Calistrat Hogaș

Calistrat Hogaș (born Calistrat Dumitriu; April 19, 1848 – August 28, 1917) was a Moldavian, later Romanian prose writer. The son of a Tecuci priest, he studied at Iași University before beginning an over four-decade career as a high school teacher, often at Piatra Neamț. Meanwhile, he made several false starts as a writer before finding a suitable genre, namely stories drawn from his mountain rambles that appeared starting in 1907. He did not manage to collect his works during his lifetime, but these appeared to great success in 1921.

Born in Tecuci, his parents were Gheorghe Dumitriu, a Romanian Orthodox archpriest, and his wife Mărioara (née Stanciu), the daughter of a serdar from Pechea, Galați County. He was the first or second of eight children, and various birthdates between 1847 and 1852 have been suggested, but April 19, 1848 appears likeliest. His adopted surname was a nickname of his grandfather's that was assigned to him in primary school as a way to distinguish him from other pupils named Dumitriu. After completing the primary grades in his native town, he attended middle and high school at Academia Mihăileană and at the National College in Iași from 1859 to 1867.Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol, Vasile Conta, Alexandru Lambrior, Constantin Dimitrescu-Iași and George Panu were all classmates, and he befriended the last three. From 1867 to 1869, he attended the literature faculty of Iași University. Panu and Lambrior remained university classmates, and he was noticed as a good student during high school by Titu Maiorescu, with whom he also came in touch during his university years. Nevertheless, he did not join the Junimea society of which the latter was president, and which at the time was a sure path to advancement of one's literary reputation. From 1869, he worked as a teacher of Romanian language and literature at the new gymnasium in Piatra Neamț, where he was also director and handled all the humanities courses. In January 1870, he married Elena Gheorghiu, the daughter of a Piatra Neamț priest; the couple had eight children. A lover of Greek and Roman culture, he gave them names such as Cleopatra, Cornelia, Sidonia and Aețiu. In 1878, he left Piatra Neamț for a period of three years, teaching first at the gymnasium in Tecuci and then at a normal school in Iași, and then lived in the former town from 1881 to 1885. He subsequently taught in Tecuci, Alexandria and Roman; during this period, from the mid-1880s to the late 1890s, he published only sporadically. His reluctance to write was deepened by the accidental death of his 18-year-old daughter in 1894. From 1898, he was a teacher at the Boarding High School in Iași.

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