Urmuz (, pen name of Demetru Dem. Demetrescu-Buzău, also known as Hurmuz or Ciriviș, born Dimitrie Dim. Ionescu-Buzeu; March 17, 1883 – November 23, 1923) was a Romanian writer, lawyer and civil servant, who became a cult hero in Romania's avant-garde scene. His scattered work, consisting of absurdist short prose and poetry, opened a new genre in Romanian letters and humor, and captured the imagination of modernists for several generations. Urmuz's Bizarre (or Weird) Pages were largely independent of European modernism, even though some may have been triggered by Futurism; their valorization of nonsense verse, black comedy, nihilistic tendencies and exploration into the unconscious mind have repeatedly been cited as influential for the development of Dadaism and the Theatre of the Absurd. Individual pieces such as "The Funnel and Stamate", "Ismaïl and Turnavitu", "Algazy & Grummer" or "The Fuchsiad" are parody fragments, dealing with monstrous and shapeshifting creatures in mundane settings, and announcing techniques later taken up by Surrealism.
Urmuz's biography between his high school eccentricity and his public suicide remains largely mysterious, and some of the sympathetic accounts have been described as purposefully deceptive. The abstruse imagery of his work has produced a large corpus of diverging interpretations. He has notably been read as a satirist of public life in the 1910s, an unlikely conservative and nostalgic, or an emotionally distant esotericist.
In Urmuz's lifetime, his stories were only acted out by his thespian friend George Ciprian and published as samples by Cuget Românesc newspaper, with support from modernist writer Tudor Arghezi. Ciprian and Arghezi were together responsible for creating the link between Urmuz and the emerging avant-garde, their activity as Urmuz promoters being later enhanced by such figures as Ion Vinea, Geo Bogza, Lucian Boz, Sașa Pană and Eugène Ionesco. Beginning in the late 1930s, Urmuz also became the focus interest for the elite critics, who either welcomed him into 20th-century literature or dismissed him as a buffoonish impostor. By then, his activity also inspired an eponymous avant-garde magazine edited by Bogza, as well as Ciprian's drama The Drake's Head.
Name Urmuz's birth name was, in full, Dimitrie Dim. Ionescu-Buzeu (or Buzău), changed to Dimitrie Dim. Dumitrescu-Buzeu when he was still a child, and later settled as Demetru Dem. Demetrescu-Buzău. Radu Cernătescu, "Noi argumente pentru redeschiderea "cazului Urmuz' " , in România Literară, Nr. 27/2010Sandqvist, p.221 The Demetrescu surname was in effect a Romanian patronymic, using the -escu suffix: his father was known as Dimitrie (Demetru, Dumitru) Ionescu-Buzău.Deligiorgis edition, p.5Nicolae Moisescu, "Primarii orașului Curtea de Argeș între anii 1877–2009 și realizările lor pe timpul mandatului", in Muzeul Municipal Curtea de Argeș. Studii și Comunicări, Vol. V, 2013, p.139 The attached particle Buzău, originally Buzeu, confirms that the family traced its roots to the eponymous town.Vasile Andru, "Urmuz – A Great Innovator in Spite of Himself (Urmuz and Anti-Literature as Hyper-Life)", in Plural Magazine, Nr. 19/2003 According to George Ciprian, the names Ciriviș (variation of cerviș, Romanian for "melted grease") and Mitică (pet form of Dumitru) were coined while the writer was still in school, whereas Urmuz came "later".Ciprian, p.40
The name under which the writer is universally known did not actually originate from his own wishes, but was selected and imposed on the public by Arghezi, only one year before Urmuz committed suicide.Cernat, Avangarda, p.340; Deligiorgis edition, p.5; Sandqvist, p.221 Vasile Iancu, "Avangardiștii de ieri și de azi" , in Convorbiri Literare, May 2005 Geo Șerban, "Cursă de urmărire, cu suspans, prin intersecțiile avangărzii la români", in Lettre Internationale Romanian edition, Nr. 58, Summer 2006 Gabriela Ursachi, "Martie" , in România Literară, Nr. 12/2003 The spelling Hurmuz, when used in reference to the writer, was popular in the 1920s, but has since been described as erroneous. The variant Ormuz, sometimes rendered as Urmuz, was also used as a pen name by the activist and novelist A. L. Zissu. , in Realitatea Evreiască, Nr. 237 (1037), September 2005, p.9; Liviu Rotman (ed.), Demnitate în vremuri de restriște, Editura Hasefer, Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania & Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania, Bucharest, 2008, p.175.
The word [h]urmuz, explained by linguists as a curious addition to the Romanian lexis, C. Lacea, "Curiozități semantice", in Transilvania, Nr. 10-12/1914, p.469 (digitized by the Babeș-Bolyai University Transsylvanica Online Library) generally means "glass bead", "precious stone" or "snowberry". It has entered the language through oriental channels, and these meanings ultimately refer to the international trade in beads centered on Hormuz Island, Iran. Anthropologist and essayist Vasile Andru highlights a secondary, scatological, meaning: in the Romani language, a source of Romanian slang, urmuz, "bead", has mutated to mean "feces". An alternative etymology, exclusive to the author's pseudonym, was advanced by writer and scholar Ioana Pârvulescu. It suggests the combination of two contradictory terms: ursuz ("surly") and amuz ("I amuse").
Biography
Childhood Mitică was the eldest son of a middle class nuclear family: his father, described by Ciprian as "short and mean" (om scund și ciufut),Ciprian, p.40. According to Sandqvist (p.224), the man was "extremely authoritarian". was the director of Curtea de Argeș Hospital in the 1890s. In his spare time, Ionescu-Buzeu Sr. was also a classical scholar, folklorist and active Freemason. His wife, the writer's mother, was Eliza née Pașcani, sister of the doctor, chemist and University of Paris professor Cristien Pascani.Sandqvist, p.224 Urmuz had numerous other siblings ("a multitude", according to Ciprian), of whom most were daughters. One of Urmuz's sisters, Eliza (married Vorvoreanu) was later a main source of information on the author's childhood and adolescence.Blaga, p.324, 326; Cernat, Avangarda, p.91–92, 339–340, 352
The future Urmuz was born in the northern Muntenian town of Curtea de Argeș, and, at age five, spent one year in Paris with his parents.Călinescu, p.888; Deligiorgis edition, p.5 The family eventually settled in Romania's capital, Bucharest, where his father was hygiene teacher at Matei Basarab National College, later city health inspector, and rented houses in Antim Monastery quarter. Young Mitică was described by his sister as mainly unpretentious and introverted, fascinated by scientific discovery and, in his childhood years, a passionate reader of Jules Verne's science fiction books.Cernat, Avangarda, p.340; Sandqvist, p.224–225 At a later stage, he was also possibly familiarized with and influenced by German idealism and by the philosophical views of 19th-century poet Mihai Eminescu.Cernat, Avangarda, p.340 Paul Cernat, "Urmuz: un conservator eretic?", in Observator Cultural, Nr. 193, November 2003 A more evident influence on the future writer was Ion Luca Caragiale, the main figure in early 20th-century Romanian comic theatre.Cernat, Avangarda, p.340; Sandqvist, p.209 "Anchetă. I. L. Caragiale – azi", in Convorbiri Literare, February 2002Ioana Pârvulescu, Lumea ca ziar. A patra putere: Caragiale, Humanitas, Bucharest, 2011, p.87.
Ionescu-Buzău's family had artistic interests, and Urmuz grew up with a fascination for classical music and fine art, learning to play the piano and taking up amateur oil painting.Cernat, Avangarda, p.340, 341; Ciprian, p.40–42 He got along best with his mother, who was also a pianist. The devout daughter of an Orthodox priest, she was unable to instill in her young son the same respect for the Church.
Urmuz's arrival to literary history took place in the atmosphere of Bucharest gymnasia. It was at this junction that he became a mate of Ciprian, who later described their encounter as momentous: "I don't much believe in destiny. [...] Yet I find it such an odd incident that my bench mate, from my failing grade year through to my high school graduation, was [...] this tiny man of a rare originality, who had a massive say on how my life would turn up." Ciprian describes what follows as his own "initiation in artistic matters": he recalls conversations with "Ciriviș" where they debated the "perfection" of Ancient Greek sculpture, and mentions that young Urmuz, unlike himself, regarded theater as a "minor art".Ciprian, p.40–42 Instead, Urmuz preferred to attend concerts at the Romanian Atheneum, and, Ciprian writes, had an advanced understanding of absolute music even at age thirteen.Ciprian, p.42 Reportedly, the young man was also in the attendance at lectures given by Titu Maiorescu, a philosopher and aesthete who had influenced both Eminescu and Caragiale.
Pahuci brotherhood
Some years later, while enrolled at the Gheorghe Lazăr National College, Urmuz turned his interest toward mocking the severity of his teachers and challenging the dominance of artistic traditionalism. One such early episode is attested by Ciprian: amused by the creation of a Vivat Dacia ("Long Live Dacia") association of nationalist students, Urmuz subverted its meetings, and, with deadpan snark, suggested that membership fees should be paid in duck heads.Ciprian, p.47–49 Also according to Ciprian, these events soon lost their shock value, leading him and Urmuz to "take to the streets", where they began their activity as pranksters. Their initial experiment was to pressure law-abiding and credulous passers-by into presenting their identity papers for inspection, and the apparent success earned Urmuz an unexpected following in school (his fans even heckled Vivat Dacia into accepting poultry heads as means of payment, before the society dissolved itself with ceremony).Ciprian, p.49 Another colleague, future traditionalist poet Vasile Voiculescu, recalled young Urmuz as "genially knavish", his humor being "cerebral, harder to detect and appreciate".Cernat, Avangarda, p.344
The core group of Urmuzian disciples, organized as a secret society, comprised Ciprian (nicknamed "Macferlan" by Urmuz), Alexandru "Bălălău" Bujoreanu and Costică "Pentagon" Grigorescu, together known as the pahuci. Allegedly, the obscure word originated from the Hebrew for "yawns". Their activity centered on daring pranks: Urmuz and the other three young men once made an impromptu visit to the isolated Căldărușani Monastery, in Ilfov County, where the deposed and disgraced Metropolitan Ghenadie was living in banishment. Passing themselves off as newspaper editors, they demanded (and received) honored guest treatment, tested the monks' patience, and were later introduced to a well-disposed Ghenadie.Ciprian, p.50–57 Ciprian also recalls that Urmuz's philosophical musings or deadpan surreal humor were a direct inspiration for other pranks and experiments. He describes how Ciriviș acted out sadness for the plight of a screechy sledge (declaring "my heart is at one with all things in existence"), but then duped onlookers into believing that the squeaks came from a woman somehow trapped under the vehicle.Ciprian, p.59–60 Reportedly, Urmuz also approached his seniors training at seminaries or other traditionalist institutions, earned their attention by claiming to share the nationalist agenda, and then began reciting them nonsense lyrics such as an evolving draft of his mock-fable "The Chroniclers".Ciprian, p.61–62
Outside school, the young man was still introverted, and, Sandqvist notes, "extremely shy, especially with girls."Sandqvist, p.225 Ciprian recalls Ciriviș's engrossing pick-up lines: he acted familiar to any young woman who caught his eye, assuring her that they had met once before, and, having stirred her curiosity, falsely recounting how they both used to kill flesh-flies for sport.Ciprian, p.63–64