Dimitrie Stelaru | |
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 Stelaru during an interview with Adrian Păunescu for România Literară, 1969 | |
| Born | Dumitru Petrescu 8 March 1917 Segarcea-Vale, Teleorman County, German-occupied Romania |
| Died | 28 November 1971 (aged 54) Bucharest, Socialist Republic of Romania |
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| Period | c. 1935–1971 |
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Dimitrie Stelaru (pen name of Dumitru Petrescu, later formalized as Petrescu-Stelaru; 8 March 1917 – 28 November 1971) was a Romanian avant-garde poet, novelist, playwright, and bohemian figure. Originating from the rural area of Teleorman County, he was paternally orphaned at birth, in the Romanian campaign of World War I. He was adopted by a bricklayer from Turnu Măgurele, who turned the boy toward the Seventh-day Adventist Church and forced him to undergo religious education. In his adolescence, Stelaru rebelled against this upbringing, and took up poetry—initially Christian-themed or neo-romantic in content. He became a habitual vagrant, taking up jobs from porter and stevedore to coal miner. His youth is hard to reconstruct, due to patchy records and Stelaru's own passion for autofiction; it is however known that he lived in extreme poverty in Bucharest, romantically involved with a tuberculosis-stricken woman, who became the focus of his early love poems.
Despite his own pedigree within the precariat, Stelaru shunned proletarian literature in the 1930s; his only influence from left-wing culture was Panait Istrati, who became one of his favorite writers. While preserving the trappings of neo-romanticism, and drawing heavily from Edgar Allan Poe, he sometimes embraced an extreme form of literary naturalism, and slid into literary Expressionism. The ethereal qualities of his poetic imagery, meanwhile, were informed by his familiarity with Surrealism, to which he also introduced his writer friend, Constant Tonegaru. Stelaru himself was discovered by fellow poet Eugen Jebeleanu, and became the focus of veneration by the younger writers. By 1944, he had built up a literary network which included Jebeleanu, Tonegaru, Geo Dumitrescu, Ion Caraion, Pavel Chihaia, Ben Corlaciu, Mihu Dragomir, and Miron Radu Paraschivescu. His contribution as a poet bridged the gap between the older modernists at Sburătorul (where he was personally welcomed by Eugen Lovinescu) and avant-garde circles, including Albatros and Adonis.
Experiencing literary fame by the start of World War II, Stelaru amused himself by staging his own death in 1940. Over the following years, he tried to slide back into vagrancy and obscurity, as a draft evader. Upon the war's end, he reemerged as an art teacher in Sighișoara, and made a brief return to publishing. Such projects were ended with the rise of a communist regime in 1947; Stelaru embraced proletarian themes, but abhorred the guidelines of Socialist Realism. He and Chihaia unsuccessfully tried to defect as stowaways, from Constanța Port. The regime reciprocated his disdain with a ban on his work, also preventing him from even joining the Writers' Union of Romania. Stelaru lived out the ban as an unemployed man in Turnu Măgurele, but was slowly reinstated in the mid-1950s, when he was allowed to publish modern fairy tales and works of children's drama. Again lambasted in 1958, he was finally recovered and progressively rehabilitated in the early 1960s.
Returning to his work and formally consecrated by the Writers' Union, Stelaru was also given his first permanent home—an apartment in Berceni, where he lived with his third wife and second child. Between 1967 and 1971, he produced a large corpus of poetry and prose, including new plays which echoed Absurdism. He was then physically incapacitated by cirrhosis, which ultimately killed him in November 1971. His work was again ignored, then rediscovered in the mid-to-late 1980s; by then, his descendants had split between Romania and West Germany.