Mihai Eminescu

Mihai Eminescu (Botoșani, 1850 – Bucharest, 1889) was the leading poet of late Romanticism in Romania. Although he also wrote prose fiction, philosophical essays and journalism, he is remembered above all for his verse. Critics regard him as the most important voice in Romanian literature, and he is probably the Romanian poet best known outside his country.

His father, Gheorghe Eminovici, had crossed from the Austrian province of Bukovina into Moldavia and settled near Botoșani. His mother, Raluca Iurășcu, came from an old Moldavian noble family. Mihai was the seventh of eleven children. He used both Mihail and Mihai, though the latter became the usual form. The Slavic-sounding surname Eminovici was altered to Eminescu on the advice of Iosif Vulcan, who felt it sounded insufficiently Romanian, a small change that reflects the national concerns of his generation.

He studied in Cernăuți between 1858 and 1866. His first appearance in print as a writer dates from 1866, when former pupils of his late Romanian teacher, Aron Pumnul, published a memorial pamphlet that included a poem by him. Soon afterwards, the magazine Familia, issued in Pest, printed another of his poems, and from then on his work appeared steadily in periodicals. Between 1866 and 1869 he travelled through towns where Romanians formed the majority, gaining firsthand knowledge of the language and customs of ordinary people.

In Bucharest he worked in theatre companies as a prompter and copyist, and there he met Ion Luca Caragiale. In 1869 he went to Vienna to study philosophy, but without a diploma, since he had not completed his secondary education. There he read Schopenhauer closely. Schopenhauer's pessimism and his idea that will outranks reason shaped much of Eminescu's later verse. Against that bleak picture, the poet sought a counterweight in compassion for others and in a sense of human brotherhood, as his poem "Angel and Demon" suggests.

He returned to Romania in 1874 and lived in Iași until 1877, working as a librarian, school inspector and editor. There he formed a friendship with Ion Creangă and kept close ties to the Junimea circle around Titu Maiorescu, the central figure of Romanian culture at the time. He then moved to Bucharest, where he became an editor and later chief editor of Timpul, the paper of the Conservative Party. The strain of this intense journalistic work took a heavy toll, and contemporaries describe his physical and mental health as deteriorating.

This was also the period of his major poems, among them the Epistles and Luceafărul. His 1884 volume Poezii gathered much of his verse and was the only book published during his lifetime. In 1883 he fell seriously ill and was treated with mercury in a Bucharest clinic. After a period of improvement in Vienna, his condition fluctuated until his death in Bucharest in 1889. The most plausible explanation for his illness is bipolar disorder, though the question remains open.

His legacy is considerable. Eminescu is regarded as Romania's national poet, and his work has been translated into more than sixty languages. His manuscripts, dozens of volumes, were donated to the Romanian Academy. His language, his personal mythology and his restrained patriotism remain points of reference for generations of Romanian readers and writers.