Urmuz

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Urmuz
Demetru Dem. Ionescu-Buzău

Urmuz , actually Demetru Demetrescu-Buzău (born March 17, 1883 in Curtea de Argeş , † November 23, 1923 (suicide) in Bucharest ) was a Romanian writer. His work consists of only a handful of absurd and grotesque short stories. Nevertheless, he is considered an important forerunner of the Romanian avant-garde, Dadaism and Surrealism .

Life

Urmuz was born on March 17, 1883 in Curtea de Argeş under the name Demetru Dem. Ionescu-Buzau. His father was a doctor at the local hospital. Out of sympathy for the naming of Romanian farmers and Russians with a surname derived from the first name, the father adopted this spelling for the son, while the parents continued to be called Ionescu. In 1888 the family lived in Paris for a year and settled in Bucharest on their return to Romania . Demetrescu-Buzău attended elementary school here, and later the Gheorghe Lazăr Lyceum . There he made friends with the later playwright Gheorghe Ciprian and the later writer and physicist Vasile Voiculescu . He first studied medicine for a year, but then switched to law. From 1907 he worked as a judge and clerk, initially in small provincial towns and from 1913 in Bucharest. From 1907 onwards the first grotesque stories emerged, which were initially only presented to siblings and friends and acquaintances. It was not until a long time later, in 1922, a year before his death, that the first two stories of his mentor, the writer Tudor Arghezi , were published in the magazine Cugetul românesc . It is also Arghezi who gave him his pseudonym Urmuz . Urmuz was also considered a high-ranking musical talent on the piano.

On November 23, 1923, Urmuz committed suicide in a Bucharest park on Chaussee Kiseleff by shooting a revolver in the temple. After his death, further individual texts appeared in the magazines of the Romanian avant-garde ( Punct , Bilete de papagal , unu and Contimporanul ). In the magazine unu gave Sasa Pană 1930 the whole time out known work. In the same year the first German translation appeared in Herwarth Walden's avant-garde magazine Der Sturm . In 1965 Eugène Ionesco brought out a selection of texts in French translation together with a detailed work on Urmuz. In 1970 the most complete volume to date , Pagini bizare (Bizarre Pages), was published in Romanian by Saşa Pană. In 1976 the German translation was published under the title The entire work ; translated by Oskar Pastior with some additional smaller texts. So far Urmuz '"Bizarre Pages" have been translated into at least 7 languages.

Bizarre sites

The “Bizarren Seiten”, Urmuz's complete oeuvre, today comprises 10 stories, of which only Der Trichter and Stamate and Ismail and Turnavitu appeared during his lifetime. More have gradually been published posthumously through the initiative of Romanian and French writers such as Geo Bogza , Saşa Pană and Eugène Ionesco . The absurd-grotesque stories describe animal-like figures whose meaningless and often compulsive actions move in a self-contained microcosm. Inexorable mechanisms are determined by a bizarre intrinsic logic. The language is characterized by a purring sonority with a suspension of any sentence and text logic. In Urmuz, the Romanist Eva Behring speaks of a "destructive lust for ridicule" of popular, bourgeois art concepts aimed at national and social harmony:

“He parodied those who lacked education, who gave themselves up to be taught, but twisted their ideas and twisted their sentences with pretentious and incomprehensible expressions; above all, he parodied the style of the feature novels from the newspapers. Although he loved and respected people [...] he laughed at the unconsciousness of those who live by imitating others. The nature of a number of institutions and the behavior of some officials made him laugh. "

reception

When Urmuz's first stories were recorded, they did not fit in with the literary landscape of the early 20th century that he himself only thought of publication a year before his death. In literary history it is considered to be an avant-garde “one-man revolution” that preceded all later avant-garde currents in Romanian literature. Ionesco introduced Urmuz to a Western European audience in 1967. He too describes Urmuz as his forerunner. Because Urmuz 'tragic cosmos of grotesque animal men refers to the oppressive absurdity of Ionesco's most famous work The Rhinos - decades before its publication.

Urmuz 'stories are considered to be an extraordinary processing of the problems that gave all European avant-garde movements of the time the awareness of an existential crisis in bourgeois society. There is a particular proximity to surrealism - the creation of a daring imagery in which, typical for dreams and the subconscious, random particles of reality are assembled. Eva Behring also recognizes clear principles of futurism through a comprehensive and definitive traditional nihilism .

Work editions

  • Urmuz: The entire work. Translated from Romanian and edited by Oskar Pastior. Second, revised edition. edition text + kritik, Munich 1983. ISBN 3-921402-29-8

swell

  • Eva Behring: Romanian literary history from the beginning to the present . Universitätsverlag Konstanz 1994. pp. 236–246.
  • Klaus Bochmann and Heinrich Stiehler: Introduction to Romanian language and literary history . Romanistischer Verlag, Bonn 2010. pp. 183–193.
  • Eugène Ionesco: That was Urmuz . In: Accents. Journal of Poetry , No. 6/1967. Pp. 520-547.
  • Richard Reschika: God asleep - Gnosticism as a Romanian cultural constant. A study of Gnostic leitmotifs in Romanian mythology, philosophy and literature with special consideration of selected works by Lucian Blaga, EM Cioran, Mihai Eminescu, Urmuz, Mircea Eliade and Eugène Ionesco, Projekt-Verlag, Bochum / Freiburg 2016, pp. 79-87 , ISBN 978-3-89733-404-5 .

TV documentary

  • That was Urmuz. Documentation of a case of poetry Production: SFB , 1967 (Director: Heinz von Cramer )

Web links

Supporting documents and comments

  1. ↑ Geo Bogza, Zeitschrift unu No. 31, November 1930; quoted from: Urmuz: The entire work. Munich 1983, p. 90f
  2. ↑ Urmuz: The entire work. Munich 1983, p. 107
  3. ^ Official police protocol, quoted from: ibid., Pp. 93f
  4. ↑ Urmuz: The entire work. Munich 1983, pp. 107-111
  5. ↑ Behring (1994)
  6. ↑ Eliza V. Vorvoreanu, 1967. Sister of Urmuz. Quoted from Urmuz (1983), p. 96.
  7. ↑ Letter to Dim. Vărbănescu, July 21, 1949. Quoted from: Urmuz (1983): 120
  8. ↑ cf. Bochmann / Stiehler 2010: 188
  9. ↑ cf. Behring (1994)
personal data
SURNAME Urmuz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Demetrescu-Buzău, Demetru (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Romanian prose writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 17, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Curtea de Argeș , Romania
DATE OF DEATH November 23, 1923
Place of death Bucharest , Romania