Ion Heliade Rădulescu
Wallachian scholar, revolutionary, and language reformer.
Ion Heliade Rădulescu was a Wallachian, later Romanian academic, poet, essayist, memoirist, short story writer, newspaper editor, and politician. A prolific translator and author of works on linguistics and history, he helped reopen Saint Sava College in Bucharest and served as its teacher. He was a founding member and first president of the Romanian Academy, and is regarded as a major champion of Romanian culture in the first half of the 19th century.
Quick Facts
- Pen name
- Ion Heliade, Eliad
- Born
- 6 January 1802
- Birthplace
- Târgoviște, Wallachia
- Died
- 27 April 1872
- Place of death
- Bucharest, Romania
- Occupation
- poet
- essayist
- journalist
- translator
- historian
- philosopher
- Genre
- Lyric poetry
- epic poetry
- autobiography
- satire
- Subject
- Linguistics
- Romanian history
- philosophy of history
Facts from the source article.
Biography
Ion Heliade Rădulescu was born in Târgoviște into a family of Greek ancestry. His father, Ilie Rădulescu, was a wealthy proprietor who led a patrol unit in the 1810s; his mother, Eufrosina Danielopol, was a Greek woman educated in Greek. Three of his siblings died of bubonic plague before 1829. Early in his youth, his father bought him a house once owned by scholar Gheorghe Lazăr on the outskirts of Bucharest near Obor. The family also owned a large garden near Herăstrău and estates near Făgăraș and Gârbovi. After basic Greek education with a tutor named Alexe, Heliade taught himself to read Romanian Cyrillic, reportedly using the Alexander Romance with help from his father's Oltenian servants. He became an avid reader of popular novels, especially during a stay in Gârbovi in 1813, after other areas were ravaged by Caragea's plague. He later studied under Orthodox monk Naum Râmniceanu, then at the Greek school at Schitu Măgureanu in Bucharest, and in 1818 at the Saint Sava School under Gheorghe Lazăr. After graduating in 1820, he worked as Lazăr's assistant teacher in arithmetic and geometry until the school ceased activities in 1821 due to the Wallachian uprising. During these years he adopted the surname Heliade, a Greek version of his patronymic derived from the Romanian form of Elijah.
Heliade and the Romanian language
Heliade's most influential contributions involved developing the modern Romanian language, synthesizing Enlightenment tenets and Romantic nationalist ideals of the 1848 generation. At a time when educated Romanians often preferred French or Greek, he and his supporters argued for adapting Romanian to modernization. He wrote that young people should preoccupy themselves with the national language, speaking and writing in it, and that cultivating a language meant writing in it about all sciences and arts, as language alone unites, strengthens, and defines a nation. In 1828 he published a grammar proposing that the Cyrillic script be reduced to 27 letters reflecting phonetic spelling, citing the Latin alphabet of Ancient Rome as an example. He then campaigned for introducing Romance neologisms adapted to Romanian spelling. Earlier, Transylvanian scholars Gheorghe Şincai and Petru Maior had supported unifying Romanian varieties and creating a standard lexis, focusing on liturgical language choice. Heliade expanded on this legacy, first proposing a language regulator (an idea later used in creating the Romanian Academy), and stressed that the dialect spoken in Muntenia, which had formed the basis of 16th-century religious texts by printer Coresi, should serve as the standard language.
Literature
Heliade is celebrated as the founder of Wallachian Romanticism, but was equally influenced by Classicism and the Enlightenment. His work took a middle path between Romantics such as Alecu Russo and Mihail Kogălniceanu and Classicists such as Gheorghe Asachi, Grigore Alexandrescu, and George Baronzi. George Călinescu described him as a devourer of books, noting his favorites included Alphonse de Lamartine, Dante Aligheri, Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, Voltaire, Jean-François Marmontel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and François-René de Chateaubriand. His poetic style, early influenced by Lamartine, became infused with Classicism in middle age before he again adopted Romantic tenets. He initially followed Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux's poetic guidelines but later opposed them after reading Victor Hugo's Romantic preface to Cromwell, though he never fully discarded them. Like the Classicists, he favored literature highlighting character types as unions of universal and particular traits; like the Romantics, he encouraged subjective writing, believing writers were prophets who criticize society's plagues and look toward a happier future. He also adopted the Romantic stress on national specificity in later years. Much of his literary work was based on non-original material, compiled from translations or from a single source, aiming to introduce new genres and styles to Romanian literature.
In cultural reference
A monument to Ion Heliade Rădulescu, sculpted by Italian artist Ettore Ferrari, stands in front of the University building in central Bucharest. The Romanian Academy named a lecture room after him and instituted the Ion Heliade Rădulescu Award; in 1880 it was awarded to Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu for his Cuvinte den bătrâni, worth 5,000 gold lei. Ten years later, the prize became the center of a scandal involving dramatist Ion Luca Caragiale and the cultural establishment of the National Liberal Party, including Hasdeu and Dimitrie Sturdza, who disapproved of Caragiale's anti-Liberal stance and association with Junimea, and refused to grant him the prize. A high school in Târgovişte bears his name, as does a village in the commune of Ziduri, Buzău County. The grave of Take Ionescu, a Prime Minister of Romania and Heliade's descendant, is in Sinaia Monastery near a fir tree planted by Heliade and fellow 1848 revolutionaries. In his 1870 poem Epigonii, Mihai Eminescu dedicated an entire stanza to Heliade. During the early 1880s, Alexandru Macedonski and his Literatorul tried to preserve Heliade's status and theories against criticism from Junimea, but by 1885 this rivalry ended in defeat for Macedonski and contributed to Literatorul's disestablishment.
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