Lucian Blaga was a Romanian philosopher, poet, playwright, poetry translator and novelist. He is considered one of the greatest philosophers and poets of Romania, and a prominent philosopher of the twentieth century who due to the unfortunate circumstances surrounding his career is barely known to the outside world.
Neagu Bunea Djuvara was a Romanian historian, essayist, philosopher, journalist, novelist, and diplomat.
Nicolae Bălcescu was a Romanian Wallachian soldier, historian, journalist, and leader of the 1848 Wallachian Revolution.
Dacianism is a Romanian term describing the tendency to ascribe, largely relying on questionable data and subjective interpretation, an idealised past to the country as a whole. While particularly prevalent during the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, its origin in Romanian scholarship dates back more than a century.
Iorgu Iordan was a Romanian linguist, philologist, diplomat, journalist, and left-wing agrarian, later communist, politician. The author of works on a large variety of topics, most of them dealing with issues of the Romanian language and Romance languages in general, he was elected a full member of the Romanian Academy in 1945. He was head of its Institute of Linguistics between 1949 and his retirement in 1962.
Adrian Mihai Cioroianu is a Romanian historian, politician, journalist, and essayist. A lecturer for the History Department at the University of Bucharest, he is the author of several books dealing with Romanian history. He is also noted for his contribution as co-author of a high school textbook.
Alexandru Toma was a Romanian poet, journalist and translator, known for his communist views and his role in introducing Socialist Realism to Romanian literature. Having debuted as a Symbolist, Toma was influenced by 19th-century writer Mihai Eminescu, an admiration which came to characterize his entire work. The official poet during the early years of the Communist regime and appointed a full member of the Romanian Academy, he is considered by many commentators to have actually been a second-shelf writer, with a problematic legacy.
Editura Ion Creangă was a publishing house based in Bucharest, Romania. Founded as a state-run company under communist rule and named after the 19th-century writer Ion Creangă, it ranked high among Romanian publishers of children's literature, fantasy literature and science fiction. Its activity resulted in many Romanian-language translations of world children's classics, among which were bestselling versions of Jules Verne's complete works and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. The company also stood at the core of a phenomenon in local book illustration, assigning contracts to recognized artists such as Sandu Florea, Val Munteanu, Lívia Rusz and Eugen Taru.
Petru Comarnescu was a Romanian literary and art critic and translator.
Mircea Florian was a Romanian philosopher and translator. Active mainly during the interwar period, he was noted as one of the leading proponents of rationalism, opposing it to the Trăirist philosophy of Nae Ionescu. His work, comprising some 20 books, shows Florian as a disciple of centrists and rationalists such as Constantin Rădulescu-Motru and Titu Maiorescu.
Claude Calame is a Swiss writer on Greek mythology and the structure of mythic narrative from the perspective of a Hellenist trained in semiotics and ethnology (ethnopoetics) as well as philology. He was a professor of Greek language and literature at the University of Lausanne and is now Director of Studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, in Paris. He taught also at the Universities of Urbino and Siena in Italy, and at Yale University in the US.
Mihail Roller was a Romanian communist activist, historian and propagandist, who held a rigid ideological control over Romanian historiography and culture in the early years of the communist regime. During his training in engineering, he rallied with the communist cells in Romania and abroad, joining the Romanian Communist Party while it was still an underground group. He collaborated with the Agitprop leaders Leonte Răutu and Iosif Chișinevschi, spent time in prison for his communist activity, and ultimately exiled himself to the Soviet Union, where he trained in Marxist historiography.
Magda Cârneci is a poet, essayist, and art historian born in Romania. She took a Ph.D. in art history at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (1997) and received several international grants in literature and art history. Member of the well-known “generation of the ‘80s” in Romanian literature, of which she was one of the theoreticians, after the Revolution of December 1989 she became actively involved in the political and cultural Romanian scene of the 1990s. In the 2000s, after working as a visiting lecturer at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) in Paris, she was the director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in Paris. At present, she is visiting professor at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, editor-in-chief of ARTA magazine for visual arts, and president of PEN Club Romania. She is also a member of the European Cultural Parliament.
The Socialist Peasants' Party was a short-lived political party in Romania, presided over by the academic Mihai Ralea. Created nominally in 1938 but dissolved soon after, it reemerged during World War II. A clandestine group, it opposed the fascist regime of Ion Antonescu, although its own roots were planted in authoritarian politics. Looking to the Soviet Union for inspiration, the PSȚ was cultivated by the Romanian Communist Party (PCdR), and comprised a faction of radicalized social democrats, under Lothar Rădăceanu.
Dan Petrașincu was an Italian-Romanian anthropologist, writer and translator.
The National Popular Party was an antifascist political party in Romania, founded during World War II as the underground Union of Patriots. The latter had defined itself as a spontaneous movement of resistance to the dictatorial regime of Ion Antonescu, but was largely known as a front for the illegal Romanian Communist Party. Its founders—Dumitru Bagdasar, Gheorghe Vlădescu-Răcoasa, Simion Stoilow—were closely cooperating with PCdR men, but also with liberal opposition forces. Repressed by the authorities, the UP made a comeback after the pro-Allied August 23 Coup of 1944, when it endured as a small ally of the communists—mostly controlled directly by them, but sometimes rebellious.
Traian Bratu was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian scholar of German language and literature. A native of the Mărginimea Sibiului region in present-day Sibiu County, southern Transylvania, he left for the Romanian Old Kingdom, where he attended university, followed up by a doctorate at the University of Berlin.
Frederic Monneyron is a French writer and academic.
Alexandru Rosetti was a Romanian linguist, editor, and memoirist.
Niculae I. Herescu was a Romanian classical scholar, essayist, translator and poet. Descended from a noble family of Oltenia, he was trained in Latin and became a full professor at the University of Bucharest while still in his twenties. He translated widely from the Roman canon, as well as publishing a series of studies devoted to ancient writers. Meanwhile, Herescu wrote poetry of his own, and was president of the Romanian Writers' Society for several years. He left his native country shortly before a Soviet occupation began, and spent the last part of his life in exile, first in Portugal and then in France.
