The literary avant-garde is usually defined by the extremes which polarize its attitudes: the split from and radical negation of cultural traditions and the aspiration toward an absolute renewal of language, it is a refusal, on the one hand, to adibe by of any sort, whether those of the conventions, authorities or social and aesthetic "codes of behaviour", ultimately rejecting literature itself; on the other hand, it affirms the need to synchronize with" the rhythm of the times" and "the pulse of the ages", opting for spontaneity and the absolute freedom of the spirit. Such defining elements, caught by all commentators of the phenomenon (among others, Guillermo de Torre, Renato Poggioli, Angelo Gulielmi, Matei Calinescu, Adrian Marino) lead to situating avant-gardist "states of mind" under the sign of an "absolute dynamism", a creative "total availability", without any exterior constraints. To depart from formula and convention, and yet not to enter into another formula, anather convention, wold be the - utopian - dream of the avant-garde. Between negation, as point of departure and innovation as as terminous, what is most at stake remains the movement and tension of the spirit, imaginative spontaneity, the authenticity of liging - and to a lesser extent its concrete result within a work that risks being taken over by the circuit of aesthetic conventions and fixed in "official" hierarchies. To penetrate the space of the Romanian avant-garde space from this angle also reveals signifiant testimony from its promotersnow inscribed in the "classic" repertory of ideas of the European movement (some pertinent names being Ilarie Voronca, Geo Bogza, Gherasim Luca and Gellu Naum).

The premises of the Romanian avant-garde movement must be sought in the transformations of the poetic language undertaken by symbolism (at the end of the 19th century and particularly in the first decade of our century), in opposition to more traditional stances. The symbolist aesthetics of suggestion that had overturned the old "logic of poetry", moving the exphasis to the signifiant and to the valance of poetic syntax, liberated poetry from rhetoric and anectote, so that, in the next phose, a series of poets who started out as symbolists also affirm in a spectacular way their iconoclastic attitudes in relation to this convention itself. The relatively belated response to the ideas of French symbolism, a specific "reading distance" still perceptible among the major figures like Ion Minulescu, facilitated the birth of this anti-conventionalism - which is so glaring in poets as Adrian Maniu, Tristan Tzara and Ion Vinea, in the the period 1913-1915. Maniu, author of a volume of prose poetry, Figure de ceara (Wax Figures, 1912), was already following the footsteps of Jules Laforgue, cultivating an unusual imagism, at once fantasist-ironic and demystifying. The verses written at this time, particularly the dramic poem Solomeea (Salome, 1915), push the anti-conventional attitude to an extreme, expressed also in opposition to the principles of "populism, romanticism and others" and to the "stupidity of so- called poetic subject matter". For his part, Ion Vinea attested in 1916 that "literature persecutes" his, that it bore him an "incuable antipathy", a motif that also comes out in his poems. Likewise, his friend Tristan Tzara undertook to decontruct traditional lyrical discourse by seriously disrupting coherent communication, appealing to violetly prozaic elements, juxtaposing images of disparate elemets, and mimicking an attitude of infantile play. A man of foresight would also have recognized the literary avant-garde in Urmuz (D. Demetrescu- Buzau, 1883-1923), who, with is "bizarre pages", already begun in 1907, anticipates many of the experiments of dadaism and surrealism, as well as those of the "literature of the absurd" of the later period. Analysis of his restrained work displays an unusual imaginary universe, marked by an obsession with the alienation of man, absurd humour, associative automatism, derangement of traditional discursive logic, thus undermining "the message" by displacing of attention onto "self- referentiality", to construct, ultimately, a "comedy of literature" which ironically demonstrates its own productive mechanisms.

In spite of several similar promises which unquestionably define a pre-avant-gardist spirit, a proper avant-garde group would not gel until just after the War, due to specific historico-cultural conditions (the outbreak of the World War One, the concentration of energies in constructive directions, the mobilization to realise the ideal of national unity, a literary tradition less influential than others in Europe); yet once launched, avant- garde programs would indicate very soon the orientation towards a "modern synthesis" integrating under certain dominant features, diverse tendencies of European avant-garde.

The specific socio-cultural context explains why it was not dadaism (lauched by the Romanian Tzara in 1916 in another area of culture) but constructivism that was the first productive avant- garde doctrine in Romania (with significant futurist echoes). It also explains why expressionsism is fructified in the form of a moderate modernism by poets with tendencies tangential either to avantgardism (B> Fundoianu) or to traditionalism (Lucian Blaga, Adrian Maniu etc.) and why the transition from constructivism to surrealism was to take place gradually through the intermediate formula of "integrality", near the end of the twenties. Under these conditions it is not easy to clarify the defining elements for each of the somewhat crystalized avant-gardist programs in the years between 1922 and 1947. Research into the dadaistic echoes received by the Romanian avant-garde shows that, in spite of popular beliefs, Data was unable to unite into a durable movement of major proportions on our literary scene. Launched by a poet who had left Romania, the movement did not take root here: under the circumstances such an exploasive movement did not stand a chance. The Dada poem projects of Ion Vinea, revealed in the correspondence with his friend living in Zurich, were not realised. The future director of the magazine Contimporanul (The Contemporary Man) quickly became sceptical and ironic about the dadaist venture that he abandoned in favour of constructivism, as did the painter and architect Marcel Janco. Only in October 1924, with the appearance of the only issue of the magazine 75 H.P. (edited by Ilarie Voronca, Stefan Roll and Victor Brauner) a fleeting and late reevival of the dadaist spirit was noticeable within a composed formula which also included constructivist and futurist elements. The programatic rejection of logic and grammar, the ironising of "the formula" and the option of dismantling traditional discourses were brought back into currency following the Dada Manifestoes, while some "antiliterary" texts seemed to illustrate the "recipe" of the dadaist poem offered by Tzara. The ludic-parodic spirit and the practice of spontaneity dominate, bringing to mind Tristan Tzara's "buffooneries" in the Manifestos. However, militant Romanians were soon to speak of this avant-gardist moment and about dadaism in general as a "gun loated with pure noise" or a "confetti machinegun"...

Concerning constructivism, it crystalizes in two significant moments, represented on the one hand by the Contimporanul groul (1922-1932, led by Ion Vinea and Marcel Janco) and sister publications (75 H.P., Punct - 1924-1925), and on the other hand by the Integral group (1925-1928, led by the painter M.H.Maxy). The former is characterized, especially in the case of Contimporanul magazine, by a certain general-modernist eclecticism, onto which is gradually imposed a constructivist dominance with the launching in May 1924 of Activist Manifesto to Youth, edited by Ion Vinea. The radical rejection of art and literature of the past ("Down with art because it has prostituted itself!" etc.) manifests itself in the proclamation of an innovative approach in strict alliance with "the great industrial activistic phase", marking the liberation from naturalist mimesis, the exigency of "the new and self-centered word" and of the "fine, strict and rapid expression of Morse's device". In numerous articles Marcel Janco likewise miliates for an art of abstract structure. Foreign collaborations - signed by Hans Richter, Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters, Theo Van Doesburg, Georges Linze, Ludwig Kassak etc. - illustrate the major international opening of the group (it also records the futurist presences, foremost of whom is Marinetti, without neglecting surrealism). Special issues of Contimporanul are dedicated to architecture, theatre and cinema, "the new interior", and the sculptor Constantin Brancusi.

More difficult to transpose into literary terms, visual constructivism however finds poetic correspondence in Ion Vinea and especially in the younger Ilarie Voronca (1903-1946). In the magazines 75 H.P. and Punct, the latter takes up the abstractionist rejection of mimesis and replaces it with the "grammar" and "logic" of poetic discourse, while the construction of a visual reality independent of natural "illusion" attracts him to the Mallarmean exploitation of the "materiality" of words, treated as pure constructive elements freed from any intertion of symbolizing (suggestions along these lines could have come from Dutch "deoplastician" artists of the De stijl group, and the "constructive poetics" of Theo Von Doesburg). The "integralist" moment of constructivism, represented in the magazine Integral, marks a regrouping of Romanian avant-garde forces (without the collaboration of Vinea and Janco), in an attempt to overcome the modernist eclecticism of Contimporanul and with an explicit program to realize a "modern synthesis" in which all European avant-garde movements could rediscover themselves, restructured along "constructivist foundations". Ion Calugaru, Ilarie Voronca, B. Fondane, Stefan Roll, Mihail Cosma and F. Brunea are the main spokesmen for "integralist" ideas, which develop in essence the doctrine of constructivist art - with its activism inherited from the futurists, with its almost exclusive interest in urban and industrial civilization, with its taste for concentration and synthesis of expression, with its robotic-imaging of "the engineer-poet".

Within this framework, Ilarie Voronca is again the one who stands out among the passionate theorists, offering in an article of 1925 dedicated to Tudor Arghezi a definition of poetic images - "an abstract construct, the image: pure connection between two elements as far apart (or as close) as possible" - which recalls that of Marinetti or Pierre Reverdy. Voronca also insists upon "the chemistry of words" and the "objective" character of the poem's construction. The impact of the constructivist program upon the creative practices of Romanian avant-gardists is notable and can be identified in the writings of Ion Vinea, Ilarie Voronca, Stefan Roll (Gheorghe Dinu), Mihai Cosma (the future Claude Sernet) or in the attempts at prose of Ion Calugaru and F. Bunea - in which there is clear evidence of the great importance of "imagism", apt to suggest the metamorphic dynamism of the modern world, the strangeness of events, the intention of kaleidoscopic encompassing, the mechanical rhythm and new geometry of the machine age.

In no small number, futuristic interferences shed light upon the Romanian avant-garde's feeling for the movement of F.T.Marinetti. Published in Romanian on the very day the original text appeared in the newspaper Le Figaro (February 20, 1909), the first Futurist Manifesto was not yet able to inspire the formation of a "branch" of the trend in Romania, even though the phenomenon was recorded with interest in the litearary press, yet in the 1920s Marinetti's and his frieds' texts found an ample echo in the avant-garde milieu (particularly in Contimporanul and Integral). Marinetti himself visided Romania in 1930, when he wrote his futurist report The Fire of the Moreni Derricks. Echoes of the italian movement can be found in the constructivist-integralist programs in Contimporanul, 75 H.P., Punct and Integral, where the "activism" of vehement negation corresponds to futurist vitalism, its rejection of the psychological novel and analysis, as well as its praise of daily reporting and the "theatre of pure emotion", the cult of speed and performace in sports ("the sportsman- poet"), its need to free words from logical and grammatical patterns etc. In constructivist circles where they were particularly well received, futurist ideas were also met wit many reservations, often being criticized for lacking "the spirit of abstraction" and for their "superficiality".

The second important step in the Romanian avant-garde movement, represented by unu (one) magazine and its group (1928-1932), can be characterized by a move away from integralism toward surrealism. It is the perod in which the most obvious elements of surrealist doctrine plant themselves in the soil prepared by constructivist ideology. Rejected in principle by constructivism with which it was incompatible ("the integralist" Voronca spoke in 1925 about" a sick, romantic-surrealist disintegration"), surrealism is accepted, although with reservation, in the spirit of "synthesis" by the same Integral. At the beginning it is also embraced by unu magazine but only as part of a larger innovative undertaking: the Manifesto of Sasa Pana (in the premier issue of April 1928) proposes, in telegraphic constructivist style, the continuation of the previous avant-garde approaches - "75 H.P./.../marinetti/breton/vinea/tzara/ribermont- dessaignes/arghezi/brancusi/theo van deosburg/.../art rhythm speed unforessen granite/ / gutenberg resurrected" - blaming in exchange "the scribes" and "the pulp of the libraries". In the amalgam of the typical "integralist", the "Breton" component was likely to win much more ground, even though direct adherence to the French movement was never admitted. On the other hand, a detachment from the "vocabulary of Americanism" and from the "abstraction" of constructivism are all the more clearly expressed, pushed to the point of breaking with the Contimporanul group by an article published in issue 29 of unu magazine (September 1930): here, alongside the condemnation of "constructivist utilitarianism" and the concession made by Ion Vinea to literary "officials", the group vindicates itself with" a conduct completely torn from reality", praising the dream and invoking "the waters of a vision devoid of all problems and contradictions located beyond the poem and semi-watchfulness". Along the way - in a few strctly programatic texts and especially in a very rich production of "prosepoems" (as part of the confluence of the manifesto, the critical eseay and the poem in prose) - the elements of surrealist origin increase. Former "integralists" such as Ilarie Voronca and Stefan Roll oppose "logic" to imagination and chance, the revelations of associative spontaneity, and a neo-romantic dream cult. They will be followed by Sasa Pana and particularly by Geo Bogza who, proposing "the rehabilitation of the dream" due to his decline in the bourgeois world, will accentuate his "subversive" an liberating values. It is also he who will write the pathetic manifesto-article Creative Expasperation (dating, as does The Rehabilitation of the Dream, from 1931) along the line of Breton's "convulsive beauty". Continually cultivated, "imagism" is redimensioned and nuanced according to the new evolution without, however, arriving at the proper "automatic dictum", as is apparent in the poetry of the group's members.

It is significant that towards the end of the period of the publication of unui magazine, there appears a change of attitude toward surrealism: Gheorghe Dinu Labels it "artistic bourgeoisism", then "false avant-garde", and a newly affirmated need for a more direct leftist socio-political engagement is asserted. This is a parallel radicalization with a good part of French suprarealism (see "the Aragon affair" etc.). These conditions aggravated conflicts between the members of the unu group (in November 1931 Ilarie Voronca is exluded from the magazine's circle, for publishing a volume of verse with an "official" publisher and trying to become a member of the Romanian Writers' Society). The magazine itself disappeared after its fiftieth issue in December 1932.

The state of the avant-garde spirit was also sustained by other publications, such as Urmuz (published in Campina by Geo Bogza, January - July 1928), X - literatura contemporanta (XX - Contemporary Literature, Iasi, 1928 - 1929), Alge (Algae, 1930, 1933) and others, all of them working the same territory as the magazine unu. Viata imediata (Immediate Life), a publication directed by Geo Bogza, launched among others in its one and only issue of December 1933, the important manifesto Poetry We Would Like to Make (signed by Bogza, as well as Gherasim Luca, Paul Paun, and the painter Perahim): it requests in the direction of the last avant-garde advances, a more direct involvement of poetry in the socio-historical challenges of the time, and rejects the "pure" office poetry" exclusively interested in "technical aspects": "We want to mix in the ink with which we write, something of the sweat and blood which runs in streams on the as yet unwiped cheeks of the most recent history..." Until, 1940, another avant-garde group will not form. The magazine Meridian (Craiova, 1934-1946) with avant-garde sympathies, will publish only sporadically the names of Geo Bogza, Gheorghe Dinu, Victor Valeriu Marinescu and Gellu Naum. In the creation of Romanian avant-garde during the stage of trasition which the unu group illustrates, one notices at the level of the imaginary universe, the gradual distancing of the "universe of electricity and speed" and of the language of techinicalization, towards a "naturistic" vision, dominated by landscape notation and the construction of neo-baroque decoration, fantastic performances, and festive methamorphoses of the world. The topic of the constructivist "fairy-like town" finds itself in league with these new perspectives. The simultaneity of the constructivist kaleidoscopic vision with its geometrization of forms captured in the mechanical rhythm of life of a modern metropolis, relaxes its tensions; the accent falling upon the material density of the images is attenuated; poetry calls upon ethereal, evanescent substances, often suggesting an oneiric atmosphere. Though less eliptic, lyric discourse is still constructed upon the principle of the addition of unusual images, associating objects with the greatest distance between them, recalling alike the surrealistic "light of images", and the taste for mannerist ingeniousness and baraque refinement. From these refinements there arises also a certain structural precariousness in such poetic production and a danger of monotony, despite the surprises and performances carried out at the level of each imagistic equation. These characteristics define the work of Ilarie Voronca (the mnost valuee poet of this first major period of the Romanian avant-garde), in the poems of Colomba (1927), Ulise (Ulysses, 1928), Plante si animale (Plants and Animals), Bratara noptilor (Bracelet of Nights, 1929), Zodiac (1930), Icantatii (Invocations, 1931), Petre Schlemihl (1932) and Patmos (1933); but they define also the writing of Stefan Roll (Gheorghe Dinu), His Poeme in aer liber (Poems in Open Air, 1929) and his poetic prose Moartea vie a Eleonorei (Eleonora's Live Death, 1930) being very close to surrealism'; and the books of verse and prose poems of Sasa Pana. Confronted with the imagism cultivated by the group's colleagues, the poetry of Geo Bogza on the contrary invests in the violence of direct expression, aiming at the "elementary level" of existence, within a notation of "reportage" which thus intensifies the dates of the real until they became expressionist tensions (see Jurnal de sex - Sex Diary, 1929, and especially Poemul invectiva - Invective Poem, 1933).

An authentic surrealistic program will be affirmed only in 1940, at the inception of the Romanian Surrealist Group (Gelly Naum, Gherasim Luca, Paul Paun, Virgil Teodorescu, D. Trost). Several texts with a doctrinal character, launched between 1945-1947, attest to the authors'subscription to European Surrealistic ideology. Polemically detaching themselves from previous avant- garde group, the newly-arrived accuse the former for their "only formal, only poetic" preoccupations, which were limited, in their opinion, to the "image" level, far from a deep commitment to "the permanent effort to free human expression in all its forms" (see the manifesto Critica mizeriei, signed in 1945 by Gellu Naum, Paul Paun and Virgil Teodorescu).

In its turn, the manifesto drawn up in French by Gherasim Luca and D. Trost, Dialectique de la dialectique (1945) and conceived as a "message addressed to the international surrealist movement", warned of the danger at transforming surrealism into a "trend of artistic revolt", calling for it to be preserved in "a state of continual revolution". In an expression of rhetorical frenzy it speaks of "the transformation of desire into the reality of desire", of the "non-oedipal position of existence" (meaning the liberation of ancestral complexes discovered by Freud), of "the adherence to dialectic materialism" and of the belief in "the historic destingy of the proletariat", but also of transforming power of love, arriving at the uncanny formulas such as: "the limitless eroticization of the proletariat" or "the dialectization and those bringing to mind the "paranoic-critical" vision of Salvador Dali, play a part in the formation of this program, whose general lines are also present in other works of the manifesto's authors. The place granted to the dream in the realisation of the absolute merging of diural existence with nacturnal existence is likewise very important (Luca and Trost even believe that they can eliminate from the transcriptions of dreams "the reactionary day residue", a comment which prompts a severe reply from Gellu Naum about the manifesto's authors as the "oneiric police". Objective chance and the surrealist object particularly preoccupy the surrealists at this time (see Gherasim Luca, Inventatorul iubirii - Love Inventor -, and Le Vampire passif, 1945; Gellu Naum, Medium, 1945). In the area of poetic creation, literature once again is opposed to poetry as a state of spiritual dynamism, open to the "merveilleux", receptive to the mysteries of existence, the magic of fortuitous meetings between objects and events. Like Breton and his comrades-in- thought, the Romanian surrealists construct for themselves a "lyrical comportment", invent a mythology of the quotidian, show themselves to be attracted by "dangerous landscapes" typical of the "gothic" novel (see Medium and Castelul orbilor, Castle of the Blind, by Gellu Naum - a definitive poetic prose for the surrealist imaginary universe). They cultivate a shocking imagery called upon to transmit the feeling of "convulsive beauty", associating the fairy-like with the apocalyptic, according to Breton's exigences of the gradual growht of the arbitrary in images.

The most significant results are attined by Gherasim Luca (see particularly the prose poems from Un lup vazut printr-o pupa (A Wolf Seen Through a Magnifying Glass, 1945) and Gellu Naum (in books already cited, but also in poems from Drumetul incendiar - Incendiary Voyager, 1936, Libertatea de a dormi pe o frunte - Liberty to Sleep on a forehead, 1937, Vasco da Gama - 1940 and Culoarul somnului - Sleep Passage, 1944). In a history of European surrealism, Gellu Naum can be located without doubt among the most valued poets. To be noted also are Paul Paun (with the chapbooks Plamanul salbatec - Savage Lung, 1939, and Marea palida - Pale Sea, 1945) and Virgil Teodorescu (Blanurile oceanelor, Ocean Furs, Butelia de Leyda, leyden Jar, 1945 and, in French, La Provocation, Au lobe du sel - 1947). Several collective writings bring to mind similar experiments in the European movement, for example, Spectrul longevitatii, Spectrum of Longevity, by Gellu Naum and Virgil Teodorescu in 1946, and Eloge de Malombra, in collaboration with the five members of the group in 1947. The last poem-manifesto belonging to the entire group, Le sable nocturne, was buplished in the collection Le surrealisme en 1947, which came out in paris on the occasion of the International Surrealist Exhibition.

Apart from the established avant-garde groups, several writers placed themselves close to the avantgardist "spiritual state": the poet Victor Valeriul Martinescu (b. 1910), related to Geo Bogza by his vehement non-conformism expression; the prose writer M. Blecher (1909-1938), author of the novel Intamplari in irealitatea imediata (Events in Immediate Unreality, 1936), attracted by the frightening atmosphere of Salvador Dali's visions; or the young essayst Eugent Ionescu with his Nu (No, 1934) in which one finds again the taste for the burlesque performance of the Dadaists.

Rejected or confroted with major reservations by the traditionalists (first by the historian Nicolae Iorga, but also by the Viata Romaneasca magazine circle and the Gandirea group), the avant-garde enjoyed a more nuanced attention within modernist circles - and critics such as E. Loveinescu, Perpessicius, G. Calinescu, Mihail Sebastian and Pompiliu Constantinescu among others. Such critical attention undoubtedly had the effect of refining the "extremism" of the movement, in the light of "moderate modernism".

In fact, research into the Romanian liberary avant-garde on the whole strongly uncovers - beyond the characteristic radicalism of attidudes, either in the direction of "breaks" or in the affirmation of the "new" - a certain moderation: in its essence, the avant-garde approach remains in our country, "integralist" in style, a "modern synthesis". There are in the movement what can be considered signs of weakness: its doctrinal "impurity" (with the exception of the surrealism of the 1940s) in which diverse programs collide and sometime cohabit with forms of a more balanced modernism: inconsistencies and vacillations between different tendencies; the temptation towards "obedience" and "classicization". On the other hand, "the desire for synthesis" - noted by Romanian critics of the last two decades (see Matei Calinescu, Adrian Marino, Ovid S. Crohmalniceanu, Marin Mincu) - also attests to a capacity for selection a certain critical spirit confirmed by the process of assimilation and development of those ideas apt to really fertilize the creativity of the nation. Marginalized, minimalized or accepted with great reticence, the avant-=garde could not let the socio-cultural ambiance of those three decades in which it affirmed itself, remain indifferent. It is precisely its "expremism" that contributed to the outlook of consciences awakened to literary conventions, warning of the need for renewal, for the outlook of the creative spirit "in step with the times". Its dimesions and its impact in the literary field should certainly not be exaggerated, but the fact should be recognized that the avant- garde manifestations offered an example of aesthetic and social nonconformism, its programs and works - though uneven in value - that played a part in the renewal of perspectives on poetic language and the enriching of the imaginary universe of Romanian poetry.

In the battle between poetry and literature, between authentic and conventional, the avant-garde spirit was a ferment with beneficial effects for the revitalization of Romanian literature: it happened in the case of "the war generation" of the 1940s (Geo Dumitrescu, Constant Toneganu, Ion Caraion, D. Stelaru), and in our time in the "oneirist" group of the 1970s (Dumitru Tepeneag, Leonid Dimov), and last but not least in the case of the highly promising "1980s generation" still in full affirmation.

Last update: 1999, September 8
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