Cezar or Cesar Bolliac, also known as Boliac, Boliacu, Boliak and Boleac (transitional Cyrillic: ЧeсарȢ БoliaкȢ;"Cronica straina. Цeaрa Рomъneaскъ шi Moldaвia", in Gazeta Transilvaniei, Issue 29/1860, p. 116 23 or 25 March 1813 – 25 February 1881), was a Wallachian and Romanian writer, scholar, and political figure. Although born to non-Romanian parents, he joined the local aristocracy, or boyardom, through adoption into the Pereț family. He was briefly a cadet in the Wallachian military forces, but harbored resentment toward the Russian Empire, which had brought Wallachia into its sphere of influence. Abandoning a military career, he took up writing and publishing and, for a time, edited a literary magazine called Curiosul, which bridged neoclassicism and romanticism. Like other Romanian liberals and Freemasons, Bolliac opposed the Russian constitutional arrangement known as the Regulamentul Organic, viewing it as a remnant of feudalism. He was therefore implicated in the anti-Russian conspiracy of 1840 and was detained on orders from Prince Alexandru II Ghica. He was ultimately released through the intervention of other members of the Ghica family, who remained his friends and protectors.
Upon his return, Bolliac continued to challenge censorship, inventing a style of social poetry that favored the exploited peasantry and expressed sympathy for the Romani underclass, which was enslaved by the boyars. He moved away from liberalism toward utopian socialism and then, briefly, toward a variant of communism; he combined these views with Romanian nationalism, shifting it from romantic to left-wing variants. Reaching out to fellow Romanian nationalists in Moldavia and throughout the Austrian Empire, he became involved in researching the origins of the Romanians, performing his first archeological digs along the Danube and in the Southern Carpathians. The landscape also provided him with inspiration for romantic elegies, which endure as some of his best works as a poet. Bolliac became an increasingly sarcastic critic of Westernization, earning praise for his journalistic wit, and a rediscoverer of Romanian folklore. He became convinced that the Romanians were primarily descendants of the Dacians, a romantic and post-romantic ideology later taken up by Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu and transformed into Dacianism. Under Prince Gheorghe Bibescu, who embraced nationalism, Bolliac served as a poet laureate and a public prosecutor. This did not prevent him from participating in the liberal conspiracy that ultimately became the Wallachian revolution of 1848. He entered the provisional government that toppled Bibescu, also serving the cause as a journalist and propagandist. Involved on the abolitionist side of revolutionary politics, he allegedly embezzled the financial contributions that formerly enslaves people owed upon their release.
In late 1848, the Ottoman Empire reasserted its control over Wallachia, arresting the rebels. Bolliac was deported with several colleagues to Orsova, from which they either escaped or were allowed to leave. He sought refuge among the Romanians of Austrian Transylvania; well into 1849, he supported forming a revolutionary alliance with the breakaway Hungarian State and, alongside his colleague Nicolae Bălcescu, approved of the Hungarian–Romanian pacification act. He fled the Russian invasion and reached Istanbul; once there, he came to be distrusted by both Romanian and Hungarian exiles—regarded as a fanatic by the former, and accused by the latter of having stolen diamonds from the Zichy family coffers.
Evading prosecution by the Ottomans and the Austrians, Bolliac spent the years 1850–1857 in Paris; there, he was converted to the cause of Moldo–Wallachian unionism as a preliminary step toward establishing a Greater Romanian, or "Dacian", state. He popularized this cause to an international audience during the Crimean War, returning to Wallachia shortly after the war had ended. He was involved in the creation of the United Principalities in 1859, proposing that Moldavia's Alexandru Ioan Cuza be selected as Domnitor. Bolliac also endorsed the more radical points on Cuza's agenda, including land reform, and, as head of the National Archives, collected documents that facilitated the secularization of monastery estates. He opposed both Cuza's other political stances, to the point of being imprisoned for lèse-majesté, and the "monstrous coalition" that formed against the Domnitor. He spent most of the 1860s involved in political quarrels, often pursued through his newspaper, Trompeta Carpaților. Discarding socialism in favor of economic nationalism, Bolliac also embraced violent antisemitism. He initially opposed the foreign-born ruler Carol of Hohenzollern, but later incorporated the monarchy into his political vision, drawing inspiration from Bonapartism. Though he made important discoveries at Zimnicea and elsewhere, he came to be widely ridiculed for his drift into pseudoarchaeology, and also publicly disgraced, though never prosecuted, as an alleged child sexual abuser. He died after a long struggle with paralysis, leaving a tarnished legacy. Although later regarded as a hero by the communist regime, particularly in the 1950s, this reassessment rested largely on his perceived compatibility with Marxism.
Biography Early life Bolliac was born in Bucharest, the Wallachian capital, on 23Faifer, p. 963; Gal et al., p. 55 or 25László Péter, "Román költő szegedi verse", in Délmagyarország, 22 February 1981, p. 8Dima et al., p. 328 March 1813. At the time, and for another four decades, Romanian-speaking Wallachia was governed as an autonomous principality within the Ottoman Empire. Cezar's mother was Zinca Kalamogdartis, and his father was a physician and political adventurer, Anton Poleac, Boliaco or Bogliaco. Little is known about Anton, though he is tentatively identified as a member of Mikhail Kutuzov's retinue, present in Wallachia during the Russian invasion of 1812.Perpessicius, "Lecturi intermitente. X", in Gazeta Literară, Vol. XIII, Issue 36, September 1966, p. 7Dima et al., pp. 328–329 He is widely believed to have had Italian roots,Dima et al., pp. 328–329; Faifer, p. 963; Vlad, p. 90 but has also been described as Jewish."Bukarest. 6 Jänner", in Pester Lloyd, 15 January 1870, p. 2 Tradition holds that he was born in Salonika,Dima et al., p. 328 though, as researcher Dumitru Popovici argues, this does not imply that he ever belonged to the Greek community.Popovici, pp. 5, 551 Researcher George Vlad attributed such origins to Zinca, describing her as "a Greek lady, and apparently a beautiful one, hence her two or three marriages".Vlad, p. 90
Anton was absent from his son's life after 1813, having "mysteriously disappeared" from all public records.Constantin Cubleșan, "Cezar Bolliac", in Utunk, Vol. XVIII, Issue 47, November 1963, p. 4 Cezar was raised for a while by an elderly woman, possibly his maternal grandmother, who sponsored his education at the Greek school of Boteanului mahala in what was then a Hellenized, Phanariote-ruled Bucharest.Dima et al., pp. 328–329 The young boy was later effectively adopted by Stolnic Petrache Pereț (or Peretz), who married Zinca.Dima et al., p. 329; Faifer, p. 963; Vlad, p. 90. See also Lăcusteanu & Crutzescu, p. 276; Măndescu (2009), p. 206 Pereț's family belonged to the local aristocracy, or boyardom, but had only recently been promoted into its ranks around 1829, having acquired land at Stoenești in Vlașca and townhouses in Giurgiu.Dima et al., p. 329 By Bolliac's own account, he was subsequently inducted into the upper class and afforded some political and judicial privileges.George Potra, "Căpitan Costache, spaima bucureștenilor de altădată", in Magazin Istoric, June 1970, p. 54 When in Bucharest, he lived in a large townhouse on Podul Mogoșoaiei, near the area currently known as Revolution Square.Vlad, p. 90
Bolliac retained a more traumatic memory of his encounter with slavery, which by that time affected the bulk of Wallachia's Romani population. Pereț owned several house slaves, a situation that conflicted with the boy's developing humanitarian ideals; on one occasion, with his adoptive parents absent, he allowed the slaves to experience a full day of freedom at his own expense.Dima et al., p. 329
Bolliac attended the Saint Sava College, where his teachers included Ion Heliade Rădulescu, who would later become a conservative political opponent.Faifer, p. 963 During this period, Wallachia and neighboring Moldavia became dominions of Imperial Russia—governed under a new constitutional document, Regulamentul Organic. At seventeen, Bolliac joined the Wallachian military as a nominal Junker but left after a brief interval, possibly because he found the disciplined environment incompatible with his literary aspirations.Faifer, p. 963 While serving, he befriended several individuals who would later support radical causes, including Ioan Câmpineanu.Dima et al., p. 329 Bolliac recalled that his first serious writing was undertaken in 1834 at Stoenești, though this claim is considered doubtful, as is his assertion that he studied in Paris between 1831 and 1833.Dima et al., p. 329 Around the same time, he had a dispute with Zinca, after she mistreated one of the Romani slaves at Stoenești.Dima et al., p. 329
At the time, Alexandru Ghica had been appointed Prince of Wallachia under Ottoman and Russian supervision. Initially, Bolliac benefited: he was a personal friend of Alexandru's brother, the Great Ban Mihalache Ghica, whom he always regarded as an intellectual leader and an outstanding antiquarian.Pippidi, p. 307 Bolliac's first known writings date from 1835, when he had joined Heliade and Costache Aristia's Philharmonic Society. Published with philosophical poems in that group's literary collection, he was also credited as the author of novellas and plays, though these were not printed at that stage.Dima et al., pp. 329–330. See also Aricescu, p. 7 He was close friends with Heliade, who would later make Bolliac into the object of a critical essay, probably the first on the history of Romanian literature; it described Bolliac as the group's "enfant terrible".Manolescu, p. 180
In 1836, Bolliac and Constantin Gh. Filipescu founded a magazine called Curiosul ("The Inquisitive"), which carried his translations from Byron and Pushkin, as well as his militant ideas about creating a national school of drama.Dima et al., pp. 330, 333, 648 Curiosul featured the first ever Romanian introduction to William Shakespeare, done by Bolliac himself (he used Le Tourneur and Guizot as his sources).Adrian, pp. 24–25 In its political pages, Curiosul pushed a liberal program, which caused the state censors to step in. Bolliac was denied on his attempt to publish an abolitionist piece in one of the magazine's four issues, but managed to establish links with Romanian intellectuals living outside Wallachia—Constantin Negruzzi in Moldavia, George Bariț and Timotei Cipariu in Austrian Transylvania.Dima et al., pp. 243, 330 Sources disagree on whether the journal was ultimately banned by the Regulamentul regimeAricescu, pp. 5–6; Faifer, p. 963 or simply brought down by financial difficulties.Dima et al., p. 330 Bolliac returned to translating in 1837, when he finished a Romanian rendition of Victor Hugo's Angelo.Ion Brăescu, "Dramaturgia franceză în România înainte de 23 august 1944", in Revista de Istorie și Teorie Literară, Vol. XVI, Issue 2, 1967, p. 262 At the time, he had parted ways with Heliade and the Philharmonic, after a conflict between himself, as the dramaturge, and C. Aristia, as the producer.Dima et al., p. 330