An anti-fascist, Claudian enlisted with the Romanian Social Democratic Party during the interwar, moving closer to the anti-communist center by the late 1940s, and became that faction's main theoretician.
Born in Cernavodă, his parents were Floru Claudian, a general in the Romanian Army who came from a working-class family, and his wife Eufimia (née Cernătescu), whose ancestors were Oltenian boyars and participants in the Wallachian Revolution of 1848.
According to sociologist Victor Godeanu, it was already obsolete: although Claudian's work was formally "perfect", his most recent references were dated 1925, missing out on the "continuous social transformation in Soviet Russia".
[20] Shortly after the December 1933 assassination of Prime Minister Ion G. Duca by the fascist Iron Guard, Claudian began contributing to Gândul Vremii, a liberal nationalist magazine.
[24] After the 1938 establishment of the National Renaissance Front single-party dictatorship, Claudian remained active in the semi-legal PSDR, a regular contributor to its newspaper, Lumea Nouă.
[28] Scholar Adrian Marino, who was his student at that time, maintained a dim view of Claudian and his colleague, Dan Bădărău, arguing that their classes ignored the realities of war and politics.
[31] By the end of World War II, with the onset of Soviet occupation, Claudian published Antisemitismul și cauzele lui sociale, a sociological inquiry into the phenomenon of antisemitism.
[18] As early as January 1945, he wrote in Libertatea against the "brutal intimidation" and "simplistic, demagogic, ideas" of the "enemies of democracy, socialism and the workers"; journalist Victor Frunză claimed this text was directed against the Communists.
[34] Zoe was released, but Claudian, arrested again in August 1952,[33] was held in confinement, first at Aiud prison, then at the Peninsula and Poarta Albă labor camps, on the Danube–Black Sea Canal.
[3] Between his release in 1954 and 1960,[7] Claudian worked as a researcher at the Romanian Academy's Iași chapter, leading a withdrawn life at his house on Copou Hill, or at his friend Mircea Spiridoneanu's home,[33] and often rejoining Zoe in Bucharest.
These suspected him of "subverting the state" and of promoting a "Western political regime", but were unable to penetrate his innermost circle of friends, and considered tapping his telephone.
)[7] In 1972, Editura Minerva released Senin ("Halcyon"), Zoe Claudian's selection from her husband's poetry,[37] written in a lyrically intellectual style, with problems posed in an ironic and philosophical manner.
[7] Described by his peers as a "fine intellectual", "paralyzed by discreetness",[10] or a "withdrawn scholar, without an expansive public persona",[38] Claudian was a respected, but often overlooked, figure in Romanian sociology—according to Z. Ornea, this was "probably because, although he did take part in one annual research, he was not involved with Dimitrie Gusti's monographic school.
[40] In his relative isolation, Claudian spent much time mapping out the socially deterministic settings of philosophical doctrines, the "collective tendencies and aspirations" that shaped individual stances, "often without the thinker himself realizing it for sure."
"[42] His reflections on antisemitism, albeit published in the wake of Holocaust, were silent on that subject, and sought to explain earlier phenomena through the grid of Marx, Kautsky, and their historical materialism.
"[46] Claudian's published poetry evidences different preoccupations, being rated by George Călinescu as "intimist" and "typically intellectual", taking up themes such as high school reveries, reflections on what could have been, and the secretive thoughts of a nostalgic character who has to act his real age.
Notițe, "cugetări", revoltă-ascunsă De-adolescent neînțeles de lume, Sarcasme disprețuitoare, glume, Și taina metafizică pătrunsă.Letters, notes, and minor bits of paper, That I once used to read on lengthy days of feast, I feel your melancholy, not as something painful, But, on my brow, as soft and saddening caresses.