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| Birth Name(s) : Nicolae Labis |
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Full Nicolae Labis Biography
Nicolae Labiş (IPA /ni.ko.ˈla.je la.ˈbiʃ/) (b. December 2, 1935, Poiana Mărului, Suceava County, Romania – d. December 22, 1956, Bucharest) was a Romanian poet.
His father Eugen was the son of a forest brigade soldier and himself fought in World War II; he became a schoolteacher in 1931. His mother Ana-Profira, the daughter of a peasant killed in the Battle of Mărăşeşti, was also a schoolteacher. He had two sisters, Margareta and Dorina. He grew up surrounded by mountains and forests.
On September 15, 1952, Labiş entered the Mihai Eminescu Literature School in Bucharest. While there, he read voraciously, spending whatever he could spare on new and used books. He also edited the poetry section of the school magazine. Among his professors were Sadoveanu, Tudor Vianu and Camil Petrescu. Although he espoused the ideas of the ruling communist regime, singing its praises in a number of poems, during his two years at the school he became a leading opinion-maker and a star there, which, given his free spirit and incorruptible dignity, made activists of the Romanian Communist Party uncomfortable. In February 1953, his department held discussions about him for his alleged "deviations from the School's morality and discipline". In the spring of 1954, the Union of Working Youth (UTM) also held discussions about him and, with one vote against, decided to expel him from the organisation. However, the penalty was not upheld by higher organs. Around this time he frequently visited Sadoveanu. He recited a poem at his June 1954 graduation, and was hired by the literary magazine Contemporanul, and then by Gazeta literară. That autumn, he took courses at the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Philology, but dropped out after a semester. Also at that time, his most famous poem, "Moartea căprioarei" ("The Deer's Death"), appeared in Viaţa Românească.
On the night of December 9-10, 1956, shortly after his 21st birthday, Labiş, who had had spent several hours with acquaintances drinking coffee and ţuică at Casa Capşa and then the Victoria restaurant, was going to take a tram. He was headed to the house of Maria Polevoi, a dancer in the Army's troupe whom he had met that evening. It was after midnight and public transport had just started running that late. Ostensibly, he lost his balance, caught the grille between the wagons, his head hit the pavement, and he was dragged a short distance. An official investigation blamed inebriation as the cause of his fall, but the file was quickly classified. His spinal cord was fractured, his body was paralysed and he was practically decapitated. As the station was across the street from Colţea Hospital, in University Square, he was taken there immediately. At 2:30 am a surgeon wrote, "cranial and vertebral trauma; paraplegia". Toward daybreak, he was taken to the Emergency Hospital. There, he whispered a poem to his friend Aurel Covaci:
Even if he was not assassinated, Labiş was certainly a thorn in the side of the regime. After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Gheorghe Tomozei wrote, "Labiş is the first Romanian dissident poet.... He announced a fierce break between poetry and the ideology of the day. More than certainly, prison was not far off for him". The Securitate made note of his private conversations that "defamed the communist regime", and his poems too contained veiled anti-communist themes. The "inertia" in the title of his second volume may well have referred to the failure to de-Stalinize by Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. He and his friends discussed the question of Bessarabia. On November 3, 1956, at a wedding attended by about a dozen people, he sang the Kingdom of Romania's anthem, "Trăiască Regele". That month, at Capşa, during an anti-Soviet discussion on the recent Hungarian Revolution, he stood up and loudly recited Eminescu's banned patriotic poem "Doina". He also participated in meetings during the Bucharest student movement of 1956, which was followed by vigorous repression. Given his rising popularity, a trial would have been inconvenient.
In 2006, the writer Imre Portik published his memoirs, in which he claimed that his friend Labiş told him he was pushed. He also wrote that in the days before the poet's death, he visited the dancer Maria Polevoi. According to Portik, she confessed that the poet was pushed, and that she even saw the man who did it, but refused to divulge further details. When Portik contacted her later, she refused to speak, saying that she had told all there was to tell to the prosecutor. Some have claimed that Polevoi was attached not to the army, but to the Interior Ministry, to which the Securitate also belonged. After the file was classified she refused to discuss the case with anyone else. She lived alone in the same house on Calea Călăraşi until her suicide in 1978. |
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