Ștefan Zeletin

Ștefan Zeletin (born Ștefan Motăș; June 19, 1882 – July 20, 1934) was a Romanian philosopher, sociologist, liberal economist and political theorist.

Born in Burdusaci, Bacău County, his mother Catinca Motăș (née Chiriac) was the daughter of Ștefanache Chiriac, a local official of Greek origin from the nearby village of Ursa. Her husband, the postelnic Dumitrache Motăș, died sixteen years before Zeletin's birth. The latter's father is unknown (one possibility is the local mayor and well-off landowner Neculache Brăescu), and he remained sensitive to the fact of his illegitimate birth, adopting a pseudonym (after the Zeletin River that passes through Burdusaci) to distance himself from his mother's husband. He grew up in a peasant family of the bourgeoisie, which he would later analyze in his work.

He attended Codreanu High School in Bârlad and the theological seminary in Roman. His tertiary studies took place at the University of Iași (1906), of Berlin (1907–1908), Paris (1909–1910), Leipzig (1910), Berlin (1910–1911) and Erlangen (1911). After taking his doctorate from the latter university in 1912, on the subject of idealism in contemporary English philosophy and advised by Richard Falckenberg, he returned to Romania and taught German at Codreanu. He started publishing soon after, with Evanghelia naturii ("The Gospel of Nature") coming out at Iași in 1915, and Din țara măgarilor ("From the Country of the Donkeys") appearing in 1916. An allegorical work about a population of "donkeys" that borders the Bulgarians, it drew an angry response from Nicolae Iorga, who signed his review "someone who is not a donkey"; others praised the pamphlet for its insightful analysis of Romanian society. One scope of the work was to ridicule Romanian pretensions over Southern Dobruja, which the country had gained as a result of the Second Balkan War. He moved to the national capital Bucharest in 1920, continuing to work as a German teacher, at Mihai Viteazul High School.

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