Doina Cornea

Doina Cornea (Romanian pronunciation: [ˈdojna ˈkorne̯a]; born 30 May 1929) is a Romanian human rights activist and French language professor. She was notable as a dissident during the communist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu.

Born in Brașov, Romania, Cornea began studying French and Italian at Cluj University in 1948. After graduation, she taught French at a secondary school in Zalău, where she married a local lawyer. She returned to Cluj in 1958 where she worked as an assistant professor at the Babeș-Bolyai University.

In 1980 she published her first samizdat book, Încercarea Labirintului ("The Test of the Labyrinth") by Mircea Eliade translated by her from French; then four other samizdat translations followed.

She illegally sent the first letter to Radio Free Europe in 1982, the first in a series of texts and protests against the Ceaușescu regime. She saw the crisis not just a material/economic one, but also a spiritual crisis, the Romanian people "a people fed solely on slogans", who value more material values rather than spiritual values, which she defined as the ones which "generated intelligence, ethics, culture, liberty and responsibility".

At the end of her letter, she apologized for not revealing her name, but she signed the letter to show that it was authentic. Due to a misunderstanding, Radio Free Europe read the letter in full, including the name. On September 15, 1983, she was fired from the university because of her political activity, the official reason being that she gave her students to read the diary of Mircea Eliade.

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