Constantin G. Stere or Constantin Sterea (Romanian; Russian: Konstantin Egorovich Stere, Konstantin Yegorovich Stere or Konstantin Georgievich Stere, Konstantin Georgiyevich Stere; also known under his pen name Sarcaleanu; June 1, 1865 - June 26, 1936) was a Romanian writer, jurist, politician, ideologue of the Poporanist trend, and, in March 1906, co-founder (together with Garabet Ibraileanu and Paul Bujor -- the latter was afterwards replaced by the physician Ioan Cantacuzino) of the literary magazine Viata Romaneasca.

He was born in Horodiste, Soroca County, to a family of boyar origins from Ciripcau, Bessarabia -- which was part of the Russian Empire at the time. Stere was one of the three sons of an ethnic Romanian couple of Russian citizens: Gheorghe or Iorgu Stere (known as Yegor Stepanovich Stere, Egor Stepanovich Stere in Russian), a landowner whose family was originally from Botosani County in the Romanian part of Moldavia, and Pulcheria (Pulkeriia), a member of the impoverished gentry in Bessarabia. He spent most of his early years, until the age of eight, in Ciripcau, where the family manor was located. Around 1874, he graduated from a Chisinau private school where classes were taught German, and entered the school for dvoryane in the city, where he became close friends with Alexandru Grosu and Lev Matveyevich Kogan-Bernstein (who were the basis for the characters Sasa Lungu and Moise Roitman in Stere's novel). It was also around this time that he became acquainted with progressive, utopian socialist, and Darwinist ideas (notably reading the works of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Alexander Herzen, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Peter Lavrovich Lavrov). Stere later indicated that, before the late 1870s, he could not spell the Romanian alphabet, which had just been adopted over the border (see Romanian Cyrillic alphabet), and had to rely on a few books smuggled into Bessarabia for getting a sense of literary Romanian. While still students, Stere and Kogan-Bernstein engaged in revolutionary politics as socialists and Narodniks, initiating a conspirative "self-instruction" cell of six inside their school. The group was affiliated with Narodnaya Volya, and Stere was responsible for multiplying and distributing locally the manifesto issued by the latter after it had assassinated Emperor Alexander II. This was also the first moment when Stere declared his opposition to a Social democratic program, a Narodnik-inspired objection which would later form one of the tenets of his doctrine. He was first arrested in late 1883, after Okhrana units decapitated the Bessarabian wing of the Narodnaya Volya. Detained in Odessa (during which time he read intensely), Stere was frequently visited by Maria Grosu, the sister of Alexandru, who had fallen in love with him -- a Narodnik and a feminist, she asked Stere for a marriage of convenience that was meant to help her become free from parental tutelage (according to the laws of the Russian Empire, unmarried women were under their father's protection). Stere agreed, and they were married in the prison chapel (1885). CANNOTANSWER

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