V. A. Urechia (most common version of Vasile Alexandrescu Urechia, ; born Vasile Alexandrescu and also known as Urechiă, Urechea, Ureche, Popovici-Ureche or Vasile Urechea-Alexandrescu; 15 February 1834 – 21 November 1901) was a Moldavian, later Romanian historian, Romantic author of historical fiction and plays, academic and politician. The author of Romanian history syntheses, a noted bibliographer, heraldist, ethnographer and folklorist, he founded and managed a private school, later holding teaching positions at the University of Iași and University of Bucharest. Urechia was also one of the founding members of the Romanian Academy and, as frequent traveler to Spain and fluent speaker of Spanish, a corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy. He was the father of satirist Alceu Urechia.
As an ideologue, Urechia developed "Romanianism", which offered a template for cultural and political cooperation among Romanians from several historical regions, and formed part of a Pan-Latinist campaign. An activist in favor of the Moldavia's union to Wallachia and a representative of the liberal wing, he was briefly Moldavian Minister of Religious Affairs, and later a prominent member of the National Liberal Party. For more than three decades, Urechia represented Covurlui County in the Romanian Kingdom's Chamber of Deputies and Senate. He was Education Minister under two successive National Liberal administrations, and, during the 1890s, he founded the Cultural League for the Unity of All Romanians, which focused on encouraging the aspirations of Romanians living in Austria-Hungary.
Urechia was involved in a decade-long controversy with Junimea, a conservative literary society which advocated professionalization. Among those involved on the Junimist side were literary critic Titu Maiorescu and poet Mihai Eminescu. Like other contributors to the liberal magazine Revista Contimporană, Urechia was a notorious target of Maiorescu's campaign against "inebriation with words", and ultimately sided with the anti-Junimist author Alexandru Macedonski, becoming a contributor to magazine. The polemics touched on his private life, after claims surfaced that he was secretly leading a polygynous lifestyle.
Name V. A. Urechia was known to his contemporaries by several name variants: his rival Eminescu once described him as having "seven names". Urechia, which the writer added in adult life, is a variant of urechea (Romanian for "the ear"), often transcribed as ureche ("ear"). An occasional rendition of the name, reflecting antiquated versions of the Romanian alphabet, is Urechiă.Martin Banham (ed.), The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p.934. Marcel Cornis-Pope, "The Search for a Modern, Problematizing Historical Consciousness: Romanian Historical Fiction and Family Cycles", in Marcel Cornis-Pope, John Neubauer (eds.), History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, Vol. I, John Benjamins, Amsterdam & Philadelphia, 2004, p.500. Nedelcu Oprea, Vasile Alexandrescu Urechia. Preocupări bibliologice , at the V. A. Urechia Library of Galați; retrieved 2 February 2008 "Vasile Alexandrescu-Urechiă" , entry in Cronologia della letteratura rumena moderna (1780–1914) database , at the University of Florence's Department of Neo-Latin Languages and Literatures; retrieved 9 February 2009
The writer was initially known as Vasile Alexandrescu, the latter being his patronymic, of which his family name, Popovici, was an alternative. Spanish sources occasionally rendered Urechia's first name as Basilio, and his full name was at times Francized as Basil Alexandresco.
Biography
Early life Born in Piatra Neamț, Urechia was the son of Alexandru Popovici, a member of the boyar class in Moldavia and a titular culcer; his mother, Eufrosina (or Euphrosina) née Manoliu. Both had been widowed or divorced from previous marriages, and Vasile had stepsiblings from each parent. After the culcers death, he and three other of Eufrosina's youngest children, all of them below legal age, moved in with their mother, who remarried serdar Fotino. In spring 1848, he was in Iași, where he witnessed the failed rebellion provoked by the Romantic nationalist and liberal current with which he would later affiliate. He debuted in journalism upon the end of the 1840s, when he wrote pieces condemning Transylvanian-born educators for promoting a version of Romanian which overemphasized the language's connection with Latin.
During most of the 1850s, the young Vasile Alexandrescu was in France, spending most of his time in Paris, where he received his Baccalauréat (1856), and trained for a licence ès lettres degree. Urechia frequented exiles from both Danubian Principalities (Moldavia and Wallachia), growing close to the Wallachian politico C. A. Rosetti. Having written his debut literary works, some grouped in 1854 under the title Mozaic de novele, cugetări, piese și poezii ("A Mosaic of Novellas, Musings, Plays and Poetry"), he also completed a debut novel, Coliba Măriucăi ("Măriuca's Cabin", in 1855). The plot was loosely based on Uncle Tom's Cabin, by the American abolitionist writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, and was adapted to the realities of Romani slavery in Moldavia. He was at the time collaborating on Steaua Dunării, a unionist magazine co-edited by the Moldavian intellectuals Mihail Kogălniceanu and Vasile Alecsandri, where he published a Romanian-language translation of Canción a las ruinas de Itálica ("Song to the Ruins of Italica"), a Spanish Renaissance poem written by Rodrigo Caro, but attributed by scholars of the day to Fernando de Rioja.
A believer in Pan-Latinism, he popularized the cause of Romanians through articles published in the Romance-speaking press of France and Spain, and founded Opiniunea, a magazine for Moldo-Wallachian exiles in Paris. During 1856, as the Crimean War brought an end to Imperial Russian administration in the two countries and its Regulamentul Organic regime, the exiles saw an opportunity for action in favor of the union. During the Peace Treaty Conference of that year, Urechia was secretary of a Romanian Bureau which popularized the unionist cause among the participants, and proposed a Romanian state under a foreign ruler, whom Urechia wanted to be of "Latin" origin.
Late 1850s and first ministerial appointment
In August 1857, he married the upper-class Spanish woman Francisca Dominica de Plano, whose father had been the personal physician of Queen regent Isabella II. Eugen Denize, "Călători români în Spania secolului al XIX-lea" , in Tribuna, Nr. 28, November 2003, p.9 The wedding at the Romanian Orthodox Chapel in Paris. He was in Spain from 1857 to 1858 and again in 1862, researching local archives and Spanish education. Francisca introduced her husband to several figures in Spain's cultural and political life: poets Ramón de Campoamor y Campoosorio and Gaspar Núñez de Arce, the future leaders of the First Republic Emilio Castelar y Ripoll and Francisco Pi y Margall, as well as dramatist Manuel Tamayo y Baus. During the following decade, Urechia also traveled to Greece, Switzerland, Italy and the German Empire.
Upon his 1858 return to Moldavia, Urechia was appointed court inspector in Iași County and Romanian language teacher at a gymnasium level. After 1860, he held a Romanian-language and Classical Literature chair at the newly founded University of Iași. His wife Francisca died a young woman, most likely before 1860, and Urechia remarried, to the German amateur musician Luiza "Zettina" Wirth. In 1859–1860, as the political union was being effected under the rule of Alexander John Cuza as Domnitor, V. A. Urechia briefly served as Moldavia's Minister of Religious Affairs in the Kogălniceanu administration. During his term in office, he awarded scholarships to local undergraduates, sending them to complete their education in the universities of France, Spain, Portugal and the Kingdom of Sardinia. Also then, he published the literary criticism volumes Schițări de literatură română ("Sketches of Romanian Literature", 1859) and O vorbă despre literatura desfrînată ce se încearcă a se introduce în societatea română ("A Word on the Profligate Literature that Threatens to Introduce Itself into Romanian Society", 1863).
He was still involved in building connections with France while pursuing his interest in ethnography, and joined the Paris-based Société d'Ethnographie, collaborating closely with its chairman . He also became an active member of the Institut d'Ethnographie and the Heraldry Society of France. Beginning in 1861, he was publishing the Iași-based magazine Atheneul Român. A pro-liberal venue, it was noted for reacting against Urechia's former associate Alecsandri over the latter's conservative views. The Atheneul Român society was the nucleus of a country-wide cultural movement, which Urechia claimed was instrumental in establishing both the Romanian Academy (founded 1866) and the Romanian Athenaeum (founded 1888). Urechia's initiative was inspired by his admiration for the Spanish institution Ateneo de Madrid.
Relocation to Bucharest In November 1864, Urechia moved to unified Romania's capital, Bucharest, having been granted a seat at the local university's Faculty of Letters, but continued to manage a "V. A. Urechia Institute", his private school. He was also employed as Head of Department in the Education Ministry, in which position he helped his future rival, Titu Maiorescu, who was at the time facing allegations of misconduct and pressured to resign from his teaching position. Also then, as a bibliographer and avid book collector, he was among those tasked by Cuza with drafting the common statute of public libraries throughout the country. He was one of the Romanian Academy's original members upon its 1866 foundation as the Academic Society, and subsequently participated in setting up its Library. Urechia served as vice-chairman and general secretary of the Academy for several terms, was president of its Historical Section, and supervised a number of its cultural programs. Dissolved in Iași due to lack of members, the Atheneul Român club was reestablished in the capital during 1865. That year, he published two books: Femeia română, dupre istorie și poesie ("The Romanian Woman in History and Poetry") and Balul mortului ("The Dead Man's Ball").
After Cuza's replacement with Carol I, Urechia successfully ran in the November 1866 election for a Chamber seat in Covurlui County. He was a member of Parliament for the next 34 years, moving from Chamber to the Senate, and pushing legislation to modernize the education system.
Also in 1866, Urechia published an essay of fables, which centered on the work of (or Chichindeal), an early 19th-century poet from Banat. In 1867, he completed work on his best-known literary contribution to local theater, a three-act drama or melodrama inspired by the 17th-century life of Costea Bucioc. The same year and the next, he published Despre elocința română ("On Romanian Eloquence"), Poezia în fața politicei ("Poetry vs. Politics") and Patria română ("The Romanian Motherland"). He was in Spain from spring 1867 to autumn 1868, perfecting his knowledge of Castilian and carrying out an extended research into local archives, being received as corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy (2 April 1868). Together with fellow intellectual and amateur archaeologist Alexandru Odobescu, Urechia represented Romania at the 1869 World Archaeological Congress in Paris. He and Luiza Wirth divorced at some point after 1868.
In parallel, Urechia published several new works of historical fiction, including, in 1872, the drama Episod de sub Alecsandru cel Bun ("An Episode from the Rule of Alexander the Good"). In 1872, he also premiered the one-act comedy Odă la Elisa ("An Ode to Elisa"), which he had written during 1869.
Conflict with Junimea