Portal:Christianity/Selected biography/December 2009

Ion Heliade Radulescu

Ion Heliade Rădulescu was a Wallachian-born Romanian academic, Romantic and Classicist poet, essayist, memoirist, short story writer, newspaper editor and politician, as well as prolific translator of foreign literature into Romanian and the author of books on linguistics and history. For much of his life, he was a teacher at the Saint Sava College in Bucharest, which he helped reopen. He was a founding member of the Romanian Academy, and the first President thereof. Heliade Rădulescu is considered one of the foremost representatives of Romanian culture from the first half of the 19th century, having first become noted for his association with Gheorghe Lazăr and the latter's support for discontinuing education in Greek. Over the following decades, he had a major contribution in shaping the modern Romanian language, but raised controversy when he came to advocate the massive introduction of Italian neologisms to the Romanian lexis. A Romantic nationalist landowner siding with moderate liberals, he was among the leaders of the 1848 Wallachian revolution, after which he was forced to spend several years in exile. Adopting an original form of conservatism, which emphasized the role of boyars in Romanian history, Heliade Rădulescu was rewarded for supporting the Ottoman Empire, and came to clash with the radical wing of the 1848 generation.

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