page_title: Păstorel Teodoreanu
section_title: Particular episodes
hierarchical_section_title: Păstorel Teodoreanu / Work / Jester Harrow / Particular episodes
caption_attribution_description: Bild aus Seite 581 in "Die Gartenlaube". Image from page 581 of journal Die Gartenlaube, 1857. Deutsch: keine Bildunterschrift English: no caption
context_page_description: Păstorel Teodoreanu, or just Păstorel, was a Romanian humorist, poet and gastronome, the brother of novelist Ionel Teodoreanu and brother in law of writer Ștefana Velisar Teodoreanu. He worked in many genres, but is best remembered for his parody texts and his epigrams, and less so for his Symbolist verse. His roots planted in the regional culture of Western Moldavia, which became his main source of literary inspiration, Păstorel was at once an opinionated columnist, famous wine-drinking bohemian, and decorated war hero. He worked with the influential literary magazines of the 1920s, moving between Gândirea and Viața Românească, and cultivated complex relationships with literary opinion-makers such as George Călinescu.
  After an unsuccessful but scandalous debut in drama, Teodoreanu perfected his work as a satirist, producing material which targeted the historian-politician Nicolae Iorga and the literary scholar Giorge Pascu, as well as food criticism which veered into fantasy literature. As an affiliate of Țara Noastră, he favored a brand of Romanian nationalism which ran against Iorga's own.
context_section_description: Although the presence of anachronisms makes it hard to even locate the stories' time-frame, they seem to be generally referencing the 18th- and 19th-century Phanariote era, during which Romanians adopted a decadent, essentially anti-heroic, lifestyle. A recurrent theme is that of the colossal banquet, in most cases prompted by nothing other than the joy of company or a carpe diem mentality, but so excessive that they drive the organizers into moral and material bankruptcy. In all five episodes, Păstorel disguises himself as various unreliable narrators. He is, for instance, a decrepit General Coban (Pursângele căpitanului) and a retired courtesan (Inelul Marghioliței). In Neobositulŭ Kostakelŭ, a "found manuscript", he has three narrative voices: that of the writer, Pantele; that of the skeptic reviewer, Balaban; and that of the concerned "philologist", with his absurd critical apparatus (a parody of scientific conventions). The alter ego, "Harrow", is only present (and mentioned by name) in the rhyming Predoslovie ("Foreword"), but is implicit in all the stories.
  Also in Neobositulŭ Kostakelŭ, Teodoreanu's love for role-playing becomes a study in intertextuality and candid stupidity. Pantele is a reader of Miron Costin, but seemingly incapable of understanding his literary devices. He reifies metaphoric accounts about a Moldavian Princedom "flowing with milk and honey": "Had this been in any way true, people would be glued to fences, like flies". Even the protagonist, Koﬆakel, is a writer, humorist and parodist, who has produced his own chronicle of "obscenities" with the stated purpose of irritating Ion Neculce (who thus makes a brief appearance within Harrow's "chronicle"). The deadpan critical apparatus accompanying such intertextual dialogues is there to divert attention from Teodoreanu's narrative tricks and anachronisms. Hrimiuc suggests that, by pretending to read his own "chronicle" as a valid historical record, Păstorel was sending in "negative messages about how not to decode the work."
  Neobositulŭ Kostakelŭ and Pursângele căpitanului comprise some of Păstorel's ideas about the Moldavian ethos. The locals have developed a strange mystical tradition, worshiping Cotnari wine, and regarding those who abstain from it as "enemies of the church". The author also highlights the Moldavian boyars' loose sexual mores: weak husbands are resigned cuckolds, Romani slaves are used for staging sexual farces; however, as Zarifopol argues, this type of prose does not seek to be "aphrodisiac". The scenes of merrymaking are played out for a melancholy effect. In Neobositulŭ Kostakelŭ, the antagonist is Panagake, an outsider (Graeco-Romanian) and usurper of tradition. Although he suffers defeat and ridicule, he is there to announce that the era of joy is coming to a conclusion. As critic Doris Mironescu notes, characters experience an "entry into time", except "theirs is not Great history, but a minor one, that of intimate disasters, of homemaking tragedies and the domestic hell."
  Hronicul satirizes the conventions of Romanian neoromanticism and of the commercial adventure novel, or penny dreadful, particularly so in Cumplitul Trașcă Drăculescul. The eponymous hero is a colossal and unpredictable hajduk, born with the necessary tragic flaw. He lives in continuous erotic frenzy, pushing himself on all available women, "without regard as to whether they were virgins or ripe women, not even if they had happened to be his cousins or his aunts". Still, he is consumed by his passion for the nubile Sanda, but she dies, of "chest trouble", on the very night of their wedding. The broken Trașcă commits suicide on the spot. These events are narrated with the crescendo of romantic novels, leading to the unceremonious punch line: "And it so happened that this Trașcă of the Draculas was ninety years of age."
caption: Domestic scene of boyardom in the Danubian Principalities (Die Gartenlaube, 1857)
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