Gheorghe Bogdan-Duică

Gheorghe Bogdan-Duică (born Gheorghe Bogdan; January 2, 1866 [O.S. December 21, 1865]–September 21, 1934) was an Imperial Austrian-born Romanian literary critic. The son of a poor merchant family from Brașov, he attended several universities before launching a career as a critic, first in his native town and then in Czernowitz. Eventually settling in Bucharest, capital of the Romanian Old Kingdom, he managed to earn a university degree before teaching at a succession of high schools. Meanwhile, he continued publishing literary studies as well as intensifying an ardently nationalistic, Pan-Romanian activism. He urged the Romanian government to drop its neutrality policy and enter World War I; once this took place and his adopted home came under German occupation, he found himself arrested and deported to Bulgaria. After the war's conclusion and the union of Transylvania with Romania, he became a literature professor at the newly founded Cluj University. There, he served as rector in the late 1920s, but found himself increasingly out of touch with modern trends in literature.

He was born in Brașov, in the Transylvania region. His father Ioan (1832–1906) was a struggling small businessman who was forced to liquidate his store, leave his family and become a clerk in Sinaia, in the Romanian Old Kingdom; by the late 1880s, he was at a glass factory in nearby Azuga. His mother Elena (née Munteanu; 1846–1911) raised seven boys and four girls. The oldest son, Ioan Bogdan, would become a historian and philologian. Four of the sons earned university degrees, while a sister, Ecaterina, married Nicolae Iorga in 1901. Gheorghe Bogdan attended Romanian-language elementary and high school in his native city; his teachers at the latter institution included Ioan Meșotă, Ioan Alexandru Lapedatu and Andrei Bârseanu. He graduated in 1885, and obtained a scholarship for the University of Budapest, where he remained a year. He transferred to the University of Jena, where he studied philosophy, and then took courses at the University of Vienna from 1887 to 1888. He started publishing criticism at an early age in the Romanian-language newspapers of Transylvania. After his studies abroad, he worked for Gazeta Transilvaniei and then for the Sibiu-based Tribuna; his beginnings as a critic coincided with the early career of George Coșbuc, whom he helped with numerous reviews. He prided himself on being an intellectual disciple of Titu Maiorescu, and was writing for the latter's Convorbiri Literare by 1888. In the autumn of 1889, he was named a part-time teacher at the high school he had attended, but was soon fired after a conflict with the administration caused by his quick temper. While in Brașov, he frequently attended social gatherings for the young Romanian women of Brașov, where he delivered public readings and sought to awaken the participants' interest in literature.

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