National poet and journalist, it was considered the most important writer of Romanian literature. His works had a major impact on the development of Romanian culture and identity.
Mihai Eminescu was the greatest representative of Romanian Romanticism and the last great European Romantic poet, among the writers who gave shine to this movement: V. Hugo, Byron, Shelley, Pushkin, Lamartine and others. In his work, romantic themes, motifs and attitudes related to the great literature of the world are encountered.
An incurable romantic poet, novelist, an active member of the Junimea literary society and worked as an editor for the newspaper Timpul („The Time”).Eminescu greeted his family and friends with these famous words, full of vitality:
„Long live the Nation! Up with her!”
His love for his ancestors was always full of patriotism and respect for the free Dacians, he was generous and rich in spirit, as the historian Nicolae Iorga testified: he is the integral expression of the Romanian soul. Eminescu stated: „The past has always fascinated me.
His first poetry was published when he was 16 and at the age of 19 he goes to study in Vienna. The poet’s manuscripts, containing 46 volumes and approximately 14,000 pages, were offered by Titu Maiorescu as a gift to the Romanian Academy.
Nicolae Iorga, the Romanian historian, considers Eminescu the godfather of the modern Romanian language, in the same way that Shakespeare is seen to have directly influenced the English language.
Eminescu’s poems have been translated in over 60 languages. His life, work and poetry strongly influenced the Romanian culture and his poems are widely studied in Romanian public schools.
Mihai Eminescu supported the idea of restoring Dacia, his life’s credo being: „everything must be Dacianized”.
The Dacians, this mother nation in the Carpatho-Balkan-Pano-Danubian-Pontic space, are present in the thinking and work of Mihai Eminescu, an authentic patriot and a man of brilliant spirituality, the Great Dacian of national culture.
Mihai Eminescu was the first political sacrifice on the altar of Dacia, about which Nicolae Densuşianu wrote, both being marginalized in their time and today by the same leadership in other generations.
His entire lyrical work contains information about the Dacians: The Prayer of a Dacian, in which he laments the fate of the defeated Dacians. In The Story of Dochia and the (Godmother)Fates he portrays the greatness of Dacia and the trials it was subjected to. The same ideas emerge from Gemini, Letter III, Memento mori, Sarmis, The Plan of Decebalus.
The Prayer of a Dacian expresses the deepest feelings of the poet who identifies with the ancestral Dacian and his spiritual experiences after the Roman victory. Eminescu’s Dacianism is a deep and solid conception and belief.His admiration for the Dacians, for Decebal, made him affirm in 1876: I feel the Dacian within me. Eminescu pays special attention to the Dacian mentor, Zalmoxe in Memento mori, who lived in a cave in the mountains:
„The gods of Dacia lived there – solar gate
Into the world of men the rocky stairs descend
And in the green-darkness of the forests they gather
And on black truncated rocks they sit as on a throne in the green world…”
Literary historian George Călinescu, in his monograph ,,The Life of Eminescu” draws a deeply appreciative conclusion at the end: Eminescu was a Romanian of the Carpathian type, that is, an authentic Dacian.
In his writings, Eminescu also addressed Doina, the species of popular literature that belongs to the lyrical genre and in which the author expresses his thoughts and beliefs regarding certain issues of life, regarding time, nature, and oneself. This is how the poem Doina appears. Eminescu’s work is deeply rooted in Dacian mythology: The Evening Star, Memento mori, The Third Letter, The Prayer of a Dacian, Gemini, Sarmis, Godmother Fates etc.
Memento mori (Remember that you will die) was conceived by Eminescu between 1871-1872 when he was 21-22 years old and is a message of patriotism from the Dacian Eminescu. The great historian and man of culture Nicolae Iorga defines Eminescu: the integral expression of the Romanian soul, and the conclusion of Prof. Gheorghe Bucur is: Eminescu is the sun of Romanian poetry, the tutelary god of our spirituality. Eminescu’s work is based on the myth of the Dacian substratum of the Romanian people (in poems such as Gemenii, Sarmis, Genaia).
Moreover, in his poems we find myths as a source of inspiration: The myth of the birth and death of the universe (Letter I, Prayer of a Dacian, Gemini, Memento mori).The myth of wisdom (the magician) as defender of the law (Prayer of a Dacian, Gemini, The Story of the Magician Traveling in the Stars, The Undead).
The myth of history (Letter III, Epigoni, Emperor and Proletarian, Letter IV). Eminescu laid the foundations of a national mythology, designed the epic of Decebalus. History is lost in myths and myths are found in history, tells us Loredana Emilia Neagoe, author of the article Mihai Eminescu and the World of Myths, published in Noul Literator no. 8/sept. 2012 in Craiova.
The erotic myth – combined with the landscape – the moon, the forest, the lake, the springs, the wind (Somnoroase păsărele, Pe lăngă popii fără soţ, Domniţa, Lacul, Floare albastră, Sara pe deal, Luceafărul). The myth of the creator (Letter I, Luceafărul, Ode in ancient meter).
The myth of the Golden Age, is the myth of childhood. In the poem Venus and Madonna (1870) he recalls the fallen world whose thinking was a myth and whose expression was poetry:
„An ideal lost in the night of a world that no longer exists
The world that thought in fairy tales and spoke in poems
Oh, I hear you, I see you, I think of you, young and sweet news
From a sky with other stars, with other heavens, with other gods.”
The Eminescu themes and motifs in Eminescu’s poetry were and are romantic, cosmic: time and space, fundamental coordinates of existence, the cosmos in its entirety, or only fragmentarily, the cosmogonic images of the beginning of the world, nature and love, viewed in a relationship of interdependent structure, myths and dreams, the dimension of history, the condition of the man of genius.
Considered the greatest romantic poet of Romanian literature, Mihai Eminescu lived love stories that profoundly influenced his creation and personal life.
Eminescu’s most famous and intense love story was with Veronica Micle. The two met in Vienna, in the spring of 1872. Veronica was married to Ștefan Micle, a man almost four decades older. Their relationship continued after his return to the country, marked by passion, but also by obstacles and suffering. Their love remained unfulfilled.
Luceafărul — The Evening Star is the longest love poems ever written, a poem I grew up with and have read hundreds of times. It brings new images and thoughts every time, and it has a special place in my heart.
It took almost ten years for Mihai Eminescu to conceive the poem Luceafarul, which was first published in 1883 in Vienna. Luceafărul is considered to be Eminescu’s masterpiece and one of the greatest achievements in Romanian literature.
Luceafăr in Romanian is the name of the morning star (the planet Venus), which in Romanian folklore is associated with demons but is also linked to the Greek Titan Hyperion.
The 98-stanza poem Luceafarul tells the story of an unattainable romance between the immortal Evening Star and an exquisite mortal princess. The young princess, deeply in love, prays every night for her beloved to join her in the human world, and even though he is ready to give up his immortality.
Evening Star
There was, as in the fairy tales,
As ne’er in the time’s raid,
There was, of famous royal blood
A most beautiful maid.
She was her parents’ only child,
Bright like the sun at noon,
Like the Virgin midst the saints
And among stars the moon.
From the deep shadow of the vaults
Her step now she directs
Toward a window; at its nook
Bright Evening-star expects.
She looks as in the distant seas
He rises, darts his rays
And leads the blackish, loaded ships
On the wet, moving, ways.
To look at him every night
Her soul her instincts spur;
And as he looks at her for weeks
He falls in love with her.
And as on her elbows she leans
Her temple and her whim
She feels in her heart and soul that
She falls in love with him.
And ev’ry night his stormy flames
More stormily renew
When in the shadow of the castle
She shows to his bright view.
And to her room with her slow steps
He bears his steps and aims
Weaving out of his sparkles cold
A toil of shaking flames.
And when she throws upon her bed
Her tired limbs and reposes,
He glides his light along her hands
And her sweet eyelash closes.
And from the mirror on her shape
A beam has spread and burns,
On her big eyes that beat though closed
And on her face that turns.
Her smiles view him; the mirror shows
Him trembling in the nook
For he is plunging in her dream
So that their souls may hook.
She speaks with him in sleep and sighs
While her heart’s swelled veins drum:
-„O sweet Lord of my fairy nights,
Why comest thou not? Come!
Descend to me, mild Evening-star
Thou canst glide on a beam,
Enter my dwelling and my mind
And over my life gleam!”
And he listens and trembles and
Still more for her love craves
And as quick as the lightning he
Plunges into the waves.
The water in that very spot
Moves rolling many rings
And out of the unknown, dark, depth
A superb young man springs.
As on a threshold o’er the sill
His hasty steps he leads,
Holds in his hand a staff with, at
Its top, a crown of reeds!
A young Voivode he seems to be
With soft and golden hair;
A blue shroud binds in a knot on
His naked shoulder fair.
The shade of his face is of wax
And thou canst see throughout –
A handsome dead man with live eyes
That throw their sparkles out.
-„From my sphere hardly I come to
Follow thy call and thee,
The heaven is my father and
My mother is the sea.
So that I could come to thy room
And look at thee from near
With my light reborn from waves my
Fate toward thee I steer.
O come, my treasure wonderful
And thy world leave aside;
For I am Evening-star up from
And thou wouldst be my bride.
In my palace of coral I’ll
Take thee for evermore
And the entire world of the sea
Will kneel before thy door.”
-„O thou art beautiful as but
In dreams an angel shows,
The way though thou hast oped for me
For me’s for ever close.
Thy port and mien and speech are strange
Life thy gleams don’t impart,
For I’m alive and thou art dead
And thy eyes chill my heart.”
Days have past since: but Evening-star
Comes up againd and stays
Just as before, spreading o’er her
His clear, translucent rays.
In sleep she would remember him
And, as before, her whole
Wish for the Master of the waves
Is clinching now her soul.
-„Descend to me, mild Evening-star
Thou canst glide on a beam,
Enter my dwelling and my mind
And over my life gleam!”
He hears: and from the dire despair
Of such an woeful weird
He dies, and the heavens revolve
Where he has disappeared.
Soon in the air flames ruddy spread,
The world in their grip hold;
A superb form the spasms of the
Chaotic valleys mold.
On his locks of black hair he bears
His crown a fierce fire frames;
He floats as he really comes
Swimming in the sun’s flames.
His black shroud lets develop out
His arms marbly and hale;
He pensively and sadly brings
His face awfully pale.
But his big wonderful eyes’ gleam,
Chimerically deep,
Shows two unsatiated spasms
That but into dark peep.
-„From my sphere hardly I come to
Follow thy voice, thy sight;
The bright sun is my father and
My mother is the night.
O come, my treasure wonderful
And thy world leave aside
For I am Evening-star from up
And thou wouldst be my bride.
O come, and upon thy blond hair
Crowns of stars I shall crowd,
And more that all of them, up there,
Thou wild look fair and proud.”
-„O thou art beautiful as but
In dreams a demon shows,
The way though hast oped for me
For me’s for ever close.
The depths of my breast ache from the
Desire of thy fierce love
My heavy, big eyes also ache
When into them thine shove”.
-„But how wouldst thou that I come down?
Know this – for, do I lie? -:
I am immortal, while thou art
One of those that must die!”
-„I hate big words, nor do I know
How to begin my plea;
And although thy discourse is clear
I don’t understand thee.
But if thou wantest my flamed love
And that would not be sham,
Come down on this temporal earth,
Be mortal as I am!”
„I’d lose my immortality
For but one kiss of thine!
Well, I will show thee how much too
For thy fierce love I pine!
Yes, I shall be reborn from sin,
Receive another creed:
From that endlessness to which I
Am tied, I shall be freed!”
And out he went, he went, went out,
Loving a human fay,
He plucked himself off from the sky,
Went for many a day.
Meanwhile, the house-boy, Catalin,
Sly, and who often jests
When he’s filling with wine the cups
Of the banqueting guests;
A page that carries step by step
The trail of the Queen’s gown,
A wandering bastard, but bold
Like no one in the town.
His little cheek – a peony
That under the sun stews;
Watchful, just like a thief, he sneaks
In Catalina’s views.
„How beautiful she grew” – thinks he –
„A flower just to pluck!
Now, Catalin, but now it is
Thy chance to try thy luck!”
And by the way, hurriedly, he
Corners that human fay:
-„What’s with thee, Catalin? Let me
Alone and go thy way!”
-„No! I want thee to stay away
From thoughts that have no fun
. I want to see thee only laugh,
Give me a kiss, just one!”
-„I don’t know what it is about
And, believe me, retire!
But for one Evening-star up from
I’ve kept my strong desire!”
-„If thou dost not know I could show
Thee all about love’s balm!
Only, don’t give way to thy ire
And listen and be calm.
So as the hunter throws the net
That many birds would harm,
When I’ll stretch my left arm to thee,
Enlace me with thy arm.
Under my eyes keep thine and don’t
Let them move on their wheels
And if I lift thee by the waist
Thou must lift on thy heels.
When I bend down my face, to hold
Thine up must be thy strife;
So, to each other we could throw
Sweet, eager, looks for life.
And so that thou have about love
A knowledge true and plain,
When I stoop to kiss thee, thou must
Kiss me too and again.
With much bewilderment her mind
The little boy’s word fills,
And shyly and nicely now she
Wills not, and now she wills.
And slowly she tells him:- „Since thy
Childhood I’ve known thy wit,
And as thou art and glib and small
My temper thou wouldst fit.
But Evening-star sprung from the calm
Of the oblivion,
Though, gives horizon limitless
To the sea lone and dun.
And secretly, I close my eyes
For my eyelash tears dim
When the waves of the sea go on
Travelling toward him.
He shines with love unspeakable
So that my pains he’d leach,
But higher and higher soars, so
That his hand I’d ne’er reach.
Sadly thrusts from the worlds which from
My soul his cold ray bar…
I shall love him for ever and
For ever he’ll rove far.
Like the unmeasured steppes my days
Are deaf and wild, therefore,
But my nights spread a holy charm
I understand no more!”
-„Thou art a child! Let’s go! Through new
Lands our own fate let’s frame!
Soon they shall have lost our trace and
Forgot even our name!
We shall be both wise, glad and whole
As my judgement infers
And thou wouldst not long for thy kin
Nor yearn for Evening-stars!”
Then Evening-star went out. His wings
Grow, into heavens dash,
And on his way millenniums
Flee in less than a flash.
Below, a depth of stars; above,
The heaven stars begem, –
He seems an endless lightning that
Is wandering through them.
And from the Chaos’ vales he sees
How in an immense ring
Round him, as in the World’s first day,
Lights from their sources spring;
How, springing, they hem him like an
Ocean that swimming nears…
He flees carried by his desire
Until he disappears.
For that region is boundless and
Searching regards avoids
And Time strive vainly there to come
To life from the dark voids.
Tis nought. ‘Tis, though, thirst that sips him
And which he cannot shun,
‘Tis depth unknown, comparable
To blind oblivion.
-„From that dark, choking, endlessness
Into which I am furled,
Father, undo me, and for e’er
Be praised in the whole world!
Ask anything for this new fate
For with mine I am through:
O hear my prayer, O my Lord, for
Thou gives life and death too.
Take back my endlessness, the fires
That my being devour
And in return give me a chance
To love but for an hour!
I’ve come from Chaos; I’d return
To that my former nest…
And as I have been brought to life
From rest, I crave for rest!”
-„Hyperion, that comest from
The depths with the world’s swarm,
Do not ask signs and miracles
That have no name nor form.
Thou wantest to count among men,
Take their resemblance vain;
But would now the whole mankind die
Men will be born again.
But they are building on the wind
Ideals void and blind;
When human waves run into graves
New waves spring from behind.
Fate’s persecutions, lucky stars,
They only are to own;
Here we know neither time nor space,
Death we have never known.
From the eternal yesterday
Drinks what to-day will drain
And if a sun dies on the sky
A sun quickens again.
Risen as for ever, death though
Follows them like a thorn
For all are born only to die
And die to be reborn.
But thou remainest wheresoe’er
Thou wouldst set down or flee.
Thou art of the prime form and an
Eternal prodigy.
Thou wilt now hear the wondrous voice
At whose bewitched singing
Mounts woody get skipping to skies
Into sea Island sinking!
Perhaps thou wilt more: show in deeds
Thy sense of justice, might,
Out of the earth’s lumps make an empire
And settle on its height!
I can give thee millions of vessels
And hosts; thou, bear thy breath
O’er all the lands, o’er all the oceans:
I cannot give thee death.
For whom thou wantest then to die?
Just go and see what’s worth
All that is waiting there for thee
On that wandering earth!
His first dominion on the sky
Hyperion restores
And like in his first day, his light
All o’er again he pours.
For it is evening and the night
Her duty never waives.
Now the moon rises quietly
And shaking from the waves,
And upon the paths of the groves
Her sparkles again drone…
Under the row of linden-trees
Two youths sit all alone.
-„O darling, let my blessed ear feel
How thy heart’s pulses beat,
Under the ray of thy eyes clear
And unspeakably sweet.
With the charms of their cold light pierce
My thought’s faery glades,
Pour an eternal quietness
On my passion’s dark shades.
And there, above, remain to stop
Thy woe’s violet stream,
For thou art my first source of love
And also my last dream!”
Hyperion beholds how love
Their eyes equally charms:
Scarcely his arm touches her neck,
She takes him in her arms.
The silvery blooms spread their smells
And their soft cascade strokes
The tops of the heads of both youths
With long and golden locks.
And all bewitched by love, she lifts
Her eyes toward the fires
Of the witnessing Evening-star
And trusts him her desires:
-„Descend to me, mild Evening-star
Thou canst glide on a beam,
Enter my forest and my mind
And o’er my good luck gleam!”
As he did it once, into woods,
On hills, his rays he urges,
Guiding throughout so many wilds
The gleaming, moving, surges.
But he falls not as he did once
From his height into swells:
-„What matters thee, clod of dust, if
‘Tis me or some one else?
You live in your sphere’s narrowness
And luck rules over you –
But in my steady world I feel
Eternal, cold and true!
„If the Romanian people disappear from the face of the earth and a book by Eminescu remains, the world will know who the Romanians were.” Mircea Eliade
Eminescu’s journalism, as profound as his poetic work, seems to have been the main cause of Eminescu’s removal from political and social life, subjected in the last period of his life to a slow but sure process of physical and moral assassination.
Eminescu should be presented to young people not only as a brilliant poet, but especially as a tireless fighter for the nation and country, a fight carried to the end, with the sacrifice of his own life. Is it so difficult to understand that Eminescu’s work had to be split, being limited only to poetry, precisely in order to almost completely erase his journalistic work, a work of great value and significance for the history of this people. Guardian angel of the Romanian nation, the one whose general observations are still very relevant today: „Not being worthy people to constitute the middle class, the existing institutional seats were filled by clowns and rascals, people whose work and intelligence do not pay a red penny, the outcasts, the intellectual and moral plebeians. Arions of all kinds, people who risk everything because they have nothing to lose, all that is most common and most degraded in the cities of the Romanian people. (…) Peasants? They are not. Not owners, not educated as a black man under his fingernail, manufacturers – only talkative, not craftsmen, they do not have an honest guild, what are they then? Usurpers, demagogues, vain heads, lazy people who live off the sweat of the people without compensating it with anything, boyar scoundrels and arrogant people”. (Mihai Eminescu, „Old Icons and New Icons” – Timpul magazine, no. 11, Dec. 1877, Opere, X, page 19. In the poet’s understanding, the Arions indicate a typology inspired by the figure of the politician Virgil Arion, the one who, after Eminescu’s death, threw Eminescu’s journalism into the trash).
Eminescu sacrificed himself for the truth, he did not give up on it, having the strength of saints and he did not hate anyone. He is the first great European poet of Romania! Mihai Eminescu, the one so beautifully called by Petrea Țuțea the „absolute Romanian”.
The silk thread of the national poet’s life broke on the night of June 14 to 15, 1889, at the Caritas sanatorium in Bucharest.
The official cause of death was syphilis, a disease the poet had suffered from for the last six years of his life, but I don’t think he suffered from this disease. There was also speculation in the press at the time that the poet was killed after he died of a blow to the head, a stone that hit him hard.
Between February and June 1889, Mihai Eminescu was administered mercuric chloride intravenously by Dr. Alexandru Şuţu, and the mercury poisoning caused cardio-respiratory arrest, which was also the cause of the poet’s death. In 2018, a book signed by 12 of the most important medical specialists in Romania dispels both the myth of syphilis and that of murder. Academician Victor Voicu, a pharmacologist and toxicologist, says that the poet’s autopsy report does not
show the brain lesions specific to syphilis.Which means that the mercury treatment, used at the time, could not have done him any good.
Experts brought together by the Romanian Academy said that the poet had early atherosclerosis and a bipolar personality which, together with the wrong treatment and his own vices, hastened his end.
In short, Eminescu was killed by mercury poisoning by a group of incompetent doctors, perhaps even pleasing those who did not love him and wanted to kill him. Professor Dr. Irinel Popescu also emphasized that mercury was already banned as a treatment for syphilis in Western Europe in the 19th century, precisely because of its adverse effects.
Death was not a match for his creation. He died in a shabby robe, on a metal hospital bed, locked in his hospital „cell”.
Although he left behind a creation of universal value, the misdiagnosed poet, as recent studies show, did not ask too much of those who cared for him.
In the pocket of the robe he was wearing were found the last poems” The stars in the sky” and ” Life” written by the poet.
If you want to know more about the uniqueness of the Romanian language, its history and roots, read Eminescu’s poems.
I will now list some of the most important ones:″Doina, Desire, Epigonii, Prince Charming of the Linden Tree, As a boy I roamed the forests, Blue Flower, Freak of the Forest, Glossa, And when will I be earth, Secretly loving, Emperor and proletarian, Angel and demon, Corrupted youths, Kamadeva, In Bucovina, In the middle of the forest, At the death of Prince Știrbey, At the grave of Aron Pumnul, At the star, The Lake, Leave your world, Evening Star , I have one more longing, The mysteries of the night, Mortua est, You don’t understand me, At night, I don’t want a rich grave, Only the poet, Oh, mother, Oh, stay, Ode (in ancient meter), Beside the poplars without a husband, Over the peaks, The story of the forest.
