Poor Dionis

Poor Dionis

Detail of Carl Spitzweg's "Poor Poet" (1839), a supposed visual inspiration for Eminescu's story
Author	Mihai Eminescu
Original title	Sărmanul Dionis
Translator	Sylvia Pankhurst
Language	Romanian
Genre	Fantasy, historical fantasy, philosophical fiction, satire
Publication date	1872
Publication place	Romania
Published in English	1979
Media type	Print
OCLC	635101592
Original text	Sărmanul Dionis at Romanian Wikisource

Poor Dionis or Poor Dionysus (Romanian: Sărmanul Dionis, originally spelled Sermanul Dionisie;^[1][2] also translated as Wretched Dionysus or The Sorrowful Dionis) is an 1872 prose work by Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu, classified by scholars as either a novel, a novella or a modern fairy tale. It is a liberal interpretation of contemporary German philosophy and ancient motifs, discussing themes such as time travel and reincarnation through the lens of post-Kantian idealism. Its eponymous central character, a daydreaming scholar, moves between selves over time and space, between his miserable home, his earlier existence as a monk in 15th-century Moldavia, and his higher-level existence as a celestial Zoroaster.

Poor Dionis is one of the first, and most characteristic, works of fantasy in Romanian literature, and one of the poet's last Romantic texts. Beyond its philosophical vocabulary, the story is Eminescu's intertextual homage to the founders of German Romanticism (E. T. A. Hoffmann, Novalis) and modern French literature (Théophile Gautier). Read out by Eminescu upon his induction to Junimea literary club, it was dismissed as an incoherent oddity by critics of the day, and overlooked by researchers before 1900. It was then reevaluated by successive generations, beginning with the Romanian Symbolists, serving to inspire both the modernists and the postmodernists.

Traditionally, Poor Dionis has intrigued researchers with its cultural complexity, discussed in connection with the Vedanta, Gnosticism, or the theory of relativity. Its unreliable depiction of the historical past is also noted in connection with invented tradition, in the context of Romanian nationalism, while its depiction of mundane contemporary scenes may offer autofictional insight into Eminescu's biography. Its favorable depiction of Jews and Judaism also caught attention, and was held in contrast to other works by Eminescu, which border on antisemitism. Various scholars, however, see Poor Dionis mainly as a work of sheer literary fancy.