Dumitru Theodor Neculuță (also known as Neculiță and Dumitru a Ciubotăriții; – October 17, 1904) was a Romanian poet, socialist activist, and artisan shoemaker. Born to a poor family in Western Moldavia, he was not allowed to pursue his passion for music, and worked from an early age. These circumstances instilled him with a desire to combat the established social order of the Romanian Kingdom, driving him into left-wing politics. His interest in music was replaced with a poetic calling: stylistically, Neculuță followed a tradition upheld by Mihai Eminescu and George Coșbuc, which he infused with the tenets of Marxism and his own experience of acute poverty. He wrote for many decades, but was only published from 1894. In parallel, he established his profile as a "poet-activist" for the Social Democratic Workers' Party and its more radically progressive faction, spending his final years as a co-chair of the România Muncitoare in Bucharest.
After his unexpected death at age 45, Neculuță enjoyed a cult following in socialist culture in both the Romanian Kingdom and neighboring Austria-Hungary. He had shared inspiration and themes with George Bacovia, and was a direct influence on Mihail Cruceanu and Cristian Sârbu. During the interwar, he was celebrated by the legal Social Democrats and Socialist Laborites, as well as by the underground Romanian Communist Party; his cultivation sometimes drew suspicion from Romania's right-wing governments. Public gatherings were held at his commemoration date in October, including one in 1924, which ended with a roundup by Romanian Police.
Socialist circles upheld Neculuță as a forerunner of "proletarian literature", but he was largely regarded as a minor author in more official contexts. This contrast was overturned in the late 1930s, when Neculuță was openly celebrated by the National Renaissance Front; it was also resumed in full after 1948, when the communist regime took over, making Neculuță a posthumous member of the Romanian Academy. The move, as well as his inclusion in literary textbooks, were contested by various regime critics, who regarded them as incoherent or distasteful. The regime itself scaled down such promotion from the 1960s, returning Neculuță to a more modest position in its literary pantheon. The literary community remains divided between those who regard Neculuță as a genuine poet, who was overvalued for political reasons, and those who dismiss him as mediocre and argue that his reputation was entirely fabricated.
Biography Beginnings As noted by philologist Katalin Kese, Neculuță was born shortly after the 1859 unification between Moldavia and Wallachia.Kese, p. 229 A native of Târgu Frumos in Moldavia, his parents were Toader Neculuță and Zamfira a Ciubotăriții. Some sources suggest that they were both poor peasants,"Informații. Comemorarea poetului socialist Neculuță", in Tribuna, Issue 217/1911, p. 7Aurel Sasu (ed.), Dicționarul biografic al literaturii române, Vol. II, p. 193. Pitești: Editura Paralela 45, 2004. G. Spina, "Dumitru Neculuță", in Opinia, October 10, 1924, p. 1Kese, p. 229; Kiss, p. 4 though, according to biographer Mihu Dragomir, this is an erroneous information originating with Neculuță's confidant, Alecu Constantinescu, who misunderstood references to his friend's more distant rural background.Mihu Dragomir, "La centenarul lui D. Th. Neculuță. Contribuții", in Gazeta Literară, Vol. VI, Issue 41, October 1959, p. 6 Records of the period show that Toader was in fact a shoemaker.Deșliu, p. 59 A similar confusion surrounds the issue of Dumitru's original surname, with some sources noting that he was first registered with his matronymic, a Ciubotăriții or Aciubotăriții, literally "of the cobbler's wife".Rodica Lăzărescu, "Două puncte de vedere", in Vatra Veche, Vol. X, Issue 7, July 2018, p. 21; Augustin Z. N. Pop, Pe urmele lui Mihai Eminescu, p. 16. Bucharest: Editura Sport-Turism, 1978 Essayist Florentin Popescu suggests that "Neculuță" can be viewed as a pen name, favored over "a Ciubotăriții" for stylistic reasons. Popescu also notes that this choice was unusual, since his original surname "made it blatantly clear that he had a very 'healthy' [proletarian] origin".Florentin Popescu, "Am citit despre... Pseudonime liteae și nu numai", in Sud. Revistă Editată de Asociația pentru Cultură și Tradiție Istorică Bolintineanu, Issues 5–6/2018, p. 2 Dragomir, who originally credited this claim, withdrew it in 1959, upon discovering that the poet was in fact known from birth as either Neculuță or Neculiță.
During his earliest years with his father in Târgu Frumos, Dumitru probably picked up a hostility toward organized religion. This was argued by Dragomir, who recounts that Toader Neculuță made a point of not going to confession in his local Orthodox church after 1864: "If we note that back then D. Neculuță was a five-year-old, we can easily conclude that, in his parental home, the child had not been pressured into respecting bourgeois institutions." The boy was passionate about music and had hopes of becoming a violinist; the circumstances of his birth made it impossible that he would afford tuition,Deșliu, p. 59; Kiss, p. 4 and instead he was pushed to earn a living from age ten, working as a shoemaker's apprentice. His formal education was limited to two grades of primary school. His father dead, and raised by his mother in "great poverty", he ran away to seek his fortune in the former Moldavian capital, Iași.Kiss, p. 4 Journalist G. Spina also notes that Neculuță spent time wandering through the Eastern Carpathians, and also that he was for a while a tutor, "paid by the hour", for schoolchildren in Iași's slums. He was working in Iași around the time when Romanian poetry was being revolutionized by Eminescu; Neculuță's first-ever works were pastiches from Eminescu, with similar borrowings from Romanian folklore.Deșliu, pp. 59–60
Neculuță was drawn into radical politics from an early age—at some point, he confessed to Constantinescu that "I was born a revolutionary; I feel within me the hatred of so many generations of proletarians". Proudly self-taught, he was familiarized with the work of Karl Marx, but also kept up with non-political literature. Uninterested in the Symbolist movement, he read from Eminescu and the classics of poetry—including Homer, Virgil, and William Shakespeare; he also knew the prose of realists such as Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola.Deșliu, p. 60 His friend A. Costin recalled in 1905 that Neculuță would spend his Christmas savings on books and plain bread, mocking party-goers; Neculuță also reportedly complained whenever he had to sell parts of his personal library, noting that "everything in today's society goes against men who seek to enlighten themselves!"Deșliu, pp. 60–61 He made his debut in print in 1894, when Icoana Vremii magazine took up some of his writings, which he signed as "D. Niculescu".
As Deșliu notes, the poet most of all feared living in an unheated room; this theme permeates his verse, wherein the chimney flame "celebrated as if a loved and longed-for human being". His works were generally inspired by Eminescu and George Coșbuc, but, as communist poet Dan Deșliu writes, they also had distinct echoes from left-liberal and socialist poets—Cezar Bolliac, Dimitrie Bolintineanu, Traian Demetrescu, and Alexandru Vlahuță.Deșliu, pp. 62–63 As noted in the 2004 biographical dictionary of Romanian writers, they reach at least the average quality of contemporary verses, and along with discussing then-current themes (suffering brought about by love, melancholy, vibrations before nature), they bring new elements such as comradeship with those who suffer and an urging toward revolution and belief in the future. His more contemplative poems describe the conflict between the quiet beauty of rural landscapes and the inner turmoil of proletarians who witness them.Deșliu, pp. 65–66
Neculuță was impressed with the plight of all lower strata, producing some poems specifically about the sufferings of peasants or the Romani underclass. However, he remains primarily important for his ability to convey industrial strife. While acknowledging the "gaucherie" of various such compositions, Deșliu highlights their overall primordialism in a Marxist setting: "Before Neculuță's time—and even for a long time after him—the most gifted poets of social rebellion worked with vague terms, with generalized and imprecise notions: people, justice, liberty, truth etc. The grounded, class-based position, only makes its first appearance in verse by D. Th. Neculuță".Deșliu, pp. 63–64 Hungarian Romanian poet Jenő Kiss, who translated some of Neculuță's poems, highlights the same notion: "the great majority of Romanian progressive poets had generally talked about the sufferings of 'the people', but by the people they mainly meant the poor peasantry. Others often said proletariat, but meant Lumpenproletariat. In Neculuță's poems, the voices of class-conscious urban and industrial workers are unmistakably heard. [...] [He] condenses the tragedy of proletarians selling their labor power into the mood of those waiting for a job opportunity in front of the factory. Despite this, there is no trace of romantic anti-capitalism in his poetry. The factory and the machine are not enemies of Neculuță and his colleagues. Work and the workplace are 'sacred', the machine is a diligent friend."Kiss, p. 5 Kiss further describes Neculuță as stylistically accomplished: "the most difficult and demanding verse forms, primarily the sonnet, but also other, complicated stanza formulas, right up to the tune of folk songs. With verse forms that required [my] full mastery of the language, selective and abundant rhyme here and there, flawless rhythm, brevity, thoughtfulness."
Later life Moving to Bucharest, the national capital, "toward the turn of the century", Neculuță joined the newly formed Social Democratic Workers' Party of Romania (PSDMR), becoming its "poet-activist". Journalist Leontin Iliescu, who met him upon his arrival, recalls that Neculuță only had 4 lei on him, all of which he spent on a ticket to see Jan Kubelík play; that night, he bunked with a friend, the sculptor Filip Marin.Leontin Iliescu, "Carnetul nostru. Amintiri despre poetul proletarilor: Th. D. Neculuță", in Universul, June 2, 1947, p. 1 He tried again to change profession by applying for the Music Conservatory. According to Kiss, he was simply rejected; Spina, however, notes that he was "for a short while, a Conservatory student." After this failure, he "lived the life of a poor shoemaker in Bucharest, working ten to fourteen hours a day in the shop. Neculuță's most precious hours are spent in this aimless prison-like work. with no perspectives." Such conditions undermined his family life: he was married to a Bucharest woman, but divorced her after six years, thereafter dedicating himself entirely to political work, "one of the most educated and consistent fighters of the Romanian proletariat."