Emil Garleanu

Emil Garleanu (January 4/5, 1878 – July 2, 1914) was a Romanian prose writer.

Born in Iasi, his parents were Emanoil Garleanu, a colonel in the Romanian Army, and his wife Pulcheria (nee Antipa). He began high school in his native city in 1889, but withdrew after the first three grades. He then entered the School for Soldiers' Sons in the same city, where one of his classmates was Eugeniu Botez. In 1898, he enrolled in the Infantry School and was assigned to the Stefan cel Mare 13th Regiment. Due to his journalistic activity, prohibited by the rules, he was transferred to Barlad as a disciplinary measure. His literary debut took place in 1900, in Arhiva magazine, where he published the poem "Iubitei" and the sketch "Dragul mamei", both signed with the pen name Emilgar. In 1900, Garleanu enrolled in the literature faculty of Iasi University, but did not attend classes. Publications that ran his work include Arhiva, Evenimentul, Samanatorul, Fat-Frumos, Luceafarul, Albina, Neamul romanesc, Convorbiri Literare, Convorbiri Critice, Flacara, Seara and Revista idealista; among the pen names he used were Emilgar, Em. Maril, Gladiatoru and Glaucos.

Together with George Tutoveanu and D. Nanu, he founded the Samanatorist magazine Fat-Frumos at Barlad; it ran from 1904 to 1906. He resigned from the army in 1906 and moved to the national capital Bucharest. He was an admirer of Nicolae Iorga's and influenced by his social and aesthetic ideas, as can be discerned from his first book, the 1905 Batranii. Schite din viata boierilor moldoveni. In turn, Iorga commented favorably on Garleanu's prose work. A familiar figure in the capital's literary bohemian scene, he subsequently entered the Convorbiri Critice circle, where Mihail Dragomirescu became his new mentor. In 1908, Garleanu helped lay the foundations for the Romanian Writers' Society, of which he was elected president for 1911-1912. From 1911 until his death in 1914, he directed the National Theater Craiova, where he hired Liviu Rebreanu as literary secretary. In the year of his premature death, he published Proza magazine, the entirety of which he wrote himself. His translations included Guy de Maupassant (A Life), Alphonse Daudet (Sapho, Artists' Wives) and Octave Mirbeau. He published popular editions of Vasile Alecsandri, Grigore Alexandrescu, Ion Creanga, Mihail Kogalniceanu and Costache Negri, as well as a revised and enlarged version of Ion Barac's One Thousand and One Nights translation.

Garleanu was a minor prose writer, imbued with nostalgia for a traditional world in which he evokes romantic, "unadaptable" and defeated boyars, in the style of Ioan Alexandru Bratescu-Voinesti, I. A. Bassarabescu and Mihail Sadoveanu, but with an added component of romantic melodrama. His preoccupation for dramatic conflict and novel psychological enquiry reveal a more authentic side to the realist narrator of Nucul lui Odobac, Punga and Inecatul. His melancholy, lyricism and gentle irony come to the fore in the naturalist vignettes of Din lumea celor care nu cuvanta (1910), precursors to the stories of Tudor Arghezi.