page_title: Ion Creangă
section_title: Early 20th century and interwar echoes
hierarchical_section_title: Ion Creangă / Legacy / Early 20th century and interwar echoes
caption_attribution_description: English: 1937 Romanian Post, 6 lei, dark brown, representing Ion Creangă; Series:Ion Creangă
context_page_description: Ion Creangă was a Romanian writer, raconteur and schoolteacher. A main figure in 19th century Romanian literature, he is best known for his Childhood Memories volume, his novellas and short stories, and his many anecdotes. Creangă's main contribution to fantasy and children's literature includes narratives structured around eponymous protagonists, as well as fairy tales indebted to conventional forms. Widely seen as masterpieces of the Romanian language and local humor, his writings occupy the middle ground between a collection of folkloric sources and an original contribution to a literary realism of rural inspiration. They are accompanied by a set of contributions to erotic literature, collectively known as his "corrosives".
  A defrocked Romanian Orthodox priest with an unconventional lifestyle, Creangă made an early impact as an innovative educator and textbook author, while pursuing a short career in nationalist politics with the Free and Independent Faction. His literary debut came late in life, closely following the start of his close friendship with Romania's national poet Mihai Eminescu and their common affiliation with the influential conservative literary society Junimea.
context_section_description: A more thorough evaluation of Creangă's literature began after 1900. At the time, it became a topic of interest to the emerging traditionalist and populist trend, illustrated by the two venues rivaling Junimea: the right-wing Sămănătorul, led by Nicolae Iorga, and the left-wing Poporanists, among which was Garabet Ibrăileanu. The new editions of his works enlisted the collaboration of Sămănătorist intellectuals Ilarie Chendi and Ștefan Octavian Iosif. Tudor Vianu however noted that, unlike Eminescu's outlook, Creangă's "authentic ruralism" did not complement the "spiritual complications", global social class perspective and intellectual background associated with these trends, making Creangă "the least Sămănătorist among our writers." According to Ornea, Creangă has "nothing in common" with the Sămănătorul ideology in particular: while the group shared his nostalgic outlook on the rural past in stark contrast to the modernized world, the Moldavian author could "maintain, intelligently, the middle ground between contraries". Likewise, Mircea Braga reacted against the perception of Creangă as announcing a "series" of authors, noting that, for all imitation, he was "an exceptional and, as far as Romanian literary history goes, unique creator."
  Directly influenced by Creangă, several early 20th century and interwar authors within the new traditionalist trend explicitly stood for the legacy of folkloric, spontaneous and unskilled literature: the peasant writer I. Dragoslav, whose memoirs borrow stylistic elements from Creangă's accounts; Constantin Sandu-Aldea, an agriculturalist by profession, who took inspiration from his techniques of rendering dialogue; and Ion Iovescu, whom the Sburătorul literary circle acclaimed as "a new Creangă", and who made ample use of a modernized Muntenian dialect. Similarly, the Aromanian activist and author Nicolae Constantin Batzaria, who divided his career between Romania and the southern Balkans, combined Creangă's storytelling techniques with the traditions of Turkish literature, while the reworking of regional folklore themes earned intellectual Constantin S. Nicolăescu-Plopșor a reputation as "the Oltenian Creangă". During the 1910s, folklorist Tudor Pamfile published a specialized magazine named Ion Creangă in honor of the writer. Creangă's various works also provided starting points for several other writers of diverse backgrounds. They included representatives of the Symbolist movement, such as Victor Eftimiu, who was inspired by Creangă's narrative style in writing his fantasy and verse play Înșir'te mărgărite. Another such author was poet Elena Farago, whose didactic children's story Într-un cuib de rândunică ("Inside a Swallow's Nest") borrows from "The Flax and the Shirt".
  With the interwar period and the spread of modernist literature, a new generation of critics, most notably George Călinescu and Vladimir Streinu, dedicated important segments of their activity to the works of Ion Creangă. Other such figures were Șerban Cioculescu, whose contribution attempts to elucidate the more mysterious parts of the writer's vocabulary, and educator Dumitru Furtună, whose biographical studies provided a main source for subsequent research. By then, interest in Creangă's life and writings had diversified. This phenomenon first touched Romanian theater when I. I. Mironescu dramatized a section of Creangă's Memories as Catiheții de la Humulești ("The Catechists from Humulești")—a literary contribution judged "superfluous" by George Călinescu, who noted that the original was already "dramatic" in style. The writer's stories also became an inspiration for Alfred Mendelsohn and Alexandru Zirra, two Romanian composers who worked in children's musical theater, who adapted, respectively, "Harap Alb" and "The Goat and Her Three Kids". Creangă was also a secondary presence in Mite and Bălăuca, two biographical novels centered on Eminescu's amorous life, written by the prominent interwar critic Eugen Lovinescu, to whom Călinescu reproached having largely ignored Creangă in his nonfictional texts. Creang
caption: Ion Creangă, as depicted on a 1937 Romanian stamp
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