page_title: Mateiu Caragiale
section_title: Mateism under communism
hierarchical_section_title: Mateiu Caragiale / Legacy / Mateism under communism
caption_attribution_description: English: 1985 Romanian Post, 2 lei, multicoloured, representing Mateiu Caragiale; Series:Famous personalities; Design: Eugen Palade
context_page_description: Mateiu Ion Caragiale was a Romanian poet and prose writer, best known for his novel Craii de Curtea-Veche, which portrays the milieu of boyar descendants before and after World War I. Caragiale's style, associated with Symbolism, the Decadent movement of the fin de siècle, and early modernism, was an original element in the Romanian literature of the interwar period. In other late contributions, Caragiale pioneered detective fiction locally, but there is disagreement over whether his work in the field produced a complete narrative or just fragments. The scarcity of writings he left is contrasted by their critical acclaim and a large, mostly posthumous, following, commonly known as mateists.
  Also known as an amateur heraldist and graphic artist, the young Caragiale published his works sporadically, seeking instead to impose himself in politics and pursuing a career in the civil service. He was associated with the Conservative-Democratic Party, and then the People's League, and ultimately raised controversy by supporting the Central Powers during their occupation of Romania.
context_section_description: Mateism, growing during the late stages of the interwar period, took the aspect of an underground cultural phenomenon during the communist regime. Tașcu Gheorghiu, a Surrealist author whose Bohemian lifestyle was itself described as a reflection of Craii..., had memorized large sections of the novel and could recite them by heart. According to Eugen Simion, dramatist Aurel Baranga is reputed to have done the same. During communism, Gheorghiu published a translation from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard, which literary critic Carmen Mușat believes was marked by the tone of mateism. Caragiale's aesthetics contrasted with those of the 1950s Socialist Realist establishment. However, after the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin signaled a relative change in cultural tenets, Communist Party affiliate and writer Petru Dumitriu wrote in favor of recovering supposed "realistic sections" of works by both Mateiu Caragiale and Tudor Arghezi. Eugen Simion writes that, late in the same decade, students at the University of Bucharest were investing their time trying to determine the exact location of houses described in Craii.... Also according to Eugen Simion, an attempt by poet Anatol E. Baconsky to republish the volume was met with a stiff reaction from the censorship apparatus, and, as a consequence of this episode, the main Communist Party organ, Scînteia, renewed its campaign against Caragiale. Matei Călinescu recalled that, "during the dark 1950–60 decade", he clandestinely read Craii... and shared his thoughts on it with a group of friends, noting that this was part of a "secret life" which contrasted with the rigors one had to obey in public.
  With the relative liberalization during the 1960s, which followed the rise of Nicolae Ceaușescu as communist leader, Caragiale's work enjoyed a more favorable reception. At that stage, nationalism and national communism became standards of official discourse, and intellectuals such as Edgar Papu were allowed to reinterpret Romanian culture on the basis of nationalist tenets: Papu's controversial theory, known as "Protochronism", claimed that Romanians as a group were at the source of any innovative movement in world culture. Papu thus believed that Caragiale, whom he described as superior to Flaubert, had foreshadowed Lampedusa's writing techniques. Independent of this approach, Mateiu Caragiale was being rediscovered by new generations of writers. In 1966, Viața Românească published Radu Albala's În deal, pe Militari ("On the Hill, in Militari"), which was a sequel and final chapter of Sub pecetea tainei. Albala was significantly influenced by Caragiale throughout his work, as was his contemporary Alexandru George in his series of fiction writings. Other such authors are Fănuș Neagu, who was inspired by Craii... to write his 1976 book The Handsome Lunatics of the Big Cities, and Virgiliu Stoenescu, whose poetry, according to Barbu Cioculescu, was influenced by "the charm of word appositions" in Caragiale's poems. Caragiale's name was also cited by the writer Geo Bogza, who, in his youth, was a major figure of the Romanian avant-garde movement. In one of his late prose pieces, titled Ogarii, "The Borzois", Bogza, who praised the dog breed for its innate grace, wrote: "I do not know if Mateiu Caragiale, who thought himself so uncommon, ever owned borzois. But, if he did, I'm sure he gazed on them with melancholy and with secret envy."
  During the final stages of Ceaușescu's rule, when liberalization was curbed, matein writings were rediscovered and reclaimed by the Optzeciști group of authors, themselves noted for attempting to evade cultural guidelines by adopting fantasy and avant-garde literature. Mircea Cărtărescu, a leading exponent of the Optzeciști and an advocate of Postmodernism, referred to Caragiale as one of his interwar precursors, while Ștefan Agopian acknowledged he pursued Mateiu's interests in his 1981 novel Tache de catifea ("Tache de Velvet"). According to critic Dumitru Ungureanu, it was mainly through Radu Albala that the matein model seeped into the work of
caption: Mateiu Caragiale on a 1985 Romanian stamp
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