Calistrat Hogaș

The son of a Tecuci priest, he studied at the University of Iași before beginning an over four-decade career as a high school teacher, often at Piatra Neamț.

Born in Tecuci, his parents were Gheorghe Dumitriu, a Romanian Orthodox archpriest, and his wife Mărioara (née Stanciu),[1] the daughter of a serdar from Pechea, Galați County.

After completing the primary grades in his native town, he attended middle and high school at Academia Mihăileană and at the National College in Iași from 1859 to 1867.

[6] In 1878, he left Piatra Neamț for a period of three years, teaching first at the gymnasium in Tecuci and then at a normal school in Iași, and then lived in the former town from 1881 to 1885.

[7] He subsequently taught in Tecuci, Alexandria, and Roman (at the Roman-Vodă High School);[1] during this period, from the mid-1880s to the late 1890s, he published only sporadically.

[4] The 1906 establishment of Viața Românească, the formation of a group surrounding the magazine and his resulting friendship with Garabet Ibrăileanu were crucial to his career; his În munții Neamțului and other travel notes appeared there from 1907 to 1912.

[1] He cut an odd and colorful picture at Iași: a large man, dressed unusually, wearing a woolen jacket in all seasons, with a huge overcoat and an equally sizable hat, wearing thick boots in winter and custom made sandals in summer, he hustled between the three high schools where he taught, after a breakfast consisting of a chunk of meat roasted over coals, seasoned with a handful of onions and washed down with a pot of coffee.

His Viața Românească colleagues respected Hogaș and treated him as a friend, even though he was older than all of them; they asked his advice and unanimously admired his contributions.

[10] He withdrew to Piatra Neamț in his last years and did not live to see his book appear, due to the ongoing World War I; he died at Roman.

[1] Initially interred there, he was later exhumed, the coffin transported on an ox-drawn cart covered in pine branches, and reburied at Piatra Neamț, in accordance with his wishes.

[10] It was only in 1921 that his collected works appeared: covering two volumes, Amintiri dintr-o călătorie and În munții Neamțului, the second was prefaced by Mihail Sadoveanu,[1] a devoted admirer.

[11] Excerpts from Hogaș appeared in textbooks for many years, but interest in him waned after the Romanian Revolution, to the point that Nicolae Manolescu called him "a nearly forgotten writer".