Bonifaciu Florescu, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Bonifaciu Florescu

Romanian literary critic (1848-1899)

Date of Birth: 14-May-1848

Place of Birth: Pest, Pest County, Hungary

Date of Death: 18-Dec-1899

Profession: poet, translator, biographer, journalist, literary critic, philosopher, literary historian

Nationality: Romania

Zodiac Sign: Taurus


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About Bonifaciu Florescu

  • Bonifaciu Florescu (first name also Boniface, Bonifacio, Bonifati, last name also Floresco; born Bonifacius Florescu; May 1848 – December 18, 1899) was a Romanian polygraph, the illegitimate son of writer-revolutionary Nicolae Balcescu.
  • Born secretly outside his parents' native Wallachia, at Pest, he was taken by his aristocratic mother in France, growing up as an erudite Francophone and Francophile.
  • Florescu graduated from the LycĂ©e Louis-le-Grand and the University of Rennes, returning home at age 25 to become a successful lecturer, polemicist, and historian of culture.
  • Influenced by his father's politics, he was for a while a prominent figure on the far-left of Romanian liberalism and nationalism, which pitted him against the conservative society Junimea, and against his own conservative cousin, Prime Minister Ion Emanuel Florescu.
  • The conflict led to his losing a professorship at Ia?i University and being sidelined when applying for chairs at the University of Bucharest.
  • His critique of Junimist literature, structured around a classical defense of prosody, inspired a libel by Mihai Eminescu—famously depicting Florescu as a "homunculus". Florescu had significant success as a self-proclaimed irredentist, agitating for Romanian causes in disputed Bukovina and Transylvania.
  • Ultimately, however, he failed in his bid to rise through the National Liberal Party, as the latter moved to the center, and fell back on independent journalism, founding several periodicals of his own.
  • He had a long but interrupted collaboration with another dissident liberal and poet, Alexandru Macedonski, who co-opted him on his Literatorul editing team during the 1880s.
  • A precursor, but not an affiliate, of the Romanian Symbolist movement, Florescu had steadier friendships with the younger Symbolists Mircea Demetriade and Iuliu Cezar Savescu.
  • His main contribution to pre-Symbolist belles-lettres is prose poetry in the manner of Catulle Mendès. A committed bohemian, whose lifestyle interfered with his literary output and his teaching job at Saint Sava, Florescu is sometimes read as a herald of decadent writing.
  • He was important to the Macedonskian Symbolists for his familiarity with French culture, but was primarily an expert in 18th-century literature.
  • His criticism, modeled on Villemain, Sainte-Beuve and Taine, was perceived as refined in its context, but later enlisted objections for its pedantry and amateurism.
  • He was a prolific translator passionate about exotic topics, authoring some of the first Romanian versions of stories by Edgar Allan Poe.

Read more at Wikipedia

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