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Caragiale's impact on language

Coined phrases

Careful to provide accurate portrayals of his characters, Caragiale took his investigations to the point where his work provides an accurate record of the Romanian language as it was spoken during his day. According to literary historian Tudor Vianu, this was made possible not just by his outgoing nature, but also by his keen musical ear. His writings sample dialects, jargon, slang, verbal tics, and, in parallel, illustrate the experiments undertaken by conflicting schools of linguistics during the 19th and early 20th century, as well as the traces they left on the Romanian lexis. Language takes the central role in his work, compensating for the lack of detail.

Largely reflecting his primordial study of dramaturgy, Caragiale's literature is indebted to dialog, as well as, in rarer cases, to internal monologue and free indirect speech (the favorite technique of Naturalists, with whom he had several stylistic affinities). According to literary critic Paul Zarifopol, who was the writer's friend, Caragiale's contributions to literature use speech as a specific and accomplished method of characterizing their protagonists. He quoted the author saying: "It is not for the sake of words that I sought to create stories. It is for the sake of stories that I purposely search for words." Zarifopol nonetheless expressed criticism for Caragiale's failure to apply this method to its fullest, noting that, many times, the writer had introduced "journalistic jargon" in his works. He noted that this was especially obvious in Cargaile's controversial Păcat novella, where, he argued, Caragiale's neologisms clashed with the rural background.

Caragiale's plays and stories have produced a series of catchphrases, many of which are still vividly present in cultural reference. Through the comedic and demagogic lines uttered by Rică Venturiano, the young character in his early play O noapte furtunoasă, and Nae Caţavencu, the liberal-radical journalist who plots blackmail in O scrisoare pierdută, Caragiale borrows heavily from the politician C. A. Rosetti, one of his main targets, and from the often Italian-influenced artificial terms used by the radical journal Românul.

Venturiano thus uses silenţiu for "silence" (instead of the plain word linişte) and venitore for "future" (as a coined term attempting to replace the common viitor). His amorous or political rhetoric degenerates into comic verbiage and absurdities (he says: "I love you like the slave loves the light and the blind man loves freedom" and "I say to the people: 'You shall either all die, or all of us will survive' ").

Caţavencu's violent nationalist rhetoric is marked by amusing self-contradictions, which have become some of the best-known lines in Romanian theater. Exemplified by his statement "I do not wish to know about your Europe, I wish to know only of my Romania", his main discourse centers on a liberal theme, the industrialization of Romania by and for ethnic Romanians. Caţavencu first points that something should be done about this, and produces the notion that "the Romanian industry is admirable, we may say it is sublime, but it lacks entirely". In comparison with other European countries, he notes that both the prosperous and bankrupt businessmen in Romania are foreigners, which leads him to exclaim "It is only us who do not have our own bankrupts!"

Caţavencu's adversary Farfuridi is caught by surprise by such unorthodox tactics, and, when he believes that his superiors are about to strike a bargain with Caţavencu, exclaims: "[L]et there be betrayal, if the party's interests call for it, but let us be informed about it!" These major interests contrast with those of secondary characters such as Pristanda, a police officer who desperately tries to hide that he has embezzled a small sum of money; when his feat is uncovered, he argues his case: "Large family... small remuneration, in accordance with the budget..."

In the comedy D-ale carnavalului, where the main characters mimic Romantic moods, a once-popular poem by Rosetti is incorporated into the lines uttered by a female republican, the overtly melodramatic suburbanite Miţa Baston. Here as well, the passionate language clashes with the overtly mundane situations that form the play's backbone — in one such case, the character Crăcănel recounts that all his successive concubines have left him for other man, and that the seventh had left for Bulgaria in the company of a German citizen. This prompts his counterpart, Iancu Pampon, to ask the much-quoted stupefied question "What was the German doing in Bulgaria?"

With his stock character Marius Chicoş Rostogan, a Transylvanian teacher, Caragiale ridicules the wholesale adoption or adaptation of Latin words, as proposed by August Treboniu Laurian and endorsed by some liberals. Chicoş Rostogan expresses himself in this unusual and pedantic form of Romanian.

Additionally, Caragiale draws on his characters' inability to digest cultural references, as a means to invent memorable words and associations. The aging Leonida, himself a radical republican, illustrates a merger of the old and the new, mixing incompatible notions in a ridiculous manner. Among his most remembered phrases is his rendering of a supposed quote from the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, which Leonida claims was uttered as praise for the radicals when they took part in dethroning Romania's Domnitor, Alexander John Cuza: "Bravo to the nation! Jolly good for you! Long live the Republic. Long live the United Principalities." An uncultured man, he misreads "moratorium law", which he sets as one of his ideals, as "murături law" (with the Romanian word for "pickles"), and to Garibaldi as Galibardi.

Miţa Baston, who constantly uses vitrion for "vitriol", is also known for replacing criminală ("criminal woman") with the coarse-sounding cremenală. Also in D-ale carnavalului, the moniker Catindatul, used in reference to a secondary character, is itself a corrupted form of the word candidatul ("the candidate").

Aside from willingly creating an alternative to the Romanian language, Rică Venturiano shows he has difficulties expressing himself in correct terms — confronted with the possible revenge of a jealous husband, he is trying to determine his rival's supposed weapon of choice, and constantly uses levorver instead of "revolver". In one of his inflamed monologues proclaiming his love for the people, Venturiano misquotes a known Latin expression to produce box populi, box dei. One particular case is Pristanda, who readily approves of all things uttered by his patron Tipătescu and repeats them out loud — he is however incapable of understanding his employer's entire vocabulary, and asks to be told what the more complicated words mean, or what the metaphors imply.

Such confusions are notably present in Caragiale's numerous sketch stories, collectively known as Momente şi schiţe. In one of these, the Georgescu family believe they are listening to a minuet by Pederaski — thus amalgamating the family name of Ignacy Jan Paderewski and the word "pederast". Several other short pieces render incoherent speech first-hand, by taking the shape of telegram exchanges between clerks and their superiors, or by recounting courtroom interrogations.

Nomenclature

One of the most notable traits of Caragiale's work is the nomenclature he instituted. Literary historian Garabet Ibrăileanu recorded the intense manner in which the writer searched for adequate names for his characters, and, paraphrasing his colleague and mentor Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, stressed "Caragiale found it impossible to conceive of a work until he knew the exact name of each character." Paul Zarifopol indicated that Caragiale had first experimented with this particular technique during the 1870s, when he was issuing the magazine Claponul, when, in some of his writings, he introduced names that, in themselves, outlined the main traits of his characters (even though, he argued, many of these early sketches were far from accomplished).

Thus, Caragiale became noted for creatively recording the widespread use of suburban hypocoristics, in situations where this could indicate the background of his protagonists. In many other cases, the nomenclature exaggerated to comedic effect the middle class habit of naming children after glorious characters in Romanian history, or after prominent figures in Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece. Thus, Agamiţă Dandanache, the decrepit but triumphant politician in the comedy O scrisoare pierdută, combines a ridiculous pet form of Agamemnon with a family name stemming from the Turkish dandana (used in Romanian to stand for either "hubbab" or "blunder"). Another such example is a short story protagonist, the Bucharest-born nationalist agitator turned police chief Coriolan Drăgănescu, whose given name is a version of Coriolanus — Ibrăileanu commented that this name was particularly well-suited to the intended political satire, given that it sounds "like a brass trumpet at the fair". This is also the case for various Transylvanian characters, where the method underlines the impact of the Latin-themed nationalist revival — the names used by Caragiale combine colloquialisms with direct references to Roman history and mythology. In this context, Vespasian is turned into Veşpazian, Sulla into Sulea, and Cicero into Cicierone, while other names are comedic adaptations of full names — Numa Pompic for Numa Pompilius, and Ovidius a Tomiţii for Ovidius and the city of Tomis.

Garabet Ibrăileanu was among the first to note that Caragiale's use of hypocoristics (for characters such as Lache and Mache or Mitică) and family names was most evident in his portrayals of Wallachians, underlining the anonymity induced by their careers in the civil service. Also according to Ibrăileanu, this class and its relative success were embodied by Caragiale's own political associate, the Conservative-Democratic Party leader Take Ionescu, whose name, he noted, actually combined a pet form of Dumitru with the commonplace family name Ionescu. He recorded that, in contrast, wherever Caragiale deals with Moldavians, the names are both individualized and bizarre — archaic surnames clashing with given names of Western European origin (one example being the sketch story protagonist Edgar Bostandaki, an effeminate high life chronicler).

Ibrăileanu believed that, at least in part, this was a comment on the social, cultural and political differences between Moldavia and Wallachia, commenting that the former had managed to preserve an aristocratic boyar class in front of the "rise of the common folk" which had been noticed in Wallachia. He wrote: "In their own way, [the names in Caragiale's works] shed light on Romania's history and sociology during the latter half of the [19th] century." Although he agreed that Caragiale may have used common names to depict people having few individual traits, Zarifopol contended that suggesting anonymity was not the writer's exact intent, and that his careful rendition of speech patterns served as a means to transcend the otherwise repetitive templates.

[to add more on what these names mean, from Cazimir:]

According to Zarifopol, several characters in O scrisoare pierdută are recipients of a unsubtle and implausible nomenclature originating from the comédie en vaudeville — they include the main protagonists Trahanache, Farfuridi, Brânzovenescu and Caţavencu. Alongside this series, the critic pointed out that Caragiale would sometimes resort to "childish" suggestions in names he wrote down in his personal papers and may have intended to use in his works: Paragrafescu (the name for a judge; from paragraf - "paragraph"), Născoceanu (a reporter; from a născoci - "to concoct"), and Opinianu (a journalist; from opinie - "opinion"), among others. Zarifopol noted that, in contrast to these, Caragiale also introduced names which, although many times unusual, seemed to "truly nominate people according to their class or professional category, without containing puerile allusions in their syllables".

In comparison, Caragiale's later stories have for their main protagonists gentlemen and ladies with Francized names (such as Popesco instead of Popescu and Piscopesco instead of Piscopescu), who adopt pretentious neologisms in their everyday language.

Through names, Caragiale offers a glimpse into many other bygone political and cultural models — Tudor Vianu wrote that, in many of his novellas and plays, the "fantasy of [...] town councilors" is made evident by the street names, stemming from the Antiquity or drawing on "bizarre allegories". Such examples include "Fidelity Street", "Emancipation Street", and "Patience Street".

Impact on contemporary culture

Caragiale's style has continued to shape Romanian humor, as well as the views Romanians take of themselves. In several of his essays, Paul Zarifopol used Caragiale's characters as Romanian prototypes, and used them or their presumed descendants as illustrations of interwar tendencies. Among these was Pulcherie Chiriac, the daughter of O noapte furtunoasă's protagonist Chiriac. Historiographer Lucian Boia noted that Caragiale's tongue-in-cheek analysis of Romania as a transitional society has been extended, in popular discourse, to cover historical developments of the 20th century, including images of life in Communist Romania and the post-Communist period. According to Boia, Romanian self-irony owes much to Caragiale's characters, their recourse to "improvisation and approximation", and their "tendency to talk rather than act".

Despite this status, Caragiale's uncomfortable criticism has occasionally seen him assigned a secondary place in the Romanian curriculum and the academic discourse. This was most obvious in periods of totalitarianism: the Iron Guard, Romania's main fascist movement, hailed the poet Mihai Eminescu as a predecessor while removing most mentions of Caragiale; the Communist regime also largely ignored the dramatist, while claiming to represent Eminescu's legacy. During the latter period, Caragiale was officially seen as a chronicler of the bourgeois society and class conflict. Literary historian Ştefan Cazimir assessed that the strict sociological interpretation of Caragiale's work was cast aside after the 1950s, at a time when his colleague Şerban Cioculescu first reacted against the perception of his characters as, in Cioculescu's words, "monkeys-marionettes, animated solely by the volitional spring of social climbing [...]".

Among the early 20th century and interwar dramatists to have been inspired by Caragiale's techniques and to have applied them in their own works, especially tragicomedies, are Mihail Sorbul, Victor Ion Popa, Mihail Sebastian, and George Mihail Zamfirescu. His theatrical writings have been the subject of several essays by director Sică Alexandrescu, whose interpretation of the texts made use of the Stanislavsky System. Ion Luca Caragiale's short stories and novellas have set up guidelines for Romanian writers, and their impact has been traced in literary pieces by Ioan A. Bassarabescu, Gheorghe Brăescu, Ioan Alexandru Brătescu-Voineşti, Dumitru D. Pătrăşcanu, and I. Peltz.

Posthumously, the writer transcended his own aesthetic guidelines to become an influence on a variety of styles and approaches, leaving his work to be reinterpreted. He is often cited as a predecessor for the Theater of the Absurd, taking in view his distortion of colloquial Romanian for comedic effect, as well as the willingly confuse nature of comedies such as D-ale carnavalului. His characters' inability to deal with a complex world has also been attributed to an existential fear, which, in itself, also echoes themes favored by the Absurdists. Thus, Caragiale's works, alongside those of the pre-Absurdist storyteller Urmuz, were cited as a direct inspiration by the renowned Romanian French Absurdist dramatist Eugène Ionesco. Other contemporary authors whose work was influenced by Caragiale's various literary contributions include Radu Cosaşu, Ioan Lăcustă, Horia Gârbea and Dumitru Radu Popa.

Caragiale's techniques in staging have been applied by several directors, beginning with Constantin I. Nottara and Paul Gusti. Aurel Jiquidi, a modernist visual artist and son of Caragiale's collaborator Constantin Jiquidi, illustrated much of the writer's work, and was reputedly influenced by the writer's depictions of the suburban world in his own depictions of slums.

Outside Romania, the impact of Ion Luca Caragiale's literature was much reduced. According to the 1996 Cambridge Paperback Guide to Theatre, this was owed to his inventive use of Romanian, which makes his plays hard to translate, as well as to the fact that Romanian directors have traditionally staged his works as period pieces.

Portrayals in literature

Several authors have left pages depicting events from Caragiale's lifetime. He is present in the memoirs authored by his friends, the Transylvanian authors Octavian Goga (whose depiction of their encounter in Szeged was considered by Tudor Vianu to be "one of the most beautiful" in his work) and Ioan Slavici. Other such pieces include ones authored by I. Suchianu and the writer's children — his son Luca Caragiale (who also printed a series of his father's posthumous works) and his daughter Ecaterina Logadi-Caragiale. The writer Cincinat Pavelescu, who befriended Caragiale during his student years, left behind a memoir and an epigram about his aged friend (he claimed that the latter was actually developed from a theme proposed by Caragiale himself). One of Caragiale's later biographers, Octav Minar, published several works centered on various episodes in the writer's life, but stood accused of having forged certain details for commercial gain.

Ion Luca's eldest child, the Symbolist writer Mateiu Caragiale, left unflattering memoirs of his father, and probably made references to him in his only novel, Craii de Curtea-Veche, completed during the 1920s (see also Criticism of Ion Luca Caragiale). Literary figure Ioan Alexandru Brătescu-Voineşti, claiming to rely on information received from Titu Maiorescu, controversially argued that Caragiale's 1880s love affair with Veronica Micle, who was also the mistress of his friend Mihai Eminescu, provided the inspiration and key for Eminescu's poem Luceafărul — with Eminescu as the aloof and genial protagonist, Hyperion, and Caragiale as the antagonist Cătălin, an inferior man who profits from Hyperion's absence to seduce his lover.

Depictions of Caragiale or characters based on him are also present in several other fiction works. During his lifetime, he was one of the heroes of a revue — under the transparently anagramed surname Gearacale, Caragiale was shown as a restaurateur commenting on the policies of Dimitrie Sturdza, a liberal leader who was his real-life adversary, while Constantin Al. Ionescu-Caion, a journalist who had repeatedly accused Caragiale of plagiarism, was identified as Crayon. Aside from his possible presence in Craii de Curtea-Veche, he is depicted as Miron Osmanli in În preajma revoluţiei ("On the Eve of the Revolution"), a lengthy volume of disguised recollections authored by Constantin Stere. Veiled references to him are also made in Goga's Meşterul Manole, and in a novel by N. Petraşcu (titled Marin Gelea).

He is present under his name in several literary works, beginning with Slavici's Cel din urmă armaş ("The Last of the Provost Marshals"). Ion Luca Caragiale is also a character in Eugen Lovinescu's Mite, a 1934 novel having his female friend Mite Kremnitz and Eminescu, her one-time lover, for its main characters. A voluble and sarcastic Caragiale makes a brief appearence in Emanoil Bucuţa's Capra neagră ("The Chamois") — he is shown among his Transylvanian friends, meeting with poet Ştefan Octavian Iosif, aviator Aurel Vlaicu, and actor Petre Liciu.

In Caragiale în vremea lui ("Caragiale in His Day"), one of his less known plays, Camil Petrescu depicts the dramatist meeting a person named Titircă, who, although imagined by Petrescu, is presented as the inspiration for O noapte furtunoasă's main protagonist, the jealous but naive Dumitrache. A biographical novel published in 1939 by the Romanians B. Jordan and Lucian Predescu, titled Caragiale. Tragicul destin al unui mare scriitor ("Caragiale. The Tragic Destiny of A Great Writer"), provided detail on his personal life, but was criticized for its style, tone, and inaccuracies.

Tributes, landmarks and visual portrayals

Never received into the Romanian Academy while he was alive, the writer was elected to the body posthumously, in 1948, following the proposal made by novelist Mihail Sadoveanu. 2002, the 150th anniversary of Ion Luca Caragiale's birth, was celebrated in Romania as the Anul Caragiale (the "Caragiale Year"). Annual theater festivals in Ion Luca Caragiale's honor are held in Bucharest and the Moldovan capital of Chişinău (known respectively as the Caragiale Festival and the "Nenea Iancu" Festival).

Caragiale's work has been the subject of many productions in Romanian cinema and television. The first film entirely based on his work was the 1928 Năpasta, followed in 1943 by O noapte furtunoasă. Other notable films based on Caragiale's writings include the 1958 Două lozuri (starring Grigore Vasiliu Birlic as Lefter Popescu) and Lucian Pintilie's 1981 De ce trag clopotele, Mitică? (with, among others, Ştefan Bănică, Sr., Mircea Diaconu, Gheorghe Dinică, Ştefan Iordache, Mariana Mihuţ, Victor Rebengiuc and Tora Vasilescu). The latter production was noted for, among other traits, its veiled criticism of Nicolae Ceauşescu's Communist regime. In 1982, a West German film, directed by Radu Garbea and based on O făclie de Paşte, was released under the title Fürchte dich nicht, Jakob! (starring André Heller as Leiba Zibal). Caragiale was the topic of several documentary films, including Alexandru Solomon's 2003 Franzela exilului ("The White Loaf of Exile"), centered on Caragiale's voluntary exile to Berlin, and titled with an expression he used in defining his status.

In 1962, a house in Ploieşti, the city where Caragiale spent his childhood, was turned into a museum honoring the writer. Known as the Dobrescu House, after one of its former inhabitants, it was never home to Ion Luca — of the two houses his family rented in the city, one was demolished in 1980. His native home in Haimanale was opened for the public in 1979. A memorial plaque in Buzău records his residence in the city. Several Berlin houses once inhabited by the Caragiales have either been destroyed during World War II or are hard to locate due to changes in landscape. A building on Schöneberg's Hohenzollerndamm features a memorial plaque set up by the local authorities, but it has not been clearly established if the writer ever lived in that location.

The Gambrinus pub, which Caragiale managed after 1901, originally located in front of the Bucharest National Theater, was moved to Elisabeta Boulevard, nearby the Cişmigiu Gardens, during the 1940s. By 2002, the location was abandoned, and the building was falling into disrepair. Part of Caragiale's house in Bucharest was turned into a restaurant, Casa Caragiale.

The National Theater, of which the writer was chairman in 1888-1889, is currently known in full as "Ion Luca Caragiale" National Theater. Educational institutions named in his honor include the Bucharest Theater and Film Academy, as well as the city's Ion Luca Caragiale National College, the similar institution in Ploieşti, and a high school in Moreni. His name was given his native Haimanale (known as I. L. Caragiale), to the Bucharest street he lived on around 1900, to a street and quarter in Braşov, to a park and an avenue in Cluj-Napoca, and to streets in Ploieşti, Buzău, Alba Iulia, Arad, Bacău, Bistriţa, Botoşani, Brăila, Călăraşi, Constanţa, Craiova, Deva, Drobeta-Turnu Severin, Galaţi, Giurgiu, Iaşi, Oradea, Reşiţa, Sibiu, Sinaia, Suceava, Târgovişte, Timişoara, Tulcea, Vaslui, and various other localities in Romania. A street in Chişinău also bears the name Caragiale.

Among the statues raised in his honor are a Bucharest monument (the work of Constantin Baraschi) and busts in the Cişmigiu Gardens and in Ploieşti. The writer was a subject for portraits and caricatures, the first of which were drawn by his colleagues on the Moftul Român editorial board. Notable artists who drew his portrait include Ion Anestin (the father of Ion Valentin Anestin), Corneliu Baba, Ion Bărbulescu B'Arg, Pompiliu Dumitrescu, Mihail Gion, Silvan Ionescu, Iosif Iser, Aurel Jiquidi, Constantin Jiquidi, Ary Murnu, Nicolae Petrescu-Găină, and Francisc Şirato. In 2002, Romanian artists invited cartoonists in 123 countries to draw caricatures of Caragiale. Five years later, the effort led to a group exhibit, held at the Romanian Cultural Institute building in the Spanish capital of Madrid, where over 1,500 portraits were displayed. As a result, Caragiale went into the Guinness Book of Records, as "the most portrayed writer".

References

• Ştefan Cazimir,
  • Caragiale: universul comic, Editura pentru Literatură, Bucharest, 1967. OCLC 7287882
  • I.L. Caragiale faţă cu kitschul, Cartea Românească, Bucharest, 1988. OCLC 21523836
• Şerban Cioculescu, Caragialiana, Editura Eminescu, Bucharest, 1974. OCLC 6890267
• Vicu Mîndra, in I.L. Caragiale, Nuvele şi povestiri, Editura Tineretului, Bucharest, 1966. OCLC 42663344:
  • "Prefaţă", p.5-33
  • "Aprecieri critice", p.267-271
• Z. Ornea, Junimea şi junimismul, Vol. II, Editura Minerva, Bucharest, 1998. ISBN 973-21-0562-3
• Tudor Vianu, Scriitori români, Vol. I-III, Editura Minerva, Bucharest, 1970-1971. OCLC 7431692

External links

• National Theater Bucharest (official site)
• The Nenea Iancu Festival in Chişinău (official site)
• Collection of Caragiale's caricatures, at Caricatura.ro
• Ion Luca Caragiale at IMDb