Gheorghe Bogdan-Duică
Eventually settling in Bucharest, capital of the Romanian Old Kingdom, he managed to earn a university degree before teaching at a succession of high schools.
He urged the Romanian government to drop its neutrality policy and enter World War I; once this took place and his adopted home came under German occupation, he found himself arrested and deported to Bulgaria.
[1] His father Ioan (1832–1906) was a struggling small businessman who was forced to liquidate his store, leave his family and become a clerk in Sinaia, in the Romanian Old Kingdom; by the late 1880s, he was at a glass factory in nearby Azuga.
[5] After his studies abroad, he worked for Gazeta Transilvaniei and then for the Sibiu-based Tribuna; his beginnings as a critic coincided with the early career of George Coșbuc, whom he helped with numerous reviews.
[7] Also that year, he wrote a study of the Romanian Orthodox Church's autonomy in the province; while in 1895, he published a volume on Bukovina that was the first to closely analyze its economic, cultural and political profile.
[4] He then returned to Transylvania, focusing on the area's history and writing books on Visarion Sarai and on the interrogation of Inocențiu Micu-Klein (both 1896), as well as on the demographic situation of Romanians in Hungary in 1733.
His objectives included making the reading public aware of important literature published in the 1880–1888 period; sharply criticizing the pseudo-celebrities of the day; and especially the popularization of aesthetic writings such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Laocoön and Hippolyte Taine's The Philosophy of Art, which had both recently appeared in translation.
[5] Reviews that published his work included Convorbiri Literare, Sămănătorul, Ramuri and Viața Românească in the Old Kingdom, as well as Transylvanian outlets such as Luceafărul and Tribuna Poporului.
[14] He was a member of the "Tribunist" wing (so called after Tribuna) of the Romanian National Party (PNR), which strongly supported publication of the Transylvanian Memorandum.
An ardent patriot who frequently veered into an exclusivist chauvinism, he published Românismul ("Romanianism") from 1913 to 1914, drawing a contrast between his Pan-Romanian outlook and Pan-Slavism as well as Pan-Germanism.
[12] After Bucharest was occupied by the Central Powers in 1916, his loose talk about an impending German defeat led to his denouncement and arrest, in early June 1917.
[4] At that point, following the union of Transylvania with Romania and the creation of Cluj University, he was named a professor in the history of modern Romanian literature,[17] proposed by Sextil Pușcariu.
He wrote a history of modern Romanian literature in 1923; George Călinescu dismissed this as being without aesthetic taste, calling its author "completely misunderstanding and disoriented".
[1] As early as 1926, he set himself up as a leading faculty opponent of hiring Lucian Blaga at Cluj, and by the following year, had launched a public campaign, offensive in tone, to discredit the poet.
[23] His conservative disposition, stubborn spirit, and scientist and historicist opinions stood in contrast with the poet's mysticism,[24] and his intransigence grew as he aged.
[29][30][31] Chronically poor at managing his money, he nevertheless lived during his Cluj years in a lavish apartment near the city's Central Park that had been requisitioned from a Hungarian owner.
