Mateiu Caragiale Biography

A native of Bucharest, he was born out of wedlock to Ion Luca Caragiale and Maria Constantinescu, an unmarried former Town Hall employee who was 21 at the time. Living his first years at his mother's house on Frumoasă Street, nearby Calea Victoriei (until the building was sold), Mateiu had a half-sister, his mother's daughter from another extra-conjugal affair. In 1889, almost a year after separating from his concubine, his father married Alexandrina Burelly, bringing Mateiu into his new family. In following years, he was progressively estranged from his father, and, according to Ecaterina, the youngest of Ion Luca Caragiale and Burelly's children, "Mateiu alone confronted [his father] and contradicted him systematically."

The young Caragiale was sent to school at Anghel Demetriescu's Sfântul Gheorghe College in Bucharest, where he discovered a passion for history and heraldry. At around that time, he was probably introduced to Demetriescu's circle, which included the doctor Constantin Istrati, the writer Barbu Ştefănescu-Delavrancea, the physicist Ştefan Hepites, the literary critic N. Petraşcu, and the architect Ion Mincu.During a 1901 summer trip to Sinaia, where he sojourned with the Bibescu family, Mateiu was acquainted with George Valentin and Alexandru Bibescu (in a letter he wrote at the time, he described the latter as "only too crazy and a frantic maniac").His favorite book at age 17 was L'Arriviste, by the French novelist Félicien Champsaur, which, as he himself acknowledged, contributed to his vision of social climbing. In 1903, with Ion Luca, Burelly and their children, he traveled through large portions of Western Europe, visiting Austria–Hungary, Switzerland, Italy and France; during the trip, he recorded the impressions left on him by the various European art trends.

In 1904, his father moved to Berlin, bringing Mateiu with him—in hopes that he could be persuaded to study law at the Frederick William University—, but Mateiu spent his time reading and exploring the Imperial German capital. He would later refer to this period using a French term, l'école buissonière ("the vagrant school"), and stressed that "[it] was of great use to me". Ecaterina Caragiale indicated that one of her brother's favorite pastimes was "admiring the secular trees in the Tiergarten", and he is also known to have spent entire days at the National Gallery, especially fond of paintings by Jacob Isaakszoon van Ruysdael. Dissatisfied with Mateiu's attitude, Ion Luca sent him back to Romania in 1905, where he enrolled at the University of Bucharest Law School, but quit one year later. For a short while, Caragiale-father even entrusted Ştefănescu-Delavrancea with supervizing his estranged son.

Mateiu Caragiale's interest in heraldry and genealogy mirrored his tastes and outlook on the world, which have been described as "snobbery", "aestheticism", and "dandyism", as well as the love of history he displayed throughout his career. It was sparked during his college years, when he would fill his notebooks with sketches of blazons, and as attested by various drawings he produced throughout his life. He also developed an enduring curiosity for astronomy, magic, as well as botany and agronomy. These skills, as well as his tastes and talents as a causeur, consolidated his reputation as an erudite in spite of his lack of formal studies. The cultivation of aesthetic goals had seemingly guided the writer throughout his life—the poet and mathematician Ion Barbu, who was one of Caragiale's greatest admirers, recounted with amazement that the writer would periodically visit the Romanian Academy's just to look over a certain page in a manual of arithmetics outlining the rule of three (he reportedly said to Barbu: "Remembering its splendor provides me with a ceaseless drive to reread it") At the same time, he was attracted by esotericism, alchemy and mystical subjects such as numerology, all of which form background elements in his prose.

A characteristic of Mateiu Caragiale's life was his search for noble origins, contrasting his illegitimate status. According to historian Lucian Nastasă, it clashed with his father's discreetness in relation to his Greek ancestors—Ion Luca is known to have described his origins as uncertain, even though these had been well recorded, and to have later commented that noble lineage in Romania relied on spurious genealogies. Caragiale-father is also thought to have discouraged his son's claims, and to have mockingly noted that their own family's origin could not have been aristocratic. Early in his youth, Mateiu jokingly referred to himself as "Prince Bassaraba-Apaffy", mixing the title used by the early Basarab Wallachian princes and the Apaffy family of Hungarian nobility. Letters he wrote while still a student show that he was envisaging a marriage of convenience as a means to increase his wealth and status. In his permanent search for nobility rights, occasionally ascribed to the inferiority complex of illegitimate children, he indicated that his mother's origins were in Austria–Hungary: before his marriage to Marica Sion, he claimed that he had lost his birth certificate, and, upon completing a new one, that his mother resided in Vienna, and that he himself had been born in the Transylvanian town of Tuşnad. In Tudor Vianu's view, Caragiale's quest for "an elective heredity" saw him joining a diverse group of writers with similar interests, among whom were Balzac, Arthur de Gobineau, and Stefan George. Commenting that "heredity has, after all, only the value of a psychological fact", he stressed: "[Caragiale] thus had the right to seek his ancestry on the ascents of history and even to be ready to believe, from time to time, that he had found it."

Between 1907 and 1911, Caragiale studied Romanian heraldry and, to this goal, read Octav-George Lecca's Familii boiereşti române ("Romanian Boyar Families"). Many of the comments added by him to his copy of the book are polemic, sarcastic, or mysterious, while the sketches he made on the margin include portrayals of boyars being put to death in various ways, as well as caricatures (such as a blazon displaying a donkey's head, which he mockingly assigned to Octav-George Lecca himself). Several of the heraldic objects he created were destined for his own use. In June 1928, he raised a green over yellow ensign he created for the Caragiale family at his property in Fundulea. He also hoisted other symbols, including the flag of Hungary, which, he claimed, underlined his foreign origin.

Other eccentricities Caragiale adopted included wearing a "princely gown" of his own design, developing unusual speech patterns, as well as a noted love for decorations—official honors which he tried to obtain for himself on several occasions, culminating in the Légion d'honneur award. He took special pride in noting that, after 14 months of governmental service, he had received Coroana României and the other medals. His major regret in this respect was not having received Finland's Order of the White Rose, having earlier claimed that he had refused the Serbian Kingdom's Order of St. Sava when it was offered to him with a rank lower than he had asked. Ion Vianu argues that, intimately aware of his genealogical claims being questionable, the writer sought to compensate by finding his way into meritocratic environments.

Writing shortly after Caragiale died, Tudor Vianu defined him as "a figure, possibly a delayed one, from that aesthetic generation of around 1880, who professed a concept of the supremacy of artistic values in life." This allowed him to draw a parallel between Mateiu Caragiale and Alexandru Macedonski, the doyen of Romanian Symbolism, with the one essential difference provided by their level of involvement in cultural affairs. Unlike his half-brother Luca, Caragiale tended to stay away from the literary movements of his age, and placed his cultural references in the relative past, being inspired by Romantic and Symbolist authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly, Charles Baudelaire and José María de Heredia.[38] Noting the manifest difference in style between the realist Ion Luca and his two sons, Vianu pointed out that the three shared, as characteristic traits, "The cultivation of fully-developed forms, the view of art as a closed system resistant to the anarchic forces of reality". According to Cioculescu, Mateiu's work would be "minor, unless placed alongside that of Ion Luca Caragiale". Elsewhere, Cioculescu indicated that a letter written by Mateiu Caragiale in his early youth, which featured his first pieces of social commentary, imitated his father's calligraphy to the point where George Călinescu initially believed they were the work of Ion Luca Literary critic Paul Cernat proposes that the clashes between father and son evidenced Mateiu's "maternal attachment and a break with paternal authority", and, in particular, his "Oedipus complex", which he also sees manifested in the personality of modern Romanian writers such as the avant-garde founding figure Urmuz and the co-founder of Dadaism, Tristan Tzara.

Discussing Mateiu Caragiale's originality, Călinescu saw in him "a promoter (maybe the first) of literary Balkanism, that greasy mix of obscene phrases, lascivious impulses, awareness of an adventurous and fuzzy genealogy, everything purified and seen from above by a superior intelligence". In relation to Romanian literature, he believed to have discovered a common trait of "Balkan" writers of mostly Wallachian origin, citing Mateiu Caragiale in a group that also included Caragiale-father, the early 19th century aphorist and printer Anton Pann, the modern poets Tudor Arghezi, Ion Minulescu and Ion Barbu, and Urmuz.He went on to define this gathering as "the great grimacing sensitive ones, buffoons with just too much plastic intelligence."In parallel, Lovinescu saw Caragiale as one in a group of modernist prose writers who sought to reshape the genre through the use of lyricism, and were thus paradoxically outdated by 20th century standards. The delayed character of Caragiale's contribution was also mentioned by literary historian Ovid Crohmălniceanu, who identified its roots in Art Nouveau and, through it, the subjects of Byzantine art.

Among other traits which set Caragiale apart from his fellow Romanian writers was his highly creative vocabulary, partly reliant on archaisms and words occurring rarely in the modern Romanian lexis (including ones borrowed from Turkish and Greek, or even from Romani). In certain cases, he used an inventive spelling—for example, he consistently rendered the word for "charm", farmec, as fermec. Tudor Vianu noted that this habit was similar to experiments presents in Ion Barbu's cryptic poetry, ascribing both cases to "the intent of underlining the differentiation between the written and the spoken words", while Ion Vianu defined Caragiale as "an accurate artisan of the language, an extraordinary connaisseur of the Romanian language, which, out of snobbery, he sets aside for the plebeian readers." Craii de Curtea-Veche introduces a large array of words present in early 20th century slang and Romanian profanity, as well as rendering the then-common habit of borrowing whole sentences from French to express oneself (a trait notably present in Mateiu Cargiale's own day-to-day vocabulary). The novel's tone, often irreverent, and the book's foray into the mundane have been seem by some as tributary to the informal style cultivated by Bogdan-Piteşti.

Most of Caragiale's prose is interconnected through allusions to himself, and, occasionally, the narratives discreetly refer to one another. Although his texts are characterized by precision in defining the moment and location for the plot, the general lines of the narratives are often subject to a calculated fragmentation, an innovative technique which, Vartic writes, attests the author's familiarity with Antoine Furetière's vision. Vartic also indicates that Balzac's La Comédie humaine, in particular its Thirteen cycle—which is known to have been one of the books Caragiale treasured most—, influenced the general structure of his stories.

Caragiale's Symbolist poems, including a series of sonnets, also display his profound interest in history. Pajere, which reunited all of the poems Caragiale had published in Viaţa Românească and Flacăra, was defined by Lovinescu as a series of "archaically-toned tableaux of our ancient existence", and by Ion Vianu as "a picturesque history of Wallachia", while George Călinescu remarks their "savant" character. The same critic also noted that Pajere, which drew inspiration from Byzantine settings, were more accomplished versions of a genre first cultivated by Dumitru Constantinescu-Teleormăneanu. According to Perpessicius, Caragiale had "a certain outlook [...], according to which the past [...] should not be sought in books, but in the surrounding landscape". He illustrated this notion with a stanza from Caragiale's Clio: