This article is actively undergoing a major edit for a little while. To help avoid edit conflicts, please do not edit this page while this message is displayed. This page was last edited at 11:32, 20 July 2024 (UTC) (0 seconds ago) – this estimate is cached, update. Please remove this template if this page hasn't been edited for a significant time. If you are the editor who added this template, please be sure to remove it or replace it with {{ Under construction}} between editing sessions.

Lucian Raicu (12 May 1934 – 22 November 2006) was a Romanian literary critic, biographer, memoirist, and magazine editor.

Raicu was born in his grandparents' home at Iași, on 12 May 1934; as he explained in a 1975 interview, his mother only traveled there for her labor, returning with him to her preferred home in Bârlad after just three weeks. ^[1] The future writer's ancestry was entirely Jewish—he once declared himself as "above all else, a Jew", noting that this ethnic origin gave him an "existential drama" and a "transfiguring mystique" with Talmudic roots; ^[2] his brother, the novelist Virgil Duda, was similarly attached to the Jewish identity, as discussed by his book of essays on Mihail Sebastian. ^[3] Raicu also viewed himself as quintessentially tied to Western Moldavia and its traditional spirit, which he describes as "above all a critical spirit [Raicu's emphasis]." ^[1] Surviving World War II and its waves of antisemitic persecution, he integrated with the local version of the Jewish left, increasingly associated with the Romanian Communist Party after 1944. As noted by literary historian Leon Volovici, both Raicu and his future wife, Sonia Larian, belonged to a generation of young Jews who were won over by "communist romanticism" around 1948 (when the Romanian Kingdom was toppled by a communist regime), only to "wake up" from its lure around 1960. ^[2]

As a literary columnist in the early 1950s, Raicu gave full support to the official line of Socialist Realism—as later reviewed by literary historian Ana Selejan, he argued from within Marxist literary criticism, identifying and condemning "bourgeois remnants" in the works of his generation colleagues. ^[4] He thus censured Ion Brad for communist poetry that still seemed "idyllic", and attacked popular magazines for featuring "mediocre" poems by the likes of Gica Iuteș. ^[5] He was instead enthusiastic about the poet debut of a teenager, Florin Mugur, describing him as a model to follow. ^[6] This "positivity" eventually won over in his columns, which offered encouragements to generation upon generation of Romanian writers. According to the younger critic Ioana Pârvulescu, it should not be mistaken for naivete, but rather for "[giving] everyone a chance"—Raicu "does not admire all those whom he reads", but gave each one of them his full attention. ^[7] A younger colleague, Daniel Cristea-Enache, remarked that Raicu was unusually charitable in this respect, sometimes to the point of over-analyzing the more "irrelevant books". ^[8] Later, in discussing the work of Leo Tolstoy (whom he had read profusely while recovering from an accident), ^[9] Raicu took a stance against critical revisionism. His "empathetic vision", Cristea-Enache notes, risked identifying Tolstoy's entire life and work with his "peak", entirely glossing over the more questionable aspects. ^[10]

In ideological terms, by 1956 Raicu and his fried Radu Cosașu had come to side with the anti-Stalinist left, secretly supporting the revolution in neighboring Hungary. In August 1958, after having refused to engage in self-criticism for his perceived liberal socialism, he was ousted from the Communist Party, and, by his own account, became a nonperson. ^[11] Literary historian Eugen Negrici proposes that Raicu, alongside other authors (from Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu to Ion Negoițescu), had been callous in assessing the impact of de-Stalinization in Romania, and had found himself exposed to the inevitable backlash. ^[12] Living for a while on the margins of society, Raicu still celebrated the victories of international socialism, including the Cuban Revolution and the Lumumbist initiatives, as well as any signs of continued liberalization in Romania itself. ^[11]

Later in his Romanian career, Raicu was mainly employed as an editor at România Literară magazine, issued by the Writers' Union of Romania. ^[2] Upon discarding the ideological constraints of Marxist-Leninism, he came to be seen by Volovici as a "critic of great spiritual complexity and depth, fascinated by the mysteries of creativity"; ^[2] Pârvulescu reserves praise for Raicu's method of viewing the literary process "from within", as an "initiation" of his readers. ^[7] His first published volume was a monograph on Liviu Rebreanu, appearing at Editura pentru literatură in 1967. ^[1] Re-reviewing it years later, fellow critic Gabriel Dimisianu commended Raicu for having managed to usurp the "cliches of Socialist Realism" by exploring the deep-layered symbolism in Rebreanu's novels. ^[13] He followed up with the essays called Structuri literare ("Literary Structures"), put out by Editura Eminescu in 1973, then with a literary biography of Nikolai Gogol, appearing at Cartea Românească in 1974. ^[1] As noted by Pârvulescu, the later work shows Raicu as a "detective", opposing his "daring presuppositions" to the critical consensus (regarded by Raicu himself as utterly stale). ^[7]

Despite integrating with the new cultural climate of national-communism, Raicu was not readmitted into the party. In early 1974, the authorities granted him and his wife a new home in Bucharest, right outside the Metropolitan Circus, but, by June, also included them on a list of non-party literary professionals, who would only receive half pay for their services. ^[14] In 1976, Cartea Românească featured another collection of Raicu's essays, as Critica, formă de viață ("Criticism as a Lifestyle"). ^[1] He returned as a biographer in 1977, when Editura Eminescu put out his monograph on poet Nicolae Labiș. ^[1] Six other works of essays came out at Cartea Românească: Practica scrisului și experiența lecturii ("Practicing Writing and Experiencing Reading", 1978), Reflecții asupra spiritului creator ("Reflections on the Creative Self", 1979), Printre contemporani ("Among Contemporaries", 1980), Calea de acces ("A Way In", 1982), Fragmente de timp ("Fragments in Time", 1984), Scene din romanul literaturii ("Scenes from Literature as a Novel", 1985). ^[1] As noted in 2007 by Cristea-Enache, these works, of which Calea de acces was Raicu's "most beautiful", consolidated his appeal among a Romanian readership, with its "amazingly high interest [in] authentic literature." For a while in the 1970s, Raicu was a "central figure" in local literary life, though he remained largely uninterested in cultivating his own celebrity status. ^[8]

In November 1986, ^[9] Raicu decided to leave Romania, and was reluctantly allowed by the regime to do so. He was forced to leave his manuscripts behind, but the authorities remained careless in handling these; as a result, poet Mircea Dinescu was able to recover them from Raicu's discarded home in the winter of 1986–1987, and could even smuggle some of them out of Romania. ^[9] As Cristea-Enache writes, Raicu's departure effectively destroyed his cultural capital in Romania, and never allowed him to grow as a writer in his adoptive France (where he only endured as a "misfit"). ^[8] A similar point is made by Raicu's disciple, Simona Sora, who notes that he began suffering from an "non-analyzed depression", which also made him turn his attention to absurdist works by a fellow exile, Eugène Ionesco. ^[9] While he and Larian settled in Paris, Duda took longer to leave Romania. He ultimately settled in Israel, alongside other Romanian refuseniks, in the late 1980s. ^[3] Raicu's own French period, meanwhile, witnessed the publication of his 1974 book of commentary as Avec Gogol ("With Gogol"), in a translation curated by Éditions L'Âge d'Homme in 1992. ^{[1] [9]}

After the Romanian Revolution had toppled communism in December 1989, Raicu returned to publishing in Romania as well: in 1993, his literary diary on Ionesco appeared at Editura Litera International ^[1] (fragments were translated and published by the Revue des Deux Mondes in March 2007); ^[9] in 1994, he published some of his memoirs at Cartea Românească, as Scene, reflecții, fragmente ("Scenes, Reflections, Fragments"). ^[11] From 1987, he had been preparing a monograph on Ionesco's "vital circuit". ^[7] His final regular contributions were letters to his Romanian public, which he read over Radio France Internationale. ^[13] If Raicu opted never to return to Romania, it was also because of a certain malaise—Sora contends that he was aware of his having "broken up" with the Romanian society, and also that he could not bear to live out a disillusionment with the post-revolutionary regime. ^[9] He lived to see a reissue of his Calea de acces at Polirom publishers (2004), which was supposed to revive interest in his work. ^[8] He ultimately died in Paris on 22 November 2006. ^[13] Carmen Mușat handled and prefaced a posthumous anthology of his essays, which appeared in 2009 at Editura Hasefer of Bucharest. ^[15]

• Daniel Cristea-Enache, "Critică literară. În miezul literaturii", in Idei în Dialog, Vol. IV, Issue 12, December 2007, pp. 11–12.
• Ana Selejan, Literatura în totalitarism. Vol. II: Bătălii pe frontul literar. Bucharest: Cartea Românească, 2008. ISBN  978-973-23-1961-1