Teodor Mazilu, also known as Theodor or Tudor Mazilu (11 August 1930 – 18 October 1980), was a Romanian writer, editor, cartoonist, and occasional actor. He was from a working-class background, born on what was then a marginal area of Bucharest. Already a writer in his childhood, he documented his experience of poverty and strife, growing up as World War II was raging. With the growing influence exercised by the Romanian Communist Party in the late 1940s, Mazilu wrote proletarian literature. He was embraced by the staff of Tinerețea magazine, which published his first sketch stories. Shortly before the communist regime had been fully established, he was on the perennial staff of , where he remained until 1956. Neglecting his schooling and opting for a bohemian life, Mazilu only received a political education, culminating in his acceptance by the Eminescu School of Literature. His initial work was explicitly in agitprop, but he began modifying the contents of his reportage pieces to feature subtle mockery of the party directives, particularly when it came to the cultivation of socialist realism.
Mazilu's satire became mordant, and evidenced his interest in exposing imposture and idiocy across all strata of society; this made him clash with communist censors, who found his approach unnervingly irregular. His autobiographical novel of 1959, Bariera, belonged to a late wave in socialist-realistic prose, but carried enough satirical hints to cause a wide-reaching controversy. Encouraged by director Lucian Pintilie, Mazilu moved on to writing for the stage in the early 1960s. His debut comedy play, , caused a scandal and was banned as immoral—following a direct intervention by party eminence Nicolae Ceaușescu. In 1965–1969, at a time of relative liberalization inaugurated by Ceaușescu's takeover of the party, Mazilu was still unsure of his status: allowed to publish sporadically, invited to limit himself to sports journalism, he did not have any plays produced for almost a decade. When he later returned to favor, it was with a long succession of volumes, including all his new plays. Though sometimes vastly different in his stylistic choices, Ion Băieșu was his generational companion and a defender of his work; their names were often cited together as illustrating the better aspects of comedic writing in late-communist Romania.
Mazilu's final decade was marked by a diversification of activities, including his authorship of two screenplays and a teleplay, a cameo in , and a star appearance in his own documentary film. He took more distance from communist themes, and emerged with new poems, essays, a philosophical novel, a Bildungsroman, all outlining his "Cartesian" approach to existential issues. He earned critical attention for all these works, as well as for a change in his storytelling—with sketches, sometimes absurdist, that became more lenient toward the human condition, and with more ample works that overturn the convention of romance novels. His plays, including the widely acclaimed , were taken up by directors and troupes who had decided to confront censorship; terminally ill with gastrointestinal cancer, Mazilu only lived through the early stages of this phenomenon. He left a checkered legacy, being either held up as a great Romanian humorist, in line with Ion Luca Caragiale and Tudor Arghezi, or contrarily defined around his political compromises and the uneven value of his writing.
Biography Childhood and debut Mazilu was born in Bucharest, capital of the Romanian Kingdom, on 11 August 1930; his parents were Tudor, a worker for the city transport company, and Maria née Mureșanu.Balinte, p. 235 Teodor, their fourth child,Ștefănescu, p. 4 grew up in Lupeasca mahala, within Rahova, where the family moved shortly after his birth. They lived there at No 21 Plivitului Street.Constantin Răsvan, "Teodor Mazilu", in Astra, Vol. XX, Issue 11, November 1985, p. 8 He attended primary school No 39, on the edge of Ferentari. A neighbor and classmate, Constantin Răsvan, recalled being impressed by Mazilu's talent for drawing, also noting that he would read philosophical literature at night, and play street football by day. He was already writing stories and small plays at ages ten–thirteen, using Răsvan as one of his actors, and advertising his shows with posters plastered across Lupeasca. While walking about Cotroceni in 1941, he encountered the aging, high-born novelist Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, who owned a villa in that quarter. During their talks, he confessed to her that he wanted to be a poet. She tried to dissuade him from making this choice, advising him to "become a doctor, an engineer, an aviator", and only take up literature as a hobby.Teodor Mazilu, "Emoționante amintiri", in Almanah Flacăra, 1976, p. 34Ioan & Mazilu, p. 4
As detailed by his own autobiographical novel, Bariera ("The Barrier"), Mazilu had a hard time growing up, especially during World War II and Ion Antonescu's dictatorship. His initial poverty was aggravated by wartime shortages, by the absence of reliable bread-earners (who were drafted for service on the Eastern Front), as well as by waves of carpet-bombing.Balinte, p. 238 He once retreated to his grandparents' home in the countryside, and always had fond memories of the evenings he spent there, alongside his cousins, gazing at the night sky.Eugenia Vodă, "În priză directă... Simpozion Teodor Mazilu. Un singur scenariu", in Cinema, Vol. XX, Issue 12, December 1982, p. 23 He was again in Bucharest during the anti-fascist coup of August 1944, personally witnessing skirmishes between Romanian paramilitary formations and the Wehrmacht.Teșu Milcoveanu, "Ce ați pregătit pentru 23 August? Primul roman", in Flacăra, Vol. VIII, Issue 33, August 1959, p. 16
Young Mazilu found employment immediately after these events—he was a cartoonist, sports chronicler, and eventually humorist at Tinerețea magazine (it was here that he published his first sketch stories). He also did cartoons for the rival Pițigoiul, but, as he recalled in 1980, could not resist "staunch competition" by its staff artists, Constantin Calafeteanu and Ion Popescu-Gopo. He did not wish to continue his studies, but finally enlisted at the Commercial High School in 1946. He dropped out the following year, when he joined the editorial staff of , founded as an organ of the Union of Communist Youth.Balinte, p. 235. See also Ioan & Mazilu, p. 4; Ștefănescu, p. 4 According to Răsvan, he may well have been "the only editor to still wear short pants". Mazilu's first samples of lyrical poetry were printed in 1946 by Marvan, described by scholar Alex. Ștefănescu as "an improvised publishing house". Called ("Miniature Universe"), they were advertised as featuring reproductions by Frans Masereel and others, but these were never actually printed. Răsvan, who read the 24 works contained therein, describes them as having "extraordinary feeling", and as detailing the experiences of war; Marvan advertised them as having "a touch of Vladimir Mayakovsky's tempestuous verb".
In 1948, the kingdom was officially replaced by a communized republic, with Marxism-Leninism as its official ideology. A more ideological lyrical composition by Mazilu appeared in Flacăra of 1949, eulogizing the 2nd World Festival of Youth and Students. He continued to write without formally completing his education. As observed by literary historian and critic Eugen Negrici, much of Mazilu's later prose is somewhat anti-intellectual, maintaining a "cult of simplicity" and reserving particular contempt for "talkative smatterers".Negrici, p. 232 He himself finally completed high school in a non-attendance program, and enlisted, in a similar regimen, at the Workers' University, later moving on to the Romanian Communist Party's Eminescu School of Literature. Novelist and period witness Nicolae Breban sees Mazilu, alongside his colleagues Nicolae Labiș and Lucian Raicu, as having ultimately emancipated themselves from the latter's institution's "anti-national intoxications", emerging thereafter as writers of genuine interest.Nicolae Breban, "Modele. Lucian Raicu", in Contemporanul, Vol. XXI, Issue 3, March 2010, p. 3 For a while, Mazilu lived in the same house as Raicu and Labiș, located near Uranus Hill. As he recalled this "divine youthful bedlam" was also briefly shared with three other future literary figures of note, including George Mărgărit and Ion Gheorghe. He had a bohemian lifestyle, with no source of income other than writing and editorial work, and was not seen as reliable by his superiors at —though he was maintained there until 1956. His own intellectual development as a "self-taught" writer remains somewhat mysterious, with Ștefănescu arguing that "he wrote and read by some logic that we can't begin to reconstruct."
Developing a style
According to Breban, Mazilu always gave others the impression that he had genius, "well hidden beneath a jeering, acidly ironic shell". His debut volume, ("Pocket Insectarium"), saw print in 1956, followed a year later by Galeria palavragiilor ("A Gallery of Windbags"). Both are dismissed by Negrici as mere samples of socialist realism—and as showing his best and worse traits as "the author of satirical portraits, carried by only minimal storytelling and excessive commentary." Negrici sees this literature as rooted in Tudor Arghezi's work as a lampoonist, to which Mazilu added "elements of sharp-witted character-sketching", inspired by English literature. The same author notes however that the early Mazilu was already "upsetting the standard categories of socialist-realism", allowing "absurdity, unpredictability and the spiritual abyss" to reclaim their place in the narrative.Negrici, p. 233 The same had been noted earlier by scholar Mircea Zaciu who sees Mazilu, Fănuș Neagu, Dumitru Radu Popescu, and Sorin Titel as a "new generation", who challenged the "cultural terror of dogmatism" by pushing depictions of marginals into the literary canon.Mircea Zaciu, "Proza unui deceniu", in Viața Românească, Vol. XXXIV, Issue 3, March 1981, p. 35
As Ștefănescu reports, the inherent nonconformities did not go unobserved by the agitprop apparatus that was overseeing Mazilu, which had expected him to continue writing "by the quota". He therefore had "countless conflicts" with the communist censors—which were mostly unknown to his readers, but which he tackled by pushing through text after text, faster and more obstinately than the censors could deal with, "responding to the more diverse, even frivolous, invitations [to write]." Likewise, researcher Cristina Martha Balinte believes that Insectar, with its mock-reportage pieces in the human-interest genre, implicitly derides the communist take on urbanization. In one such fragment, Mazilu depicts the élan of an urbanite, who joins the campaign for agricultural mechanization only as an excuse to abandon his wife; another such work dwells on a "maniacal commuter", who hides his gross incompetence by always anticipating the arrival of labor inspectors.Balinte, p. 237