Păstorel Teodoreanu
Poet and writer
Died when: 69 years 231 days (835 months)Star Sign: Leo
Pastorel Teodoreanu, or just Pastorel (born Alexandru Osvald (Al.O.) Teodoreanu;July 30, 1894 – March 17, 1964), was a Romanian humorist, poet and gastronome, the brother of novelist Ionel Teodoreanu and brother in law of writer ?tefana Velisar Teodoreanu.
He worked in many genres, but is best remembered for his parody texts and his epigrams, and less so for his Symbolist verse.
His roots planted in the regional culture of Western Moldavia, which became his main source of literary inspiration, Pastorel was at once an opinionated columnist, famous wine-drinking bohemian, and decorated war hero.
He worked with the influential literary magazines of the 1920s, moving between Gândirea and Via?a Româneasca, and cultivated complex relationships with literary opinion-makers such as George Calinescu.
After an unsuccessful but scandalous debut in drama, Teodoreanu perfected his work as a satirist, producing material which targeted the historian-politician Nicolae Iorga and the literary scholar , as well as food criticism which veered into fantasy literature.
As an affiliate of , he favored a brand of Romanian nationalism which ran against Iorga's own.Corrosive or contemplative, Pastorel's various sketches dealt with social and political issues of the interwar, continuing in some ways the work of Ion Luca Caragiale.
In the 1930s, inspired by his readings from Anatole France and François Rabelais, he also published his celebrated "Jester Harrow" stories, mocking the conventions of historical novels and Renaissance literature.
His career peaked in 1937, when he received one of Romania's most prestigious awards, the National Prize.Teodoreanu was employed as a propagandist during World War II, supporting Romania's participation on the Eastern Front.
From 1947, Pastorel was marginalized and closely supervised by the communist regime, making efforts to adapt his style and politics, then being driven into an ambiguous relationship with the Securitate secret police.
Beyond this facade conformity, he contributed to the emergence of an underground, largely oral, anti-communist literature.In 1959, Teodoreanu was apprehended by the communist authorities, and prosecuted in a larger show trial of Romanian intellectual resistants.
He spent some two years in prison, and reemerged as a conventional writer.He died shortly after, without having been fully rehabilitated.
His work was largely inaccessible to readers until the 1989 Revolution.
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