Ionel Gherea

Ionel Gherea, also known as Ioan Dobrogeanu-Gherea or Ion D. Gherea (Francized J. D. Ghéréa; 1895 – November 5, 1978), was a Romanian philosopher, essayist, and concert pianist. The son of Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, a Marxist theoretician and critic, and the brother of communist militant Alexandru "Sașa" Gherea, he discarded their political and literary influence, being more interested in the aestheticism of his brother-in-law, Paul Zarifopol. As a youth, Zarifopol took him to meet playwright Ion Luca Caragiale and his family. Gherea's debut as a writer was a 1920 novel written jointly with Luca Caragiale, which was also his only contribution to the genre.

Enjoying national success as an accompanist for George Enescu, Gherea was also a respected literary essayist, and a noted Romanian phenomenologist, ontologist, and philosopher of art; his lasting friendship with philosopher Constantin Noica transcended ethnic and ideological barriers. An anti-authoritarian, Gherea was repressed by during the first decade of Romanian communism, but reemerged in the 1960s as a memoirist and Nietzsche translator.

Biography

Origins and early life

Born into a Jewish family in Ploiești, he was the third child of Marxist Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea and his wife Sofia (née Parcevska, or Parcevskaia).[1] The family originated in Yekaterinoslav, a Ukrainian part of the Russian Empire: patriarch Gherea fled to Romania to escape persecution for his political activism, and worked menial jobs before getting his break in journalism.[2] At Iași, he married Sofia; she was the daughter of a Polish gourmet chef, who was also Gherea's business associate.[3] Around the time of Ionel's birth, his father, mother, and his grown-up siblings were managing the Ploiești Train Station Restaurant, a venue for commercial and literary transactions, but also a hangout for Romanian and exile Russian Marxists, including Leon Trotsky and Pavel Axelrod.[4] Alexandru soon made an impact as a revolutionary socialist, and later communist, militant.[5][6]

Gherea's early education took place at home and was followed by the local Saints Peter and Paul High School, where he graduated from the sciences section.[1] Together with his elder sister Ștefania and her husband, literary critic Paul Zarifopol, he lived in Germany for a time, especially in Leipzig, and in Italy, but returned home upon the outbreak of World War I.[1] In his father's houses in Ploiești and Sinaia, as well as in Germany, he became acquainted with Caragiale; Gherea became friends with the playwright's younger son Luca (Luki). Other cultural figures whom he met in the family homes include Barbu Ștefănescu Delavrancea, Alexandru Vlahuță, George Coșbuc, Panait Cerna and Sextil Pușcariu. His memoirs include sharply drawn portraits as well as revealing anecdotes about Caragiale and his elder son, Mateiu.[1]

Around 1915, young Gherea was a student at the University of Bucharest Faculty of Letters, where he became close friends with poet Artur Enășescu and met Tudor Vianu, his fellow critic.[7] He was also close to Lucia Demetrius, and, together with Zarifopol, helped her launch her career as a novelist.[8] Together with Luki, Gherea himself wrote the novel Nevinovățiile viclene ("The Cunning Naïvetés"). A study in adolescent psychology, which has earned posthumous appreciation,[1][9] it appeared in Viața Românească in 1920. The work shocked conservative sensibilities with its supposed libertinage, and was only taken up by the literary magazine following Zarifopol's intercession.[9]

With Luki dying the next year, Gherea never returned to fiction writing.[9] He dedicated himself to philosophy and criticism, with essays which appeared in Revue Philosophique, Viața Românească and its satellite, Adevărul Literar și Artistic, Kalende, later in Zarifopol's Revista Fundațiilor Regale and Revista de Filosofie. Such works reveal his intellectual debt to Blaise Pascal; a generous use of irony; complex readings from Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but also of Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, Francis Jammes, and Knut Hamsun.[1] His abstract, philosophically grounded speculations somewhat resemble Zarifopol's, but unlike his onetime mentor, he often wrote down impressionist thoughts in the manner of Anatole France, one of his favorite authors, glossing over the discrepancies and limitations of the texts he discussed.[1] He is especially known for his pioneering study on Proust's snobbery, which appeared in the 1929 edition of Adevărul Literar și Artistic, and in which he opposed Zarifopol's own Proustianism.[10]

Pianist-philosopher

Gherea was also friends with violinist-composer George Enescu: in 1927 or 1928, he accompanied Enescu as a pianist on a domestic concert tour, also leaving anecdotes from that encounter.[1][11] The two reunited in 1936, when Enescu returned to the country and included Gherea on his team of touring pianists, which also included Dinu Lipatti, Alfred Alessandrescu, and Muza Ghermani Ciomac.[12] Gherea claimed that, overall, he had been Enescu's piano accompanist in as many as 300 separate performances.[11]

During those years, Gherea was writing a lengthy treatise on the philosophy of self; titled Le Moi el le monde. Essai d'une cosmogonie anthropomorphique ("The Self and the World. An Essay in Anthropomorphic Cosmogony"), it initially appeared in 1933 in the Paris-based Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale. It was published in book form in Paris and in Bucharest in 1938.[1] The book was noted by reviewer Constantin Floru for its disregard toward academic terminology, basing itself on "common sense", "years-long meditation", and "the erudition of a subtle spirit".[13] It earned Gherea the friendship and admiration of academic philosophers Constantin Noica and Petru Comarnescu, who prepared the book for Editura Fundațiilor Regale. Noica referred to Gherea as an "innovative" asset in Romanian philosophy, comparing him to Stéphane Lupasco and Pius Servien.[14]

Le Moi el le monde mapped out an independent phenomenology and ontology, imagining situations in which the "coexistence" of individual minds creates an implicit need for time perception, which inevitably leads them to the noumenon—hence, "cosmogony is anthropomorphic".[15] As read by Floru, Gherea understood these selves as monadic units, with direct reference to Leibniz's ontological essences.[16] Gherea's "anthropomorphism" was nevertheless a critique of "naive" materialism, seeking to rehabilitate idealism with input from particle physics.[17] Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, himself a historical materialist, found the work to be "original", but remained critical of Gherea's implicit agnosticism and explicit consequentialism.[18]

During the early 1930s, Gherea and Noica were involved with the Criterion cultural forum. He was supposed to lecture there about the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, but, being a timid man, lost his composure; he was filled in by Mircea Vulcănescu, who reused his notes.[19] He and Noica became friends, despite the latter being a right-leaning national conservative. Noica wrote in 1936: "One of the several things about [Gherea] that left a mark on me is that, although he lives in a leftist milieu and carries a surname dear to the Jewish and socialist circles, he has never once profited from this and has been living in want, at least not these past few years."[20]

Repression and recovery

The rise of Iron Guard fascism and antisemitism was a disappointment for Gherea, a fact documented by Mihail Sebastian, a Zarifopol disciple and fellow Jewish writer.[21] However, with Vulcănescu and Noica, he remained one of the "young philosophers and disciples" who stood by metaphysician and Guard affiliate Nae Ionescu, when the latter was released from a concentration camp for political prisoners.[22] In December 1940, the Iron Guard's National Legionary government ordered his father's remains to be exhumed and reburied in a Jewish-only cemetery.[23]

After World War II and the fall of fascism, Gherea, whose brother had taken refuge to the Soviet Union and killed as a dissident during the Great Purge,[6] was troubled by the prospects of communization. In a 1946 interview with Ion Biberi, he expressed his support for a "tolerant and libertarian democracy", but believed that the future belonged to "the sort of socialism that prevents people from speaking their mind."[24] Gherea's final decades were lived under the communist regime. Branded a "decadent" philosopher in the Marxist works of Constantin Ionescu Gulian, he was marginalized together with other thinkers of his generation.[25] By 1955, his father, Constantin, was being officially recovered as a precursor of socialist realism, the standard literary dogma,[26] but his works appeared only in censored form.[27] Gherea was mainly focused on translation work, putting out versions of Jammes, Thomas de Quincey and Heinrich Mann into Romanian, while rendering Ion Marin Sadoveanu's Sfârșit de veac în București into French.[1]

In the late 1950s, Gherea's continued visits with Noica became a subject of interest for Securitate agents, who were monitoring Noica for his former Iron Guard affiliation. Noica and many of his friends were arrested and tried in 1960, with Gherea himself interrogated.[28] Later that decade, the regime introduced controlled liberalization, and Gulian was sidelined.[25] Nevinovățiile viclene came out in a paperback edition at Editura Tineretului, 1969.[9] Gherea's work became more available. His essays reprinted in Manuscriptum, then as the 1971 Eseuri ("Essays"), Gherea's 1938 study was only fully published in Romanian in 1984, as Eul și lumea.[1]

Living his final years in Bucharest, Gherea was sought after by his father's Hungarian Romanian biographer and translator, Gyula Csehi, their interviews published in Igaz Szó on Gherea's 70th birthday. Csehi left this portrait of Gherea Jr: "His face is surprisingly like his fathers'. He is a quiet, gentle, thoughtful man, mindful of all exaggeration."[29] Returning to philosophical work, in 1978 Gherea and Ion Herdan also published a translation from Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, also signaling a recovery for the German thinker.[30]

Notes
  1. Eugen Simion (ed.), Dicționarul general al literaturii Române, vol. 6, pp. 325–326. Bucharest: Univers Enciclopedic, 2007. ISBN 973-637-070-4
  2. Atanasiu, pp. 373–377
  3. Păcurariu, pp. 42–43
  4. Atanasiu, pp. 57–58, 178–180; Păcurariu, passim
  5. Beke, pp. 240–241
  6. (in Romanian) Vladimir Tismăneanu, "Un stilist al ideilor: Paul Zarifopol și snobismul mesianic", in LaPunkt, July 21, 2014
  7. Tudor Vianu, Scriitori români, Vol. III, Editura Minerva, Bucharest, 1971, p. 321. OCLC 7431692
  8. (in Romanian) Lucia Demetrius, "Memorii" Archived 2012-03-26 at the Wayback Machine, in România Literară, Nr. 4/2004
  9. (in Romanian) Ioana Pârvulescu, "În numele fiului", in România Literară, Nr. 10/2001
  10. (in Romanian) Dana Pîrvan-Jenaru, "Receptarea lui Proust în România", in Observator Cultural, Nr. 436, August 2008
  11. Ștefan Cervatiuc, Istoria teatrului la Botoşani: 1838-1944. Vol 3: 1925–1944, Index, p. 224. Botoșani: Quadrant. ISBN 978-606-8238-88-3
  12. Virgil Gheorghiu, "Anul muzical 1936—1937", in Revista Fundațiilor Regale, Nr. 10/1937, pp. 204–205
  13. Floru, p. 685
  14. Chișu & Noica, pp. 72, 77
  15. Floru, pp. 686–689; Pătrășcanu, pp. 92–98
  16. Floru, pp. 688–689
  17. Pătrășcanu, p. 167
  18. Pătrășcanu, pp. 97–98
  19. Constantin Mihai, "Dinamica conferințelor Criterionului", in Anuarul Institutului de Cercetări Socio-umane C. S. Nicolăescu-Plopșor, Vol. 13, 2012, p. 50
  20. Chișu & Noica, p. 73
  21. Mihail Sebastian, Journal, 1935-1944. London: Random House, 2003, p. 135. ISBN 0-7126-8388-7
  22. Mircea Eliade, Autobiography, Vol. 2. 1937–1960, Exile's Odyssey, p. 83. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. ISBN 0-226-20411-1
  23. Matatias Carp, Cartea neagră. Suferințele evreilor din România, 1940—1944. I. Legionarii și rebeliunea, p. 197. Bucharest: Editura Socec, 1946
  24. Gabriel Dimisianu, "La început, la mijloc, la sfârșit de secol", in Lettre Internationale (Romanian edition), Nr. 62, Summer 2007
  25. (in Romanian) Vladimir Tismăneanu, "C. I. Gulian, exterminatorul filosofiei românești", in România Literară, Nr. 2/2012
  26. Florin Mihăilescu, De la proletcultism la postmodernism. Constanța: Editura Pontica, 2002, pp. 94–95. ISBN 973-9224-63-6
  27. Monica Lovinescu, Unde scurte, p. 410. Bucharest: Humanitas, 1990. ISBN 973-28-0172-7
  28. (in Romanian) George Ardeleanu, "Constantin Noica în vizorul Securității. Meditații la limba engleză (la Cîmpulung, în 1957–1958)", in Observator Cultural, Nr. 277, July 2005
  29. Beke, p. 241
  30. Simion Dănilă, "Die Rezeption Friedrich Nietzsches in Rumänien", in Nietzsche-Studien. Internationales Jahrbuch Fur Die Nietzsche-Forschung, Vol. 34, Issue 1, p. 243

References
  • I. C. Atanasiu, Pagini din istoria contimporană a României: 1881-1916. I. Mișcarea socialistă: 1881-1900. Bucharest: Editura Adevĕrul.
  • György Beke, Fără interpret. Convorbiri cu 56 de scriitori despre relațiile literare româno-maghiare. Bucharest: Editura Kriterion, 1972. OCLC 38751437
  • Lucian Chișu, Constantin Noica, "Corespondență. Scrisori către Petru Comarnescu", in Caiete Critice, Nr. 5–6–7/2009, pp. 72–80.
  • Constantin Floru, "O încercare de cosmogonie antropomorfică", in Revista Fundațiilor Regale, Nr. 10/1937, pp. 684–689.
  • C. Păcurariu, Câteva amintiri despre C. Dobrogeanu-Gherea. Bucharest: M. M. Antonescu, 1936.
  • Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, Curente și tendințe în filozofia românească. Bucharest: Editura Socec, 1946.
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