Bonifaciu Florescu | |
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 Florescu, ca. 1890 | |
| Born | Bonifacius Florescu May 17, 1848 Pest, Kingdom of Hungary |
| Died | December 18, 1899 (aged 51) Bucharest, Kingdom of Romania |
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| Occupation |
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| Nationality | Wallachian (1848–1859) Romanian (1859–1899) |
| Period | ca. 1865–1899 |
| Genre | |
| Literary movement | Neoclassicism Didacticism Literatorul Decadence |
| Spouse | Rose-Henriette Le Roho d'Alcobia |
Bonifaciu Florescu (first name also Boniface, Bonifacio, Bonifati, last name also Floresco; born Bonifacius Florescu;[1] May 17, 1848 – December 18, 1899) was a Romanian polygraph, the illegitimate son of writer-revolutionary Nicolae Bălcescu. Born secretly outside his parents' native Wallachia, at Pest, he was taken by his aristocratic mother in France, growing up as an erudite Francophone and Francophile. Florescu graduated from the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the University of Rennes, returning home at age 25 to become a successful lecturer, polemicist, and historian of culture. Influenced by his father's politics, he was for a while a prominent figure on the far-left of Romanian liberalism and nationalism, which pitted him against the conservative society Junimea, and against his own conservative cousin, Prime Minister Ion Emanuel Florescu. The conflict led to his losing a professorship at Iași University and being sidelined when applying for chairs at the University of Bucharest. His critique of Junimist literature, structured around a classical defense of prosody, inspired a libel by Mihai Eminescu—famously depicting Florescu as a "homunculus".
Florescu had significant success as a self-proclaimed irredentist, agitating for Romanian causes in disputed Bukovina and Transylvania. Ultimately, however, he failed in his bid to rise through the National Liberal Party, as the latter moved to the center, and fell back on independent journalism, founding several periodicals of his own. He had a long but interrupted collaboration with another dissident liberal and poet, Alexandru Macedonski, who co-opted him on his Literatorul editing team during the 1880s. A precursor, but not an affiliate, of the Romanian Symbolist movement, Florescu had steadier friendships with the younger Symbolists Mircea Demetriade and Iuliu Cezar Săvescu. His main contribution to pre-Symbolist belles-lettres is prose poetry in the manner of Catulle Mendès.
A committed bohemian, whose lifestyle interfered with his literary output and his teaching job at Saint Sava, Florescu is sometimes read as a herald of decadent writing. He was important to the Macedonskian Symbolists for his familiarity with French culture, but was primarily an expert in 18th-century literature. His criticism, modeled on Villemain, Sainte-Beuve and Taine, was perceived as refined in its context, but later enlisted objections for its pedantry and amateurism. He was a prolific translator passionate about exotic topics, authoring some of the first Romanian versions of stories by Edgar Allan Poe.
- ^ Potra, p. 133