Constantin G. Stere or Constantin Sterea (Romanian; , Konstantin Yegorovich Stere or Константин Георгиевич Стере, Konstantin Georgiyevich Stere; also known under his pen name Șărcăleanu; June 1, 1865 – June 26, 1936) was a Romanian writer, jurist, politician, ideologue of the Poporanist trend, and, in March 1906, co-founder (together with Garabet Ibrăileanu and Paul Bujor — the latter was afterwards replaced by the physician Ioan Cantacuzino) of the literary magazine Viața Românească.Stere, "Cum am devenit...", p.13 One of the central figures of the Bessarabian intelligentsia at the time, Stere was a key actor during the Union of Bessarabia with Romania in 1918, and is associated with its legacy.
Constantin Stere was professor of Administrative and Constitutional law at the University of Iaşi, serving as its rector between 1913 and 1916. He is also remembered for his partly autobiographical novel În preajma revoluției (literal translation: "On the Eve of the Revolution" — in reference to the Russian Revolution of 1917).
Biography
Early life He was born in Horodiște, Soroca County,Ornea, Vol.I, p.28 to a family of boyar originsNădejde, in Gorovei; Ornea, Vol.I, p.212 from Ciripcău, Bessarabia — which was part of the Russian Empire at the time. Stere was one of the three sons of a couple of Russian citizens: Gheorghe or Iorgu Stere (known as Yegor Stepanovich Stere, Егор Степанович Стере in Russian), an ethnic Greek landowner whose family was originally from Botoșani County in the Romanian part of Moldavia,Ornea, Vol.I, p.23-25 and Pulcheria (Пулкерия), a member of the impoverished gentry in Bessarabia.Ornea, Vol.I, p.26-28 He spent most of his early years, until the age of eight, in Ciripcău, where the family manor was located.Ornea, Vol.I, p.27-29, 33
Around 1874, he graduated from a Chișinău private school where classes were taught German, and entered the school for dvoryane in the city, where he became close friends with Alexandru Grosu and Lev Matveyevich Kogan-Bernstein (who were the basis for the characters Sașa Lungu and Moise Roitman in Stere's novel).Ornea, Vol.I, p.36-37 It was also around this time that he became acquainted with progressive, utopian socialist, and Darwinist ideas (notably reading the works of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Alexander Herzen, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Peter Lavrovich Lavrov).Ornea, Vol.I, p.37-41 Stere later indicated that, before the late 1870s, he could not spell the Romanian alphabet, which had just been adopted over the border (see Romanian Cyrillic alphabet), and had to rely on a few books smuggled into Bessarabia for getting a sense of literary Romanian.Ornea, Vol.I, p.44-45
While still students, Stere and Kogan-Bernstein engaged in revolutionary politics as socialists and Narodniks, initiating a conspirative "self-instruction" cell of six inside their school.Ornea, Vol.I, p.46-48 The group was affiliated with Narodnaya Volya,Hitchins, p.82; Ornea, p.48-49 and Stere was responsible for multiplying and distributing locally the manifesto issued by the latter after it had assassinated Emperor Alexander II.Ornea, Vol.I, p.50 This was also the first moment when Stere declared his opposition to a Social democratic program, a Narodnik-inspired objection which would later form one of the tenets of his doctrine.Ornea, Vol.I, p.56-59
He was first arrested in late 1883, after Okhrana units decapitated the Bessarabian wing of the Narodnaya Volya.Ornea, Vol.I, p.60-61 Detained in Odessa (during which time he read intensely),Ornea, Vol.I, p.61-67 Stere was frequently visited by Maria Grosu, the sister of Alexandru, who had fallen in love with him — a Narodnik and a feminist, she asked Stere for a marriage of convenience that was meant to help her become free from parental tutelage (according to the laws of the Russian Empire, unmarried women were under their father's protection).Ornea, Vol.I, p.74-75 Stere agreed, and they were married in the prison chapel (1885).Ornea, Vol.I, p.75-76
Siberia In 1885, he was deported to Siberia, serving a three-year term.Ornea, Vol.I, p.77 Briefly kept in Tyumen prison awaiting transport further east, he was sent to Kurgan in the custody of two gendarmes (October).Ornea, Vol.I, p.80-86 He was joined there by Maria, who gave birth to their son Roman in 1886.Ornea, Vol.I, p.87-88 Moving to Turinsk, the Steres joined a group of revolutionaries in internal exile; Constantin Stere agreed to print copies of a Narodnik magazine, using a hectograph, and was exposed during a raid by authorities.Ornea, Vol.I, p.90-93 He was swiftly taken to Tobolsk, then shipped down the Irtysh to the place where it met the Ob; he traveled to the village of Sharkala (the northernmost part of Siberia he ever reached) in a Khanty canoe,Ornea, Vol.I, p.93-94 and was then settled in Beryozovsky District, only to be arrested again and sent back to Tobolsk in the autumn of 1888.Ornea, Vol.I, p.93-96
He was tried for his activities in Turinsk, based on evidence collected by the Okhrana.Ornea, Vol.I, p.96-97 While in prison, Stere, who was beginning to distance himself from socialism and proletarian internationalism, argued in front of authorities that mention of his change in attitude was supposed to be kept by the court when passing the verdict. At the time, a physician who examined him noted that he had suffered a nervous breakdown, and had him moved to a prison hospital.Ornea, Vol.I, p.98 According to most accounts, he had attempted suicide (a gesture caused by either the death of one of his brothers, who had himself committed suicide,Ornea, Vol.I, p.103 or by news that the Narodnik leader Lev Tikhomirov had become a supporter of the political establishment).Ornea, Vol.I, p.104-106 In hospital, Stere stated that: "Quite a while ago have I begun to remove myself from the influence of political exiles and their tradition. Recent times, filled with major hardships for me, I have decided firmly and sincerely to break with these traditions, as well as with all things «illegal» in my past."Stere, in Ornea, Vol.I, p.98-99
Instead, he became familiar with neo-Kantian philosophy, expanding on his interest in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (which he was reading in Beryozovsky District).Ornea, Vol.I, p.106-108 It was at this time that Stere began writing.Ornea, Vol.I, p.108
In March 1889, the court decided to extend his term of exile by three more years, and relocated him to the village of Serginsk, near Minusinsk. He much later claimed that, while passing through the prison of Krasnoyarsk, he met Vladimir Lenin, the future Bolshevik leader — this is unlikely, as Lenin passed through the city several years after Stere.Ornea, Vol.I, p.111-112 His other claim to have met and befriended Józef Piłsudski, future head of state of Poland (and, at the time, a prominent member of the Polish Socialist Party), was confirmed by Piłsudski himself in 1927 (Stere's novel, În preajma revoluției, included Piłsudski as a character, under the name Stadnicki).Ornea, Vol.I, p.113
Datoria and Evenimentul In late 1891 or early 1892, having been set free, Stere returned to Bessarabia, and eventually sought political refuge inside Romania, crossing the border clandestinely.Ornea, Vol.I, p.126-143 He studied law at the University of Iași (under Petre Missir, while carrying on as a leftist activist and quickly becoming an influential figure among the youth of Iași, the inspiration behind a left-leaning student society that engaged in a virulent polemic with the nationalist youth,Ornea, Vol.I, p.156-160 and an acquaintance of socialist leaders such as Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Garabet Ibrăileanu, Ioan Nădejde, Sofia Nădejde, Constantin Mille, Theodor Speranția, Vasile Morțun, and Nicolae L. Lupu.Ornea, Vol.I, p.147-149, 150-153, 156, 194, 238-241 Later, a controversy erupted over Stere's academic credentials, as it was never consistently proven that he had passed his baccalaureate between being arrested and applying for law school.Ornea, Vol.I, p.52-55
Stere's break with Marxism led him to attempt persuading the newly created Romanian Social Democratic Workers' Party (PSDMR) to amend its proletariat-focused policies,Hitchins, p.83; Ornea, Vol.I, p.172, 180-185, 198 and, in 1893, to found the student society Datoria ("The Duty"), which preserved the Narodnik focus on educating peasants.Hitchins, p.83; Ornea, Vol.I, p.161-165 He and his followers nevertheless continued to rely much of their thesis on Marxist concepts,Boatcă, p.18; Ionescu coupled with an interest taken in the reformist socialist way advocated by Eduard Bernstein.Boatcă, p.15; Ornea, Vol.I, p.122-123
After debuting as a journalist for the liberal-inspired Evenimentul in 1893 (and engaging in public debates with the socialist press),Ornea, Vol.I, p.165-175 Stere also sent substantial contribution to , a tribune of various left-wing trends that was being published in Bucharest under the direction of Anton Bacalbașa.Ornea, Vol.I, p.173 Later in 1893, he took part in founding Evenimentul Literar, the literary supplement of Evenimentul.Ornea, Vol.I, p.183-188
He joined in the socialists Bacalbașa and Ibrăileanu in a cultural polemic with the poet Alexandru Vlahuță and his magazine Vieața.Ornea, Vol.I, p.190-197, 199 Vlahuță, who had sided with Dobrogeanu-Gherea during the latter's conflict with Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu,Ornea, Vol.I, p.193 nonetheless clashed with the leftists over the issue of "art for art's sake", arguing that the interest his adversaries took in didacticism was harming literature.Ornea, Vol.I, p.193-197 This exchange of replies soon involved the former socialist Eduard Dioghenide, who attacked Evenimentul Literar with Antisemitic language, contending that Stere was "an employee of the little kikes" and had "lost his soul to the Jews".Dioghenide, in Ornea, Vol.I, p.199, 200 At the time, Stere's activity with Datoria also came under attack from various student societies — most of them associates of the Conservative Party.Ornea, Vol.I, p.198
During the late 1890s, he had begun making use of the Șărcăleanu alias in his polemic articles,Ornea, Vol.I, p.187-188 which became a particular topic of dispute after his confrontation with Dioghenide (who first speculated that Stere was the author of Șărcăleanu'''s articles).Ornea, Vol.I, p.199-202 Dioghenide's supporters, editors of the newspaper Naționalul, consequently pressured Stere to indicate who Șărcăleanu was ("We wish to know him, does he wear sidelocks or is he a Judaisized Romanian?").Naționalul, in Ornea, Vol.I, p.202 Similar calls were voiced by Vieața, who alleged that Stere himself was a Russian Jew.Ornea, Vol.I, p.210
Winning the support of several Conservative politicians, Stere successfully applied for Romanian citizenship in February 1895, obtaining naturalization through a special law, as "a Romanian from Bessarabia".Ornea, Vol.I, p.211-214
In 1897, Stere obtained a licensure with a thesis on legal entity and individualism, one which drew criticism from the influential Conservative-inspired group Junimea, on the assumption that it had been partly inspired by Marx.Ornea, Vol.I, p.218; 225-236 At the time, he also published an incomplete series of philosophical essays centered on the works of Wilhelm Wundt.Ornea, Vol.I, p.220-223 After graduation, Stere, who was by then the father of four, lived for a while in Ploiești, and afterwards joined the Bar association in Iași as a practicing lawyer.Ornea, Vol.I, p.237-238 During the period, he met and befriended the influential writer Ion Luca Caragiale.Ornea, Vol.I, p.241
Birth of Poporanism