Ludovic Dauș

Early life and debut

Born in Botoșani, he was the son of Alfred Dauș (also Dousa, Dușa, or Bouschek).^[2] An engineer of Czech origin,^[3][4] he had settled in the United Principalities and taken up various activities in his field of expertise. According to various records, he had participated in the January Uprising, supporting the Polish National Government;^[5] other sources note that he had lived for a while in Ottoman Bosnia.^[6] Ludovic's mother was Maria Negri, a niece of the Moldavian writer Costache Negri, reportedly educated in Lviv.^[6] Through her, Dauș was a member of the boyar aristocracy.^[7]

The future writer, who only took Romanian citizenship in 1899,^[8] attended the A. T. Laurian National College of Botoșani. He prepared for a career in the Romanian Land Forces, enlisting at the Military School of Iași, but disliked the conditions there and moved to Fălticeni.^[7] There, he studied for a while under Eugen Lovinescu, before returning to his home city, and finally to Bucharest, where he attended Sfântu Gheorghe High School—a private school managed by Anghel Demetriescu and George Ionescu-Gion. During the period, he had his very first poems appear in Scipione Bădescu's paper, Curierul Român of Botoșani.^[9] According to his own recollections, he was heavily inspired by the elegiac poetry of Vasile Alecsandri and Heinrich Heine. From such beginnings, he switched to writing "naive, stupid" works, including a dramatic poem "where the protagonist was the head of a decapitated man."^[10] Botoșani and Fălticeni, as prototypes of the Western Moldavian târg, would later form the backdrop for his prose, which includes specific allusions to his school years.^[11]

After taking his baccalaureate in June 1892, Dauș entered the civil service as a copyist at the Ministry of Royal Domains.^[12] He subsequently earned a law degree from Bucharest University (1897)^[4][13] and practiced as a lawyer. While still pursuing his career in the national bureaucracy, Dauș entered the publishing business as co-manager of Alcaly publishers, coordinating their serial Biblioteca pentru toți; the nominal owner, Leon Alcaly, was illiterate.^[14]

Dauș married Margot Soutzo, of the Soutzos clan, then divorced and, in 1910, remarried to the Frenchwoman Ecaterina Thiéry.^[15] He continued to publish poetry, some of it in Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu's Revista Nouă—an "obscure", "entirely impersonal" endeavor, according to historian George Călinescu.^[16] He debuted as a translator in 1896, with Antoine François Prévost's Manon Lescaut, later publishing renditions of Molière (The Imaginary Invalid, 1906), Ivan Turgenev (The Duelist, 1907), Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels, 1908), E. T. A. Hoffmann (Stories, 1909), Leo Tolstoy (The Kreutzer Sonata, 1909), and Arthur Conan Doyle (1909).^[4][17] During those years, as a protege of Ionescu-Gion's, he frequented Hasdeu's literary salon at Editura Socec, where he met and befriended the fellow poet and dramatist Haralamb Lecca.^[18]

Dauș followed up with more dramatic poems of his own, usually performed at the National Theater Bucharest. The series began with plays inspired by Lithuanian history: Akmiutis, in 1898;^[4] and, in 1903, the five-act Eglà.^[19] This work earned him a prize from the Romanian Academy.^[20] In 1902, he returned with Patru săbii ("Four Swords"); followed in 1904 by Blestemul ("The Curse"); in 1906 by Doamna Oltea ("Lady Oltea"), dramatizing the lives of Prince Bogdan and Stephen the Great; and in 1912 by Cumpăna ("The Watershed"). Such works were alternated by novels and novellas: Străbunii ("The Forefathers", 1900); Dușmani ai Neamului ("Enemies of the Nation", 1904); Iluzii ("Illusions", 1908); Satana ("Satan", 1912).^[4][21] All these were panned by critic Ovid Crohmălniceanu, who sees Dauș's early career as "quite fecund, but producing only countless illegible works."^[22] Most were focused on the legendary period before and during the Founding of Moldavia.^[23]

Dauș became loosely affiliated with Literatorul magazine, which reunited Romanian Symbolists with poets who had left the Hasdeu circle. According to historian Nicolae Iorga, at that stage Dauș was still a "literary dilettante".^[24] His various works were by then carried by publications of many hues, including Familia, Luceafărul, Vatra, and Literatură și Știință.^[25] In Adevărul daily, he published several popular translations in feuilleton, using the pen name "Adrian Daria";^[26] other pseudonyms he used for such work include "Adina G." and "Ludovic D." (the latter used for George Ranetti's Zeflemeaua).^[27] In 1894, and again in 1897, he and poet Radu D. Rosetti published the literary weekly Doina, named after the singing style. For a while in 1903, with Emil Conduratu, he put out another magazine, Ilustrațiunea Română ("Romanian Illustration").^[28]

World War I and Bessarabia

A secretary of the prototype Romanian Writers' Society during its first meetings of 1908,^[29] Dauș cut off his links with the Literatorul circle. In 1912, he was writing for Floare Albastră, the anti-Symbolist review put out at Iași by A. L. Zissu.^[30] From 1914, he became a legal expert for the common land department of the Domains Ministry.^[10] Dauș also returned with poetry volume, În zări de foc ("Toward Fiery Horizons"), which came out in 1915, and with translations of Gustave Flaubert—Salammbô in 1913, Madame Bovary in 1915.^[4] He is hailed by some scholars as Romania's best Flaubertian translator.^[31]

In late 1916, Romania entered World War I, but was invaded by the Central Powers. In October 1916, his poem honoring the dead of Turtucaia was hosted in Viitorul newspaper and then in George Coșbuc's Albina.^[32] With Bucharest occupied by the Germans, Dauș fled to Iași, where the Romanian administration had relocated.^[18] During that time, he translated stories by the Countess of Ségur.^[17] Late in the war, his career became focused on Bessarabia, which had recently united with Romania, and he served as founding director (from 1918) of the Chișinău National Theater.^[33] He declared himself especially impressed by the "superstitious" religiousness and aristocratic dignity of Bessarabian peasants, becoming a champion of their case.^[34] In 1920, some of his new poetry was hosted in the local journal, Vulturul Basarabean.^[27]

During his stays in Bucharest, Dauș began frequenting with the modernist salon Sburătorul from its inception in 1919 and also published with regularity in the eponymous magazine.^[35] However, according to colleague I. Peltz, was only welcomed there with "kind condescension" by the Sburătorul house critic, Eugen Lovinescu.^[36] Within this society, Dauș mainly associated with older figures, including Alexandru Văitoianu and Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu.^[37] This positioning also reflected Lovinescu's verdicts: he describes Dauș as a neo-romantic in the proximity of Sămănătorul traditionalism.^[38]

Active politically, Dauș joined the minor Independent Party of Bessarabia, established by Iustin Frățiman, Sergiu Niță, and Constantin Stere, running on its lists during the election of 1919.^[39] He went on to serve in Greater Romania's Assembly of Deputies and Senate, attending Inter-Parliamentary Union conferences.^[40] He favored a radical land reform that reflected Socialist-Revolutionary influence, excoriaing the Bessarabian Peasants' Party for moderating such promises, and singling out Ion Buzdugan and Ion Inculeț as traitors of the peasants.^[34] Rallying with the National Liberal Party, and serving in the Senate during the 1922–1926 legislature, Dauș spoke out for Bessarabian and nationalist causes. Noting the hostile Romanian–Soviet relations, he favored annexing the Moldavian ASSR to Greater Romania.^[41] In September 1926, his connections with Bessarabia were severed, as Ion Livescu took over his managerial position at the region's National Theater. The troupe protested at the time, demanding that Dauș be reinstated.^[42]

Dauș was also director of the State Press, president of the Romanian Athenaeum and of the Bessarabian Press Association, and eventually deputy director of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Company.^[4][43] He returned to publishing first as a poet, with the 1919 Valea Albă ("White Valley")—a dramatic poem about the eponymous battle of 1476; and the 1924 Drumul sângelui ("Trail of Blood"). The latter was an homage to the soldiers dead at Mărășești and elsewhere on the Romanian front.^[44] Dauș's translations of verse drama included Victor Hugo Le roi s'amuse and William Shakespeare's King Lear (both 1924).^[4] He continued in that field with a new play centered on, named after, Vlad Țepeș, performed at the Bucharest National Theater and published in 1930. It earned notoriety and disgust with its depictions of medieval cruelty, including impalement and death by boiling; reviewer Mihail Sevastos sarcastically noted that Dauș only "stopped short of cutting off the actresses' breasts" and never dramatized Vlad's alleged raping by Mehmed the Conqueror. Also according to Sevastos, the play was political theater, urging for the return of a Vlad-like dictator.^[45]

Literary prominence and later life

Dauș's interwar prose drew more attention, and is generally seen as much more accomplished than his earlier output. According to Crohmălniceanu, his novels of the 1920s and '30s were "interesting, commendable for their social observation", with "an actual writer's skill."^[22] According to Lovinescu, Dauș only discovered his literary point of view "at the age when most others lose theirs."^[38] The series includes 1927's Drăceasca schimbare de piele ("A Devilish Shedding of the Skin"), in which a middle-aged woman embraces marital infidelity, then insanity, as she changes into the clothes of a courtesan.^[46] Among the reviewers of the time, Constantin Șăineanu was largely unimpressed, reading Drăceasca schimbare... as an implausible "exceptional, abnormal, sickly case, to be addressed by medical clinics." The eroticized episodes, Șăineanu argues, "are supposed to pass for action."^[47]

Published in 1932, Asfințit de oameni ("A Dimming of Men") documented the decline of boyardom, replaced by "a social mix of Levantines", depicted "with remarkable objectivity and astuteness".^[22] As noted by Călinescu, the upstart and murderer Vangheli Zionis, originally the antagonist, appears more likeable by the end of he book, when he is contrasted with the sadistic boyaress Nathalie Dragnea. Based on "romanticized historical truth", the novel is "not entirely transfigured by art".^[48] Highlighting its narrative of class conflict, Lovinescu sees the novel as a revamped Sămănătorist work, but "solid, realistic, honest", and "without romantic rhetoric."^[49] A final novel, titled O jumătate de om ("Half a Man"), came out in 1937. Noted by Crohmălniceanu for its "ingenious intrigue" and its "nervous" writing,^[50] it follows the submissive and exploitable Traian Belciu through a series of existential failures. These culminate with him being swept up by the world war, dragged into Germanophile circles, and ultimately shot as a deserter. It is, in Lovinescu's view, the best book by Dauș—accomplished as a work of political fiction, but largely failed as a psychological novel, and out of step with modernism.^[49]

By the time of its publishing, Dauș's activity as a translator also covered works by Honoré de Balzac (a version of Eugénie Grandet came out in 1935) and François Coppée (Les Jacobites). His translations from Heine were put to music by the Transylvanian Emil Monția.^[17] Having been awarded the Romanian Writers' Society prize in 1938,^[4][29] the following year he put out memoirs in the magazine Jurnalul Literar.^[51] That year, answering Gherman Pântea's invitation, he also returned to Bessarabia to unveil a monument honoring Ferdinand I of Romania, using the occasion to reinforce unionist sentiment with a patriotic speech.^[52] As an associate of Victor Dombrovski, the Mayor of Bucharest, Dauș helped organize the June 1939 commemoration of Mihai Eminescu, Romania's national poet,^[7] to whom he dedicated several speeches and poems.^[53] His final works, published during World War II, were the play Ioana (1942) and the novella collection Porunca toamnei ("Autumn Commands", 1943).^[4] The former was performed at Bucharest's Studio Theater, and had considerable success. It contrasted the eponymous female hero with a decadent bourgeois society.^[31]

Following King Michael's Coup in August 1944, with Dombrovski returning as Mayor, Dauș was made co-director of Caragiale Theater, sharing this distinction with actor Ion Manolescu and producer Sică Alexandrescu.^[54] He lived to see the first years of Romanian communist rule, dying in Bucharest^[23] and being buried at Colentina cemetery.^[10] Some confusion persists as to his date of death, as some sources have 1953;^[4][55] the most precise accounts indicate that he died on November 17, 1954 and was laid to rest two days after.^[10]

He left various manuscripts, including a verse chronicle of World War II, titled Anii cerniți ("Years of Mourning"), and the unfinished novel Răscruci ("Junctions").^[56] At least three other notebooks of his own poetry, and an "impressive number" of poetry translations (notably, from Charles Baudelaire, Alexander Pushkin, and Paul Verlaine), all remain unpublished.^[57] He was survived by his widow Ecaterina Thiéry-Dauș, who donated his papers and her own memoirs of their life together to the National Archives fund in Botoșani.^[58] In 1977, critic Valentin Tașcu noted that the "solid tradition of Romanian historical prose" included Mihail Sadoveanu, Camil Petrescu, Liviu Rebreanu, "and even Ludovic Dauș."^[59] As argued by scholar Iurie Colesnic, while dismissed as a "mediocre" writer and "almost forgotten" in Romania, Dauș is still regarded as a "legendary figure" among the Romanians of Bessarabia—in particular, in the present-day Republic of Moldova.^[60]