Lucian Raicu

Lucian Raicu (pen name of Bernard Leibovici; 12 May 1934 – 22 November 2006) was a Romanian literary critic, biographer, memoirist, and magazine editor.

Early life
The future Lucian Raicu was officially registered as Bernard Leibovici. His parents entrepreneur Carol Leibovici and his wife Uca (née Solomon), who worked as a clerk. Bernard was born in his grandparents' home at Iași, on 12 May 1934; as he explained in a 1975 interview, Uca only traveled there for her labor, returning with him to her preferred home in Bârlad after just three weeks. 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; his brother, the novelist Virgil Duda (born Rubin Leibovici), was similarly attached to the Jewish identity, as discussed by his book of essays on Mihail Sebastian.

Comparatist and novelist Matei Călinescu recalls that "Bernard [...] was my first Jewish friend and the first one to have made me aware of how difficult it is to have been a Romanian Jew [...]. Bernard did not view his being a Romanian—or his being Jewish—as a miracle, just as I am sure that he did not regard being Romanian—or Jewish—as some metaphysical curse". According to Călinescu, this attitude showed a rift that existed between Raicu's take on his own identity and the struggles of his contemporary, the Christianized Jew Nicolae Steinhardt. Raicu also viewed himself as quintessentially tied to Western Moldavia and its traditional spirit, which he describes as "above all a critical spirit [Raicu's emphasis]." Surviving World War II and its waves of antisemitic persecution, he integrated with the local version of the Jewish left, increasingly associated with the Romanian Communist Party after 1944. As noted by literary historian Leon Volovici, both Raicu and his future wife, Sonia Larian, belonged to a generation of young Jews who were won over by "communist romanticism" around 1948 (when the Romanian Kingdom was toppled by a communist regime), only to "wake up" from its lure around 1960.

Having graduated from Bârlad's Gheorghe Roșca Codreanu High School, Raicu moved to Bucharest. In 1951, he enlisted at the University of Bucharest Faculty of Philology. He only spent a year there, transferring to the newly formed Eminescu School of Literature, which served the Writers' Union of Romania (USR). The institution is seen by his future friend Nicolae Breban as a "rather grotesque and amateurish cultural and Soviet nursery"; also according to Breban, it was probably there that he met Nicolae Labiș, with whom he formed the "greatest friendship of his entire life". Raicu wrote for the Union of Communist Youth paper, Scînteia Tineretului, where his circle of friends expanded to include Radu Cosașu, Teodor Mazilu, Eugen Mandric, and Florin Mugur. He and Duda brought Mazilu into their home on Uranus Hill, where they were bunking with Labiș, Ion Gheorghe, and George Mărgărit. Raicu became a literary columnist at Viața Romînească in 1952, before his graduation from the School of Literature (which came in 1954); he was also editor at Gazeta Literară. At that stage, he was giving his full support to the official line of Socialist Realism. As later reviewed by literary historian Ana Selejan, he argued from within Marxist literary criticism, identifying and condemning "bourgeois remnants" in the works of his generation colleagues. He thus censured Ion Brad for communist poetry that still seemed "idyllic", and attacked popular magazines for featuring "mediocre" poems by the likes of Gica Iuteș.

Raicu was instead enthusiastic about the poetic debut of the still teen-aged Mugur, describing him as a model to follow (though still occasionally chiding him for not writing fables about work-shy peasants). In mid-1955, he took the side of "scientific" literary criticism, which relied on objectivity as an obligation. From this position, he debated with his colleague Vera Călin, whose version of Marxism was more programmatically subjectivist. A subjective "positivity" eventually won over in his own columns, which offered encouragements to generation upon generation of Romanian writers. According to the younger critic Ioana Pârvulescu, it should not be mistaken for naivete, but rather for "[giving] everyone a chance"—Raicu "does not admire all those whom he reads", but gave each one of them his full attention. A younger colleague, Daniel Cristea-Enache, remarked that Raicu was unusually charitable in this respect, sometimes to the point of close reading even through the more "irrelevant books". Later, in discussing the work of Leo Tolstoy (whom he had read profusely while recovering from an accident), Raicu took a stance against critical revisionism. His "empathetic vision", Cristea-Enache notes, risked identifying Tolstoy's entire life and work with his "peak", entirely glossing over the more questionable aspects. Scholar Alexandra Ciocârlie similarly notes that Raicu's "participatory criticism" combines a "complete, near-religious, faith" and a "tremulous voice", sometimes to the point of annoying readers.

In the anti-communist exile, essayist Virgil Ierunca once listed young Raicu as one of the "pseudo-writers [and] professional opportunists". Ciocârlie contrarily believes that Raicu "emerged unaltered" from the Socialist-Realist epoch, preserving his true self when others did not. He was also defended by Călinescu, who writes that his friend's "genuine idealism" was already set on a collision course with the communists' "hypocritical, contradictory humanism". 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 (though, as Breban cautions, he was never an erudite). According to his own testimony, he frequented the more senior critic Savin Bratu, who let him and Labiș, who let him borrow "good books", at a time when these had been removed from public libraries. Raicu eventually completed his classical training by returning to the Faculty of Philology, whence he graduated in 1958.

In ideological terms, by 1956 Raicu and Cosașu had come to side with the anti-Stalinist left, secretly supporting the revolution in neighboring Hungary. In August 1958, after having refused to engage in self-criticism for his perceived liberal socialism, he was ousted from the Communist Party, and, by his own account, became a nonperson. 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. Living for a while on the margins of society, Raicu still celebrated the victories of international socialism, including the Cuban Revolution and the Lumumbist initiatives, as well as any signs of continued liberalization in Romania itself. Demoralized by his "quasi-interdiction", and also shocked by Labiș's untimely death, he found a new creative home in a circle of writers gravitating around Nichita Stănescu. This informal club was also joined by Călinescu, Cosașu, Breban, Mazilu, Mugur, and Duda, as well by Cezar Baltag, Grigore Hagiu, Modest Morariu, Petre Stoica, and cartoonist Eugen Mihăescu.

Major creative period
Raicu and Larian had been accepted back into the literary profession by 1963, when they were collecting their salaries from the USR and could rent a "tiny apartment on Între Gîrle Street" (south of Piața Unirii). By 1967, Lucian had been reassigned to Gazeta Literară. The editorial team nominally was headed by Tiberiu Utan, and also including Baltag, Valeriu Cristea, Sami Damian, Eugen Simion, and Gabriel Dimisianu. As recalled by the latter, communist hardliners put increasing pressure on the magazine, making all of them miserable; "instead of fighting [for us], Utan took his refuge in alcohol." Especially close to Călinescu during those years, the critic confided his exact sentiments about the regime they were living under: he centered his ethics on a notion of "personal dignity", and tolerant of some forms of collaboration with the authorities. He drew the line at collaboration with Securitate agents, believing that anyone who agreed to become an informant was morally salvageable. Later in his Romanian career, he was mainly employed as an editor at România Literară magazine, itself issued by the USR. He was also a columnist—as noted by Ciocârlie, he and his colleague Gheorghe Grigurcu were "among the most subtle poetry analysts in that era". Upon fully discarding the ideological constraints of Marxist-Leninism, Raicu was seen by Volovici as a "critic of great spiritual complexity and depth, fascinated by the mysteries of creativity"; Pârvulescu reserves praise for Raicu's method of viewing the literary process "from within", as an "initiation" of his readers.

Raicu's first published volume was a monograph on Liviu Rebreanu, appearing at Editura pentru literatură in 1967 and earning him the annual USR prize. Re-reviewing it years later, fellow critic Dimisianu commended Raicu for having managed to usurp the "cliches of Socialist Realism" by exploring the deep-layered symbolism in Rebreanu's novels. According to Breban, it is a work "unique in our literature", which also displayed Raicu's contempt for officialdom. Among Raicu's generation colleagues, Nicolae Manolescu spoke of his practicing a "democracy of literature" and "cult of nuances", reminiscent of Tudor Vianu's earlier essays. 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." His rejection of formalism and objectivity also led Raicu to part with the emerging tradition, or "new criticism". The same is asserted by Cernat, who places Raicu within an anti-dogmatic, biography-centered tradition that rejected theorizing by the likes of Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes; to the modernists and the postmodernists, he seemed "antiquated". Cernat sees Raicu as philosophically akin to Lev Shestov, Benjamin Fondane, and Georges Poulet.

As one of the scholars who reviewed Raicu's work, Al. Cistelecan reports: "No other Romanian critic, old or new, has had as lofty, as sacramental, as 'fundamentalist' a conception of literature [...]; none has professed the mystique of an oeuvre that would be more generous and more radical". According to Cistelecan, Raicu ultimately found in applied phenomenology (and in "subdued Platonism") an instrument for separating "authentic" literature out of the larger field of art for art's sake. Specifically, he argued that "true" writings contain a revelation, or at least the promise of a revelation. Raicu expanded on such principles with the essays called Structuri literare ("Literary Structures"), put out by Editura Eminescu in 1973, then with a literary biography of Nikolai Gogol, appearing at Cartea Românească in 1974. As noted by Pârvulescu, the latter work shows him as a "detective", opposing his "daring presuppositions" to the critical consensus (regarded by Raicu himself as utterly stale). Breban praises the volume as one of "acute originality", while Cernat calls it "splendid". In similar vein, Ciocârlie sees it as Raicu's most accomplished—since it was no longer tributary to the "religion of literature", and as such could reflect on the more miserable and mediocre aspects of Gogol's career.

In a 1991 article, critic Alexandru George, who had been repressed under communism, assessed that Raicu, alongside Manolescu and Simion, had "barely nuanced" the communist "scale of values", and therefore could only find themselves rejected by more rigurous anti-communists (such as George himself). Despite integrating with the new cultural climate of national-communism, Raicu was still not readmitted into the Communist Party. 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 tow of them, as well as their colleague Cristea, on a list of non-party literary professionals; these would only receive half pay for their services. For at least four years before, and throughout the remainder of his Romanian career, Raicu had had his phone bugged by the Securitate, which kept records of his conversations. Both Raicu and Cristea openly challenged the censorship apparatus in 1978, when they both published praise of Camera de alături, by the former political prisoner Paul Goma. Their respective chronicles appeared just as Goma's novel was being withdrawn from the shops by Securitate agents.

In 1976, Cartea Românească had featured another collection of Raicu's essays, as Critica, formă de viață ("Criticism as a Lifestyle"). The critic and his wife were good friends with the manager, Marin Preda; poet Ileana Mălăncioiu, who witnessed their gatherings, reports that Preda was impressed by the couple's solidarity, referring to them as the "Raicu Siblings". Lucian returned as a biographer in 1977, when Editura Eminescu put out his monograph on Labiș. Six other works of essays came out at Cartea Românească: Practica scrisului și experiența lecturii ("Practicing Writing and Experiencing Reading", 1978), Reflecții asupra spiritului creator ("Reflections on the Creative Self", 1979), Printre contemporani ("Among Contemporaries", 1980), Calea de acces ("A Way In", 1982), Fragmente de timp ("Fragments in Time", 1984), Scene din romanul literaturii ("Scenes from Literature as a Novel", 1985). As noted in 2007 by Cristea-Enache, these works, of which Calea de acces was Raicu's "most beautiful", consolidated his appeal among a Romanian readership, with its "amazingly high interest [in] authentic literature." Partly centered on exploring the deeper structures of George Bacovia's poems, they also evidence Raicu's belief in poetry as the more superior form of writing, for "teaching one how to live". Printre contemporani was awarded the Romanian Academy's Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu Prize.

Exile, disease, death
For a while in the 1970s and '80s, Raicu was a "central figure" in local literary life, though he remained largely uninterested in cultivating his own celebrity status. He and Larian were by then trying to persuade the regime to grant them a Romanian passport, allowing them to visit Western countries—as Călinescu reports, they met "enormous and humiliating" obstacles in this quest. In November 1986, they were allowed by the regime to leave Romania on an extended trip to France. As Raicu later told Duda, they "simply could not return" to Romania. The critic was forced by such circumstances to leave his manuscripts behind, but the authorities remained careless in handling these; as a result, poet Mircea 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. As Cristea-Enache writes, Raicu's departure effectively destroyed his cultural capital in Romania, and never allowed him to grow as a writer in his adoptive France (where he only endured as a "misfit"). A similar point is made by Raicu's disciple, Simona Sora, who notes that he began suffering from an "non-analyzed depression", which also made him turn his attention to absurdist works by a fellow exile, Eugène Ionesco. While he and Larian settled in Paris, Duda took longer to leave Romania. He ultimately settled in Israel, alongside other Romanian refuseniks, in the late 1980s. Raicu's own French period, meanwhile, witnessed the publication of his 1974 book of commentary as Avec Gogol ("With Gogol"), in a translation curated by Éditions L'Âge d'Homme in 1992. As Ciocârlie reports, the "admirable essay never gained attention within the French school of criticism." The indifference was also documented by critic Michel Crépu, who discovered that he was the only one to have published a review of the work (which he called "formidable").

Raicu was for a while employed as a correspondent by Radio Free Europe. After the Romanian Revolution had toppled communism in December 1989, he returned to publishing in Romania as well, mainly with articles carried by Vatra and România Literară. In 1993, his literary diary on Ionesco appeared at Editura Litera International (fragments were translated and published by the Revue des Deux Mondes in March 2007); from 1987, he had been preparing a monograph on Ionesco's "vital circuit", with the diary as his rough draft. Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu read it as a document of Raicu's own "mistrusting tiredness", as evidenced by Raicu's reliance on oblique expressions, by his refusal to clearly indicate citations from Ionescu's writings, and by his stated belief that not all of Ionescu's works were worthy of attention.

In 1994, Raicu published some of his memoirs at Cartea Românească, as Scene, reflecții, fragmente ("Scenes, Reflections, Fragments"). Raicu opted never to return to Romania, despite being visited in Paris by his old friend Simion, who tried to persuade him otherwise. This decision reportedly hinted at a certain malaise—Sora contends that Raicu was aware of his having "broken up" with the Romanian society, and also that he could not bear to live out a disillusionment with the post-revolutionary regime. The period witnessed a reassessment of his early work from radical positions—the critical positions expressed by Ierunca and George found a more polemical expressions in an overview of communist literature, put out in 2001 by Marian Popa. Popa regarded Raicu as a former exponent of the "Jewish supremacy" over Romanian letters, and also as one of the "Jews who set the tone for nonconformism" (such statements were quoted by another critic, Dan C. Mihăilescu, as samples of Popa's "unverifiable and irresponsible" claims).

Raicu's final regular contributions were letters to his Romanian public. Read by him over Radio France Internationale, they mainly introduced newer developments Western European literature, 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"). As Cernat reveals, all of these essays had been written in the 1990s, since the author was by then bedridden, "exhausted with disease", and "nearly blind". Old friends who managed to contact him include Mălăncioiu, who reports that he was dependent on his wife, despondent, but also that he "had not changed his views on life." Manolescu, who served for a while as Romania's UNESCO ambassador, also tried to contact Raicu and Larian, but was told that they were not receiving visits. He later surmised that this was due to their having descended into poverty. Receiving a USR special prize in 2003, Raicu lived to see a reissue of his Calea de acces at Polirom publishers (2004), which was supposed to revive interest in his work. Also that year, poet Emil Brumaru collected the epistles he had sent to Raicu in the 1970s, when they shared employment at România Literară. The edition had humorous undertones, as Raicu had never answered any of the letters. Mălăncioiu believes that the critic had consciously avoided Brumaru: while he enjoyed the letters' intertexuality, rich in allusions to Russian literature, he must have disliked Brumaru's "literary-sexual and sexual-literary obsessions".

Raicu ultimately died in Paris on 22 November 2006, and was cremated at Père Lachaise Cemetery. The small ceremony, reportedly financed by Manolescu from a Romanian state fund, 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 artist Florica Cordescu, essayist Magda Cârneci, and Raicu's friend Dinescu. Carmen Mușat handled and prefaced a posthumous anthology of his essays, which appeared in 2009 at Editura Hasefer of Bucharest. The "letters from Paris" were collected in two editions. The first, overseen by Livius Ciocârlie for Cartea Românească, appeared in 2010. A larger selection was done by Sora on behalf of the Romanian Cultural Institute, in 2016.