Ștefan Vasile Neagu

Place: Grădiștea

Born: 1932

Death: 2011

Biography:

Ștefan Vasile Neagu, known as Fănuș Neagu, was a Romanian novelist, playwright, journalist, and occasional film actor. Born to a peasant family in the Bărăgan Plain, he drew inspiration from that environment throughout his literary career. He undertook his training during the early stages of the communist regime, when he was still a teenager; in his early twenties, he was already pushing the limits of literary discourse, and the patience of ideological censors, acquiring his fame as an uncontainable rebel. Neagu's published debut came in 1959, and coincided with the onset of de-Stalinization. His short stories of the period pushed back against the influence of socialist realism, relying instead on neo-romantic and modernist models, as well as on Neagu's own resources as a raconteur. He became known, and received accolades, for a richly metaphorical and oftentimes absurdist prose, which integrated him into the tradition of magic realism; various critics remarked on his breaking the patterns of Romanian prose and his creation of a modern standard for the peasant-themed novella, as well as on his contributing new means of expression in the Romanian language. The subtleties of this style also allowed Neagu to drop hints about communist crimes against the peasants in his debut novel, Îngerul a strigat, which appeared, to critical acclaim, in 1968. Neagu died in Bucharest in 2011, at the age of 79.