Urmuz’s real name was Demetru Dem.
\nDemetrescu-Buz\u0103u and he was born in March 1883 in the small central town of
\nCurtea de Arge\u0219. A forerunner of
\nsurrealism and the literature of the absurd, Urmuz was an enigmatic and bizarre
\nfigure, just like his literature, which was aesthetically captivating despite the
\nfact that the words didn’t seem to make much sense. The literary critic and historian
\nPaul Cernat tells us more about Urmuz’ odd personality:<\/p>\n
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Urmuz was a
\nlonely and shy man, whose life was just as bizarre as his life. It appears that
\nhe first trained to become a doctor but gave up because during dissections, he’d
\nget a fright when he would pinch the dead bodies and they wouldn’t react. So he
\ntook up law instead and became a clerk at the Court of Cassation. He also concerned
\nhimself with music, being an amateur composer in his free time and writing
\nmusic to entertain his family, as one of his sisters recounted. Unfortunately,
\nhis music scores have not survived, having been lost in the 1960s. Literature
\nwas a secret passion of his, even more so than music. He knew the writer and
\npoet Tudor Arghezi, who gave him the penname Urmuz and who published his work.
\nIn fact, the only works Urmuz would ever publish appeared thanks to Arghezi in
\nthe magazine Cuget rom\u00e2nesc, a very traditionalist publication,
\nironically. This was in 1922. Urmuz committed suicide in 1923, shooting himself
\nin the bushes on the side of a popular street in the north of Bucharest where
\npeople often went for walks. The reason is unclear, and there were speculations
\nabout an unhappy love affair or a terrible disease that no one knew about. The
\nmany stories that circulated around Urmuz’ enigmatic, secretive and
\nsubterranean personality eventually turned him into something of a myth. This myth
\nis very much alive today and is the foundation of the Romanian literature of
\nthe absurd.<\/p>\n
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Urmuz’s dull existence as a clerk and his unexplained
\nsuicide combined with his apparently absurd works have contributed to the
\nfascination he still exerts on his readers, who wonder if there’s a connection
\nbetween his literature and his life. Critic Paul Cernat elaborates on this:<\/p>\n
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He was a strange man who liked to play but
\nwho also probably had some traumas. He was compared with Kafka, based on their
\nrelationships with their fathers. In reality, however, we don’t know very much
\nabout him, in fact we know very little, and any speculation is plausible. As
\nfar as Urmuz was concerned, there was a split between his public identity and
\nhis private, secret identity, between his public image as a dull clerk and his
\nidentity as an anarchic writer whose work was breaking all the rules of
\nliterature at that time. Despite their anarchic and absurd appearance, his
\nworks were very polished and the result of painstaking effort. Urmuz was like Flaubert,
\npaying attention to every word and the orchestration of his little texts.<\/p>\n
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Even the two texts published during his
\nlifetime, Algazy and
\nGrummer and Isma\u00efl and Turnavitu had been chiselled up to the very last
\nminute before publication. According to Tudor Arghezi, Urmuz wanted to change
\nsome words even after they were sent to the printers. Critic Paul Cernat:<\/p>\n
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Urmuz’ small but explosive
\nbody of work became really known after his death, some of it appearing in the
\n1920s in the Contimporanul
\nmagazine published by Ion
\nVinea and Marcel Iancu. But most of his work appeared in UNU magazine, being published by
\nthe writers Sa\u0219a Pan\u0103 and Geo Bogza who in the 1930s contacted Urmuz’ sister, who
\nhad a chest full of his manuscripts. They published whatever they found there
\nand which hadn’t been published before. And it seems there’s still more to be
\npublished. (…) A lot has been lost, but what we do have is more than enough to
\nensure Urmuz a status he would never have dreamt of.<\/p>\n
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Urmuz had a great influence
\non the generation of avantgarde writers after the First World War and beyond. Tudor
\nArghezi’s prose was also influenced by Urmuz. The generations of post-1965
\nwriters, the so-called T\u00e2rgovi\u0219te school and the poets Marin Sorescu and Nichita
\nSt\u0103nescu also showed the influence of Urmuz, which can even be traced in today’s
\npost-modernist literature. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Urmuz is one of the most important Romanian avantgarde writers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":169594,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45210],"tags":[45579,35810,45578],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-169593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-rri-encyclopaedia","tag-avantgarde","tag-literature","tag-urmuz"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n