Tiberiu Iliescu (21 December 1906 – 12 April 1978) was a Romanian writer, editor and teacher, intimately associated with the city of Craiova and the wider Oltenia region. He was born there into an artisan's family, and published his first literary contribution while still a student at Carol I High School. He studied at the University of Bucharest, during which time he became involved with literary modernism, coming under Tudor Arghezi's influence. Iliescu then worked at various provincial schools, returning to Craiova to teach at Frații Buzești. Alongside Constantin Nissipeanu and Mihnea Gheorghiu, he helped create an Oltenian avant-garde cell, which, from 1934, put out Meridian magazine. It acquired a national notoriety, attracting established modernists, or up-and-coming talents, from across the Kingdom of Romania. In the late interwar, Iliescu was especially known for his prose poetry, which merged with literary and social criticism, with biography, or with surrealistic elements.
Meridian lived to its stated goal of shocking the bourgeoisie, and was rejected by the local elites. It became associated with leftist causes, and overall with proletarian literature. Iliescu himself later claimed that he was already a Marxist before World War II, but his boast was treated with some suspicion by the local school of Marxist literary criticism. Under the fascist regimes of the 1940s, Meridian continued to appear sporadically, reducing its political content—though it also featured occasional, subtle, critiques, such as when Iliescu praised the old-regime politician Nicolae Iorga (assassinated by the Iron Guard in 1940). Meridians most documented association with the anti-fascist resistance movement and the undeground Communist Party was through a wartime contributor, Petre Pandrea.
Though the extend of Pandrea's participation remains debated (with Iliescu denying that he was ever an ideological or financial backer), the two men had a close friendship; in Pandrea's account, Iliescu directly helped with rescuing hundreds of anti-fascists who were facing the death penalty. Following the anti-fascist coup of 1944, Iliescu returned to political favor, helping consolidate generically leftist, and then specifically communist, organs of power in Oltenia. He himself served as chairman of the National Theater Craiova in 1944–1947; resolutely committed to making Craiova into a hub for modernist-and-political drama, he found himself challenged over allegations of financial misappropriation, and only preserved as a functionary at the Ministry of Arts.
Iliescu was ignored, and sometimes distrusted, during the early stages of the communist regime, when Pandrea was incarcerated as a result of factional conflicts. He himself worked as a teacher and translator in Bucharest, only making his comeback in the late 1960s, after formal retirement. He published an anthology of his interwar pieces, as well as an entirely new book in the reportage genre; he died in 1978, just as he was coming to be seen as a mentor of the neo-modernists, an anti-fascist forerunner of the regime, and a relevant figure on Oltenia's artistic scene. His son, Petruș Mircea, moved to Sweden as a religious scholar, but made returns to Romania so as to cultivate and defend Iliescu Sr's legacy.
Biography Early life Born at Craiova on 21 December 1906,"Decese", in România Liberă, 14 April 1978, p. 6Dorin Tudoran, Tiberiu Iliescu, "Biografia debuturilor. 'Îmi plac metaforele optimiste ale tinerilor și încrederea lor în realizarea unor vremuri optime'", in Luceafărul, Vol. XIX, Issue 6, February 1976, p. 3Crișan, p. 52; Durnea, p. 231 Iliescu was of a lowly origin. Pandrea, who befriended him when they were both in their thirties, believes that his ethnic and social background was Romani, and that his later matrimonial woes would have been smoothed out had he married into his own "Gypsy" community.Pandrea, p. 540. See also Gheorghe Grigurcu, "Semn de carte. Centenar. Glose la Petre Pandrea (I)", in România Literară, Issue 24/2004, p. 9 This view is contrasted by Iliescu's own autobiographical narrative, outlined in a 1976 interview. According to this account, his father Petre "Tache" Ciobanu, originally from Gănești-Lăcusteni, was an orphaned and illiterate peasant, who had walked to Craiova to set up a quilting shop. Later in life, Ciobanu took the surname Iliescu. He and his Maria had thirteen children together, but only four survived to adulthood. Revenues from the family business allowed the future poet and his siblings to have an education.Durnea, p. 231 One of his brothers, Atanasie, went on to work as an editor of Minerva daily, under Ioan Slavici; another one, Mircea, became a physician; a third, Grigore, was a colonel in the Romanian Land Forces.
Tiberiu himself began his education at a school maintained by the Roman Catholic diocese (and initially located near Madona Dudu Church), where he was colleagues with another future poet, Constantin Nissipeanu. He was in Craiova, enlisted at School No. 4 in Craiovița neighborhood, during the early years of World War I. He witnessed the Romanian defeats of 1916, and stayed behind as the city was occupied by the Imperial German Army. One of his childhood memories was of Uhlans randomly spearing geese on Craiovița's streets. He also recalled being "dirt-poor", with wooden clogs and no money for a proper uniform. When he won a school competition, he could not represent it at the next level, due to his derelict appearance, and had to be replaced by the runner-up, Barbu Ștefănescu, who could appear in uniform. For a while, he resented Ștefănescu, but they later became good friends.
In postwar Greater Romania, young Iliescu went on to study at Carol I High School, and debuted as a writer in 1924—with a piece taken up by Revista Tineretului.Durnea, p. 231 He recalled also sending his poems to Foaia Tinerimii and Cosânzeana of Cluj, but "they never published anything; not even an answer." Upon graduation, he left for Bucharest. He studied philosophy and letters at the city university, while also clerking at the Finance Ministry. Though struggling to make ends meet, he made a point of never skipping lectures by his favorite professors—including Mihail Dragomirescu (whom he regarded as slightly ridiculous, but a sound literary theorist), Vasile Pârvan ("a visionary"), Ovid Densusianu, Nicolae Cartojan, and Orest Tafrali.
Iliescu also became a regular at Tudor Arghezi's magazine, Bilete de Papagal, though without ever meeting his publisher. As observed by scholar Victor Durnea, his works for Bilete "do not evidence any sort of gift"; Durnea proposes that Iliescu only became a real poet later in life, after embracing surrealism.Durnea, p. 232 More leniently, sociologist Constantin Crișan notes his debt to Arghezian poetic language, as a prelude to his "forging his own poetic style."Crișan, p. 52 The aspiring poet took his diploma, magna cum laude, in January 1930,Durnea, p. 231 when he also gave up on clerking. He was afterwards a schoolteacher of Romanian and French,Crișan, p. 52 moving between Craiova, Calafat, Târgu Jiu, and ultimately Deva.Durnea, p. 231 While living in the latter town, he founded the journal Decebal and contributed to the local literary newspaper, Credință și Biruință.
Meridian circle Iliescu had returned to Craiova by 1934, when he was teacher at Frații Buzești; he also handled the school library, assisted by his student (and future literary collaborator) Mihnea Gheorghiu. Iliescu was joined by Ion Mihăescu (or Mihăiescu) and Constant I. Manea in putting out a literary journal, Meridian. As he reported later, the two other men, while published authors, were mainly selected because of their good standing in society (since "I myself was a bohemian"). Manea was especially important to the enterprise since he lived on Copertarilor Street, and was thus a neighbor of the magazine's printer, Mitirel. Meridian appeared with several interruptions until 1946.Crișan, p. 52; Durnea, p. 231 Though provincial in focus, it became celebrated as a hub of modernist Romanian literature, and as such a landmark in national culture. According to poet and critic Dorin Tudoran, it was "one of the most spectacular avant-garde magazines" ever to be published in Romania. Iliescu looked back on the Meridian period as one of conscious rebellion: though he knew that poets, and especially modernists, risked "dying of hunger", he made a point of unsettling the local upper-classes, "who had no other concern than to sell grain, build themselves palaces, and have their bellies as big and full as possible." Another focus was on combating the cultural monopoly of Romanian nationalism, in its right-wing, traditionalist version. Iliescu thus claimed: My great satisfaction is that I fought for the affirmation of a modernist movement in places dominated by many pranksters, by those folks who made our national specificity, which they interpreted backwards, I would even say stupidly, idyllically, into a pretext for their anti-artistic commercialism.Crișan, p. 54
The magazine, published out of the Iliescu family home of Doamnei Street, was immediately controversial. It was also highly unpopular, as jocularly explained by Iliescu: "I would drop 7 copies at the bookstore, and returned to find 11.""Teatrul Național din Craiova", in Fapta, 21 April 1945, p. 2 Over decades, he also held a grudge against elitist writers such as Eugen Lovinescu and Șerban Cioculescu, who had mocked Meridians "grotesque" themes and punctuation errors (explained by Iliescu himself as jibes against Meridians and his own samples of proletarian literature). In tandem, he found himself vilified by nationalists such as Nicolae Iorga and Nae Ionescu—but responded in kind, calling the former "a gladiator for rent", and the latter "a crusader from the fog", "immobile as a tree on some ravine." According to Durnea, such brief portraits, not all of them polemical, are Iliescu's most recognizable literary works; he also cites "caped prince" (for Alexandru Macedonski), "priest of the plains" (Nichifor Crainic), and "metropolitan musketeer" (Camil Petrescu). The critic observes however that Iliescu overdid himself in the genre, by employing "undue satirical twists", and especially by "overestimating the talent of some ideological allies".Durnea, p. 232
Iliescu also left detail on the recruitment of various Meridian writers—claiming to have ensured there the debut of figures such as Gheorghiu, Alexandru Balaci, Ion Caraion, and Geo Dumitrescu.Crișan, p. 54 While most were rarely in direct contact with him, sending in their works from Bucharest, he memorized his personal encounter with Eugène Ionesco, whom he disliked. Iliescu only agreed to feature Ionesco's precisely because he was obnoxious in his interpersonal relations, a "nagging voice" to grate the bourgeoisie. Other more or less frequent contributors included Nissipeanu, Gheorghiu, Geo Bogza, Eugen Constant, Horia Lovinescu, Pericle Martinescu, Sașa Pană, Paul Păun, Stephan Roll, and Cicerone Theodorescu.