Săteanu was born in 1907 in the village of Păpăuți on the Dniester's right bank, which was back then part of the Russian Empire's Bessarabia Governorate;[1] as noted by scholar Sergiu Grossu, his was an ethnic Romanian family.
[1] In 1931, Lehtțir's Octombrie magazine published his De peste Nistru ("From Over the Dniester"), one of several period poems which described the Greater Romania as highly oppressive, claiming that Moldavians from that region secretly cherished MASSR as an ideal homeland.
[4] As early as 1934, the scattered works drew attention from the exile anti-communist Nichita Smochină, who commented on one of Săteanu's idylls, which began in classical form (as a romantic address to a peasant girl), and ended with slogans about plentiful life in the kolkhoz and the Five-year Plan.
[8] Nicolae Dabija renders one of the charges in the original de-Romanianized vernacular: au îngunoioșat limba moldovenească cu cuvinte romînești ("[the writers] have besmirched the Moldavian language with their Romanian words").
A collection put out in 2005 by the Shevchenko University of Tiraspol, titled Фечорий плаюлуй нистрян ("Sons of the Dniester Homeland"), was supposed to include him—but "regretfully, [his] works were not reprinted", and could not be located in the original anywhere in Transnistria.