, rallied around Contemporanul magazine. This occurred after Contemporanul founder Ioan Nădejde publicly ridiculed Învățătoriul copiilor over its take on creationism, quoting its claim that "the invisible hand of God" was what made seeds grow into plants. Creangă replied with a measure of irony, stating that "had God not pierced the skin over our eyes, we would be unable to see each other's mistakes". According to other assessments, he was himself an atheist, albeit intimately so. Having hoped to be granted assistance by Maiorescu, he was disappointed when the Junimea leader would not respond to his request, and, during his final years, switched allegiance to the literary circle founded by Nicolae Beldiceanu (where he was introduced by Gruber). The book remained unfinished, as did the story Făt-frumos, fiul iepei ("Făt-Frumos, Son of the Mare"). his body being buried in Iași's Eternitatea Cemetery. His funeral ceremony was attended by several of Iași's intellectuals (Vasile Burlă, A. C. Cuza, Dumitru Evolceanu, Nicolae Iorga and Artur Stavri among them).
Work
Cultural context
The impact of Ion Creangă's work within its cultural context was originally secured by Junimea. Seeking to revitalize Romanian literature by recovering authenticity, and reacting against those cultural imports it deemed excessive, the group notably encouraged individual creativity among peasants. Reflecting back on Maiorescu's role in the process, George Călinescu wrote: "A literary salon where the personal merit would take the forefront did not exist [before Junimea] and, had Creangă been born two decades earlier, he would not have been able to present 'his peasant material' to anyone. Summoning the creativity of the peasant class and placing it in direct contact with the aristocrats is the work of Junimea." Also referring to cultural positioning within and outside the group, Carmen-Maria Mecu and Nicolae Mecu took the acceptance of "literate peasants" such as Creangă as exemplary proof of Junimist "diversity" and "tolerance".
Maiorescu is known to have had much appreciation for Creangă and other writers of peasant origin, such as Ion Popovici-Bănățeanu and Ioan Slavici. Late in life, he used this connection to challenge accusations of Junimist elitism in the face of criticism from more populist traditionalists. Nonetheless, Junimea members in general found Creangă more of an entertainer rather than a serious writer, and treasured him only to the measure where he illustrated their theories about the validity of rural literature as a source of inspiration for cultured authors. Therefore, Iacob Negruzzi sympathetically but controversially referred to his friend as "a primitive and uncouth talent". Maiorescu's critical texts also provide little individual coverage of Creangă's contributions, probably because these failed to comply exactly with his stratification of literary works into poporane ("popular", that is anonymous or collective) and otherwise. Tudor Vianu's theory defines Creangă as a prime representative of the "popular realism" guidelines (as sporadically recommended by the Junimist doyen himself), cautioning however that Creangă's example was never mentioned in such a context by Maiorescu personally.
Although he occasionally downplayed his own contribution to literature, Creangă's complex take on individuality and the art of writing was attested by his own foreword to an edition of his collected stories, in which he addressed the reader directly: "You may have read many stupid things since you were put on this Earth. Please read these as well, and where it should be that they don't agree with you, take hold of a pen and come up with something better, for this is all I could see myself doing and did." Similarly, Z. Ornea notes that the poet used Creangă's positions to illustrate his own ethnonationalist take on Romanian culture, and in particular his claim that rural authenticity lay hidden by a "superimposed stratum" of urbanized ethnic minorities. 20th century critics have described Creangă as one of his generation's most accomplished figures, and a leading exponent of Junimist literature. This verdict is found in several of Vianu's texts, which uphold Creangă as a great exponent of his generation's literature, comparable to fellow Junimea members Eminescu, Slavici and Ion Luca Caragiale. This view complements George Călinescu's definition, placing the Moldavian author in the company of Slavici and Caragiale as one of the "great prose writers" of the 1880s. Lucian Boia, who noted that "the triad of Romanian classics" includes Creangă alongside Eminescu and Caragiale, also cautioned that, compared to the other two (with whom "the Romanians have said almost all there is to say about themselves"), Creangă has "a rather more limited register". The same parallelism is explained by Ornea as a consequence of the two authors' social outlook: "[Their works] have cemented aesthetically the portrayal of two worlds. Creangă's is the peasant world, Caragiale's the suburban and urban one. Two worlds which represent, in fact, two characteristic steps and two sociopolitical models in the evolution of Romanian structures which ... were confronting themselves in a process that would later prove decisive." According to the same commentator, the two plus Eminescu are their generation's great writers, with Slavici as one "in their immediate succession." While listing what he believes are elements bridging the works of Creangă and Caragiale, other critics have described as strange the fact that the two never appear to have mentioned each other, and stressed that, although not unlikely, a direct encounter between them was never recorded in sources. George Călinescu reacted against claims that the narratives reflected antiquating patterns. He concluded that, in effect, Creangă's written language was the equivalent of a "glossological museum", and even contrasted by the writer's more modern everyday parlance. Contrasting Creangă with the traditions of literature produced by Wallachians in what became the standard literary language, Călinescu also argued in favor of a difference in mentality: the "balance" evidenced by Moldavian speech and illustrated in Ion Creangă's writings is contrasted by the "discoloration and roughness" of "Wallachianism". He also criticized those views according to which Creangă's variant of the literary language was "beautiful", since it failed to "please everyone on account of some acoustical beauty", and since readers from outside the writer's native area could confront it "with some irritation." For Călinescu, the result nevertheless displays "an enormous capacity of authentic speech", also found in the works of Caragiale and, in the 20th century, Mihail Sadoveanu. According to the same commentator, the dialectical interventions formed a background to a lively vocabulary, a "hermetic" type of "argot", which contained "hilarious double entendres and indecent onomatopoeia", passing from "erudite beauty" to "obscene laughter". Some of the expressions characteristic of Creangă's style are obscure in meaning, and some other, such as "drought made the snake scream inside the frog's mouth", appear to be spontaneous and nonsensical.
The recourse to oral literature schemes made it into his writings, where it became a defining trait. As part of this process, Călinescu assessed, "Creangă acts as all his characters in turn, for his stories are almost entirely spoken. ... When Creangă recounts, the composition is not extraordinary, but once his heroes begin talking, their gesticulation and wording reach a height in typical storytelling." According to the critic, discovering this "fundamental" notion about Creangă's work was the merit of literary historian and Viața Românească editor Garabet Ibrăileanu, who had mentioned it as a main proof of affiliation to realism. The distinctive manner of characterization through "realistic dialogues" is seen by Vianu as a highly personal intervention and indicator of the Moldavian writer's originality. Both Vianu and Călinescu discussed this trait, together with the technique of imparting subjective narration in-between characters' replies, as creating other meeting points between Creangă and his counterpart Caragiale. Partly replicating in paper the essence of social gatherings, Ion Creangă often tried to transpose the particular effects of oral storytelling into writing. Among these characteristic touches were interrogations addressed to the readers as imaginary listeners, and pausing for effect with the visual aid of ellipsis. He also often interrupted his narratives with concise illustrations of his point, often in verse form, and usually introduced by vorba ceea (an expression literally meaning "that word", but covering the sense of "as word goes around"). One example of this connects the notions of abundance and personal satisfaction: