Lucian Raicu (pen name of Bernard Leibovici; 12 May 1934 – 22 November 2006) was a Romanian literary critic, biographer, memoirist, and magazine editor, who was the brother of novelist Virgil Duda and the husband of writer Sonia Larian. As a Jewish youth growing up in Bârlad, he was drawn into leftist causes shortly after World War II, and was accepted into the Romanian Communist Party. Upon the inauguration of a communist regime in 1948, he trained at the Eminescu School of Literature in Bucharest, and, before the age of twenty, was drafted into the new cultural establishment. As a staff critic at Viața Romînească, he initially pledged himself to Socialist Realism, and supervised the literary scene for ideological conformity, falling in line with the censorship apparatus. More privately, Raicu was embracing dissident stances and questioning the standards of Marxist literary criticism; alongside friends such as Nicolae Labiș and Paul Goma, he began reading banned works by Romanian and French authors. His professionalization was effected in 1958, upon his graduation from the University of Bucharest.
Encouraged by the promise of de-Stalinization in the late 1950s, Raicu was openly challenging the communist literary establishment with articles which spoke about the primacy of aesthetic over political values. Alongside Goma, Labiș and Larian, he participated in the 1956 youth protest movement, though Securitate agents never managed to implicate him directly, and had to rely on suspicions. He and his wife were still caught up in the backlash, and left unemployed after Raicu refused to perform self-criticism. They were partly rehabilitated in the 1960s, but were by then on their way to becoming fully anti-communist. As a columnist at România Literară, Raicu embraced a "phenomenological" overview which cultivated pluralism, close reading, and a full-on rejection of formalism. He was widely celebrated in the literary community, especially after publishing highly original monographs on Liviu Rebreanu (1967), Nikolai Gogol (1974) and Labiș (1977), being seen as a companion of younger liberal critics—such as Mircea Iorgulescu, Nicolae Manolescu, and Eugen Simion. Raicu also came into implicit, and then explicit, conflict with the official strictures imposed by national-communism, rejecting its "July Theses". He was a first-hand witness to the death of his novelist friend, Marin Preda; this mysterious incident, alongside other poorly-explained deaths in his personal circle, and a general disgust with the national-communist regime, eventually forced him into near-complete isolation and silence.
After a series of efforts, the Raicus were finally reissued Romanian passports in late 1986, allowing them to receive a scholarship in Paris; they never returned from their trip. Lucian Raicu tried to rebuild his career as a critic in France, but was largely ignored by its literary establishment—excepting an encouraging review by Michel Crépu. Focusing his attention on Eugène Ionesco, who became the main topic of his literary diary, he was also a participant in the anti-communist movement of exiles, alongside Goma and Dorin Tudoran. He welcomed the Romanian Revolution in December 1989, but was again jaded after the political violence of June 1990, which cemented his resolve about not returning to his homeland. Making selective broadcasts over Radio France Internationale, and penning a number of memoirs, he spent his final decade incapacitated by disease, and became fully isolated in his Parisian home. He ultimately died anonymously in a French hospital, being survived by his widow and his brother (the latter of whom had settled in Israel).
Early life The future Lucian Raicu was officially registered as Bernard Leibovici.Călinescu & Vianu, p. 346Brandea, p. 15Nicolae Breban, "Modele. Lucian Raicu", in Contemporanul, Vol. XXI, Issue 3, March 2010, p. 3Cistelecan, p. 477Ion N. Oprea, "Călătorul profund în librăriile Iașului. La sărbătorirea lui Alexandru Mălin Tacu", in Monitorul, 22 May 1993, p. 5 His parents were entrepreneur Carol Leibovici and his wife Uca (née Solomon), who worked as a clerk.Ciocârlie, p. 506; Cistelecan, p. 477 Bernard was born in his grandparents' home at Iași, on 12 May 1934; as he explained in a 1975 interview, Uca only traveled there for her labor, returning with him to her preferred home in Bârlad after just three weeks."Note bio-bibliografice", in România Literară, Issue 26/1993, p. 7 His 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;Leon Volovici, "Cartea. Lucian Raicu — 60", in Minimum, Vol. VIII, Issue 86, May 1994, p. 46 his brother, the novelist Duda (born Rubin Leibovici), was similarly attached to the Jewish identity, as discussed by his book of essays on Mihail Sebastian.Tudorel Urian, "Cronica literară. Revelații în lumea nouă/veche", in România Literară, Issue 29/2005, p. 5 The two boys grew up on Strada Strâmbă area of Bârlad, with their parents owning a house on the adjacent Stroe Belloescu Street. Their Jewish day school colleagues included several noted intellectuals: journalist I. Schechter (or "Igor Șerbu"), engineer Sergiu Brandea, and playwright Dumitru Solomon.Brandea, passim According his own recollections of childhood, Bernard was fascinated by Mark Twain's Prince and Pauper. Its themes of "substitution" and hints about the transformations of one's image became major themes in his work as a critic.Dan Cristea, "Despre critică", in Luceafărul, Vol. XXVIII, Issue 20, May 1984, p. 7
Comparatist and novelist Matei Călinescu recalls that "Bernard [...] was my first Jewish friend and the first one to have made me aware of how difficult it is to have been a Romanian Jew [...]. Bernard did not view his being a Romanian—or his being Jewish—as a miracle, just as I am sure that he did not regard being Romanian—or Jewish—as some metaphysical curse".Călinescu & Vianu, p. 352 According to Călinescu, this attitude showed a rift that existed between Raicu's take on his own identity and the struggles of his contemporary, the Christianized Jew Nicolae Steinhardt.Călinescu & Vianu, pp. 352–353 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]." The family managed to live through World War II and its waves of antisemitic persecution. As reported by Duda, Carol Leibovici was made to do forced labor in the quarries, and was so exhausted that he died soon after the war; Rubin and Bernard's maternal uncle barely managed to survive the Iași pogrom and its "death train"."Noi. Prezențe, prezențe...: Dialog electronic Volovici–Duda", in Minimum, Vol. XX, Issue 231, June 2006, p. 26
Young Raicu integrated with the local version of the Jewish left, increasingly associated with the Communist Party after 1944. As noted by literary historian Leon Volovici, both he 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. In tandem, Raicu was also an aspiring author: he and Solomon attended a literary society in Bârlad, which was named after Alexandru Vlahuță;I. C. Negru, "Cultura și viața. Tradiții ale cercurilor literare și publicisticii bîrlădene", in Vremea Nouă, 16 April 1969, p. 2 according to Brandea, Raicu also won first prize at a national competition in literature, for which he traveled to Bucharest.Brandea, p. 16 His literary debut can be traced to 1950, when he attended in Iași a meeting of young Moldavian writers, also attended by poet Nicolae Labiș, who greatly impressed him. Later, the two of them were also competitors in the "all-republic contest in Romanian language and literature", which Labiș won by submitting a paper on Romanian folklore that actually included his own improvised verse, made to sound folksy.Ovidiu Ghidirmic, "Documente. Moartea unui poet?", in Ramuri, Vol. X, Issue 1, January 1973, p. 13 During their several trips to Iași, they befriended the more senior poet and critic George Mărgărit. As Raicu noted later, it was Mărgărit who introduced them to "cultural values", which were "hastily neglected" by the communist establishment (through this channel, Labiș got to know the works of Arthur Rimbaud).Constantin Coroiu, "Lecturi. Labiș, poetul pururi tânăr", in Contemporanul, Vol. XXVI, Issue 10, October 2015, p. 7 The two boys also traveled together into Labiș's pastoral homeland in Suceava Region, with mention of this being made in one of Labiș's poems:
Having graduated from Bârlad's Gheorghe Roșca Codreanu High School (where he was colleagues with Solomon and with other future writers, including Ion Hobana), Raicu enlisted at the University of Bucharest Faculty of Philology in 1951.Cistelecan, p. 477. See also Ciocârlie, p. 506 He only spent a year there, transferring to the newly formed Eminescu School of Literature, which served the Writers' Union of Romania (USR). The institution is seen by his future friend Nicolae Breban as a "rather grotesque and amateurish cultural and Soviet nursery"; also according to Breban, during his time there he became especially close to Labiș, forming the "greatest friendship of [Raicu's] entire life". Raicu wrote for the Union of Communist Youth paper, Scînteia Tineretului, where he and Labiș were permanent literary columnists.Radu Cosașu, "Arhiva sentimentală a Scînteii tineretului. Idilic sau nu...", in Almanah Scînteia Tineretului, 1980, p. 52 During this stint there, his circle of friends expanded to include Radu Cosașu, Teodor Mazilu, Eugen Mandric, and Florin Mugur. He and Duda brought Mazilu into their home on Uranus Hill, where they were bunking with Labiș, Mărgărit and Ion Gheorghe.Teodor Mazilu, "Emoționante amintiri", in Almanah Flacăra, 1976, p. 34 Raicu became a literary columnist at Viața Romînească in 1952, before his graduation from the School of Literature (which came in 1954); he was also editor at Gazeta Literară.
At that stage, Raicu was giving his 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.Selejan, p. 7 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.Selejan, pp. 44–45, 258 Raicu was instead enthusiastic about the poetic debut of the still teen-aged Mugur, describing him as a model to followSelejan, pp. 287–288 (though still occasionally chiding him for not writing fables about work-shy peasants).Mihăilescu, p. 201 In mid-1955, he took the side of "scientific" literary criticism, which relied on objectivity as an obligation. From this position, he debated with his colleague Vera Călin, whose version of Marxism was more programmatically subjectivist.C. Demetriad, "Teorie și critică. Obiectivitatea și preferințele criticului", in Iașul Literar, Issue 10/1955, pp. 107–114