Mihail Sadoveanu | Biography

Mihail Sadoveanu is the most prolific novelist in Romanian literature and one of the most accomplished. All his major work, however, was written before the political changes in Romania following World War II. Although Sadoveanu remained a productive author after the war, like many other writers in communist countries, he had to adjust his aesthetic to meet the demands of the communist regime, and he wrote little of artistic value between 1945 and his death in 1961.

Sadoveanu was born on 5 November 1880 in Pascani, a small town in Moldavia, to Alexandru and Profira (Ursaki) Sadoveanu. In Anii de ucenicie (Years of Apprenticeship, 1944) Sadoveanu recalled his special affection for his mother, who was a gifted storyteller. Her death in 1895, when she was only thirty-four, deeply disturbed Sadoveanu. In 1900, after graduating from high school, he decided to study law in Bucharest, but he soon lost enthusiasm and started missing classes. Instead, he spent most of his time writing novels and plays. In 1901 Sadoveanu went to live in Falticeni and married Ecaterina Bâlu. Eventually the father of eleven children, Sadoveanu enjoyed a stable and quiet family life that was no doubt a positive influence on his writing.

In 1903 Sadoveanu's literary prospects changed dramatically, when he moved permanently to Bucharest and became involved in the literary life of the capital. The important critic Titu Maiorescu publicly encouraged Sadoveanu, the best recommendation possible for a young Romanian writer of the period. At this point in his career Sadoveanu took an oath to write at least two novels every year, and, with rare exceptions, he managed to keep his promise, creating the longest string of fiction ever written by a Romanian novelist. In 1904 he published two collections of short stories, Dureri înabusite (Stifled Woes) and Povestiri (Tales), as well as his first novel, Soimii (The Soimis). He returned to Falticeni in 1906, and in 1910 he was named director of the National Theater of Iasi, a position he held until 1919 with time off for service as an officer in World War I.

In 1928 Sadoveanu published what many critics consider his first major work, Hanu-Ancutei (translated as Ancuta's Inn, 1954), a narrative that displays his gifts for storytelling and description. Following the pattern of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (1351-1353), Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (circa 1387-1400), and the medieval tradition in general, Sadoveanu set his novel at an inn, where the customers tell each other stories that help them escape the factuality of a world caught up in historical events. Like the storytellers in Sadoveanu's models, these speakers reveal their true characters in the tales they choose to tell and the manner in which they tell them. The use of classical models gives Hanu-Ancutei an unmistakable air of universality that is generally lacking in Romanian prose of that time. In this novel, as in nearly all Sadoveanu's major writings, fictional imagination constructs utopian worlds as a means to escape temporal reality. Examples of utopian fiction may also be found in the works of Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, André Malraux, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and Ernest Jünger, symptoms of a moment of general crisis in Western literature during the first decades of the twentieth century.

Zodia Cancerului sau vremea Ducai-Voda (The Cancer Zodiac or Prince Duca's Age, 1929) is at an even higher artistic level than Hanu-Ancutei . Modeled on the sort of travel fiction written by Montesquieu and Voltaire, Zodia Cancerului mixes satire and moral observation with didacticism, much as in the writings of the Enlightenment. A dominant feature of the novel is a dialogue between civilization and savagery, which suggests that Sadoveanu's implicit goal is to give Romanian fiction the themes and the authority it missed because of its late start. Most of the novel describes a trip through Moldavia undertaken by the Abbot of Marenne, a Frenchman who embodies Western civilization. His opposite is Ruset, who represents the primitive culture of an exotic land that resembles Paradise. The abbot provides the narrative frame for a confrontation between two opposing ideologies and civilizations. The message of the novel might be encapsulated in the statement that there is enough refinement in Edenic simplicity. In Zodia Cancerului Sadoveanu's rhetoric marks the highpoint of his mature style. Although it lacks spectacular adventures, the novel is remarkable for the magical atmosphere created by Sadoveanu's masterful storytelling. Here, and elsewhere in his fiction, his use of archaic words takes a reader to an ahistorical and mythical time.

Sadoveanu's novels rely little on classic fictional invention. In most of his novels nothing really happens except a feast of metaphoric language replete with archaisms and regionalisms. Another of his best works is Baltagul (1930; translated as The Hatchet, 1955), a short novella inspired by the Romanian folk myth of Miorita.

Sadoveanu also employs a mythical background in Creanga de aur (1933; translated as The Golden Bough, 1981), a short novel in which he is at his best in conveying the mystical side of nature and its magical influence on people and their history. Creanga de aur is also a metaphysical narrative, transforming events and the ideas resulting from them into descriptions of nature, which frequently becomes personified. Creanga de aur depicts the birth of the Romanian ethos in primitive times, long before the Roman conquest.

In 1937, as an editor for the magazines Adevarul and Dimineata, Sadoveanu joined other important literary figures in signing a series of antifascist protests. Two years later he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Academia Mihaileana in Iasi.

After 1944 Sadoveanu went into a gradual artistic decline. The more he engaged in the political life of the communist establishment, the less he succeeded in his writing. His novels became what the communist regime called "engaged literature." For fifteen years Sadoveanu followed Communist Party demands for literary realism. His Lumina vine de la Rasarit (Light Shines from the East, 1945) is a first attempt to convince his readers that the Soviet Union represented the only model to follow. Sadoveanu became president of the Parliament in 1946 and vice president of the National Assembly in 1948. In recognition of his unfaltering devotion to the communist regime, he was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1961, the year of his death.

There is little doubt about Sadoveanu's aesthetic contribution to the evolution of Romanian fiction. His prose prepares the way for a transition to literary modernism while also serving as a reminder of the archaic pattern in Romanian fiction, an element that every new generation of Romanian novelists should recognize as one of the fundamental pillars of their national literature. Especially for his literary output until 1944, Sadoveanu deserves a place among the major novelists of the century. Like William Faulkner, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, Sadoveanu had the extraordinary gift to create out of local or regional history a timeless space that becomes universal.