Stephan Roll

Stephan Roll (pen name of Gheorghe Dinu, also credited as Stéphane, Stefan or Ștefan Roll; June 5, 1904 – May 14, 1974) was a Romanian poet, editor, film critic, and communist militant. An autodidact, he played host to the Romanian avant-garde at his father's dairy shop, publishing his work in short-lived reviews and in two volumes of poetry. As one of the editors of the magazine unu, he turned from Constructivism, Futurism and jazz poetry to the more lyrical format of Surrealism. Roll's political radicalism seeped into his avant-garde activity, and produced a split inside the unu group; Roll's faction discarded Surrealism in favor of proletarian literature, and affiliated with the underground Romanian Communist Party.

An antifascist who supported groups such as Amicii URSS and promoted Soviet viewpoints, Roll worked on various leftist periodicals, including those of the Adevărul group and Cuvântul Liber. He kept a low profile during World War II, when he was employed by the daily Timpul, discreetly expressing his criticism of Nazi Germany, later contributing to the clandestine România Liberă. Reemerging under the Romanian communist regime, he became a propagandist and, in his final years, worked on reducing the avant-garde content of his debut works, republishing them in altered editions. He was survived by his painter wife, Medi Wechsler-Dinu.

Roll was a native of Prekopana village in the Ottoman Empire's Manastir Vilayet; today, this is Perikopi in the Florina regional unit of Greece. His parents were Bulgarian peasants: Enache Dinu, a komitadji who fled to Bucharest in 1907, and his wife Paraschiva. His formal education consisted of four grades at the Bulgarian school in Bucharest from 1911 to 1915. As his letters show, he always had difficulties writing proper Romanian, and devised his own spelling of various words.

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