Lucian Raicu (pen name of Bernard Leibovici; 12 May 1934 – 22 November 2006) was a Romanian literary critic, biographer, memoirist, and magazine editor, who was the brother of novelist Virgil Duda and the husband of writer Sonia Larian.

More privately, Raicu was embracing dissident stances and questioning the standards of Marxist literary criticism; alongside friends such as Nicolae Labiș and Paul Goma, he began reading banned works by Romanian and French authors.

He was widely celebrated in the literary community, especially after publishing highly original monographs on Liviu Rebreanu (1967), Nikolai Gogol (1974) and Labiș (1977), being seen as a companion of younger liberal critics—such as Mircea Iorgulescu, Nicolae Manolescu, and Eugen Simion.

[7] His ancestry was entirely Jewish—he once declared himself as "above all else, a Jew", noting that this ethnic origin gave him an "existential drama" and a "transfiguring mystique" with Talmudic roots;[8] his brother, the novelist Duda (born Rubin Leibovici),[2][3] was similarly attached to the Jewish identity, as discussed by his book of essays on Mihail Sebastian.

As reported by Duda, Carol Leibovici was made to do forced labor in the quarries, and was so exhausted that he died soon after the war; Rubin and Bernard's maternal uncle barely managed to survive the Iași pogrom and its "death train".

Having graduated from Bârlad's Gheorghe Roșca Codreanu High School (where he was colleagues with Solomon and with other future writers, including Ion Hobana),[5] Raicu enlisted at the University of Bucharest Faculty of Philology in 1951.

[32] As an official critic within the communist establishment, Raicu was focused on studies about the Romanian "social novel", defending and expanding on observations made by an interwar literary theorist, Garabet Ibrăileanu.

Regarded by scholar Alex Goldiș as one of "the most daring texts to have come out in the late '50s" (and immediately lambasted at the USR's annual congress), it exposed the mediocrity of several official writers, including Aurel Baranga, Mihai Beniuc, Dan Deșliu, and Eugen Frunză.

[38] In a 2006 obituary, scholar Paul Cernat concludes that Raicu, a "mobile spirit", was mostly influenced by "European humanism" and direct readings from interwar literature[39] (though, as Breban cautions, he was never an erudite).

[40] They went through Camil Petrescu's biographical play on Danton, which had a conservative message, but also through scholarly works by Lucian Blaga, Benjamin Fondane, Eugen Lovinescu, François Mauriac, and Albert Thibaudet.

According to author Irimie Străuț, these people listened in as student leaders Goma and Alexandra Indrieș voiced their support for the restoration of Greater Romania; this resulted in them being investigated and punished by the communist regime's secret police, called Securitate.

[43] Literary historian Eugen Negrici proposes that Raicu, alongside other authors—from Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu to Ion Negoițescu—, had been callous in assessing the impact of de-Stalinization in Romania, and had found himself exposed to the inevitable backlash.

[43] In a 1981 piece, Crohmălniceanu, who could still do editorial work at Viața Românescă, revealed that he had personally rebelled against Raicu's "dastardly ouster", allowing him to publish reviews and articles under various pseudonyms, and as such paying back "a portion of his measly salary".

This informal club was also joined by Călinescu, Cosașu, Breban, Mazilu and Mugur, as well by Cezar Baltag, Grigore Hagiu, Modest Morariu, Petre Stoica, and cartoonist Eugen Mihăescu.

[55] Press historian Nae Antonescu also remarked in early 1968 that the two of them, alongside Nicolae Manolescu, "write beautifully", in articles that "cultivate metaphors, the musical suggestions of phrases [and] the polemical, sometimes rebellious, gesture".

Both were enthralled by Raicu's preface to Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic, The Idiot, put out by Biblioteca pentru toți in 1965—as Brumaru recalls, it gave them the key to understanding the novel, which had previously seemed unapproachable.

[61] The anti-institutional discourse is seen by Ciocârlie as permeating Raicu's entire output: "Interested in penetrating the intimacy of a text, he despises the surfeit and self-sufficiency of those colleagues whose commentary only serves to confirm commonplace ideas—hence his hostility toward pedantry, which he attributes to all authors that are guided by theories."

[62] The same is asserted by Cernat, who places Raicu within an anti-dogmatic, biography-centered tradition that rejected post-structuralist theorizing by the likes of Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes; to the modernists and the postmodernists, he seemed "antiquated".

[39] Goldiș contrarily proposes that there was at least one "strange synchronicity" tying Raicu (but also Călinescu, Manolescu and Simion) to Barthes (and then also to Jean Rousset or Serge Doubrovsky), since they were equally interested in challenging the "critical canon" of their respective literary culture.

Raicu was initially impressed by this transition: in late August 1968, after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia and Ceaușescu's public opposition to it, he was one of the 23 writers who signed a letter in support of him, titled "For the defense of socialism's core values".

In early 1974, the authorities had granted him and his wife a new home in northern Bucharest, right outside the Metropolitan Circus, but, by June of the same year, also included the two of them, as well as their colleague Cristea, on a list of non-Party-affiliate literary professionals; these would only receive half pay for their services.

[82] One of the witnesses was Cartea Românească's Corneliu Popescu, who recounts that the group was in fact celebrating Larian's birthday, and that the novelist, who was manifestly tired, only decided to drop by because of his "deep respect for the Raicus."

His isolation was only enhanced during the subsequent years, during the application of sweeping austerity policies: "in a Bucharest disfigured by the agony of communism, Lucian Raicu rarely even went out, terrified as he was by the aggression of thousands of faces, of frost, of shortages, of each day's ennui.

[84] Printre contemporani, which was awarded the Romanian Academy's Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu Prize,[86] was described by reviewer Cornel Ungureanu as Raicu's method of outlining his spiritual associations with other literary figures, including the subjects of his essays and those whom he (sparingly) cited.

[89] The critic was forced by such circumstances to leave his manuscripts behind, but the authorities remained careless in handling these; as a result, Dinescu was able to recover them from Raicu's discarded home in the winter of 1986–1987, and could even smuggle some of them out of Romania.

[30] While Raicu and Larian settled in Paris (occupying another "tiny apartment on Rue Bargue"),[84] Duda took longer to leave Romania, and was only pushed to do so by antisemitic attacks in the national-communist paper, Săptămîna (which also gave him reason to identify more and more as a Jew, rather than as a Romanian).

"[74] He now reconnected with other writers who had left Romania, and rallied with the anti-communist networks abroad—including one formed around Goma, who visited him in Paris, and Dorin Tudoran, who, in 1987, co-opted him on the editorial board of his Munich-based journal, Agora;[91] he was also briefly employed as a correspondent by Radio Free Europe,[4] meeting with his more senior Romanian colleagues, that included his former adversary Ierunca.

In July, he was interviewed in Paris by Gabriela Adameșteanu of Revista 22, expressing his disgust with Romania's political life, but also noting that the lifting of censorship, and the overall effervescence, also created the conditions for "excellent essays" (he declared himself especially impressed by those of Andrei Pippidi).

Read by him over Radio France Internationale, they mainly introduced newer developments Western European literature,[98] but also included unexpected, comedic memoirs of his encounters with other writers (such as an episode in which Mazilu, though terminally ill, preoccupies himself with obtaining a "proper hat").

The small ceremony, reportedly financed by Manolescu from a Romanian state fund,[61] was attended by Crepu (who went there despite having never met Raicu, and covered the event with a note in Revue des Deux Mondes); also present were Dinescu and his wife, artist Florica Cordescu, as well as essayist Magda Cârneci.