Literature

Constantin Stere

Scriitor și om politic · 1865 – 1936

A Bessarabian writer and politician, one of the central figures of the national movement. He played an important role in the events of the 1918 Union, and his novel „În preajma revoluției" (On the Eve of the Revolution) is a landmark work.

Constantin Stere (b. 1865, Ciripcău, Soroca district – d. 1936) was a jurist, university professor, ideologue, publicist, writer and politician, one of the most complex Bessarabian personalities at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Descended from a family of boyars from Bessarabia, then under the rule of the Russian Empire, he left a deep mark on both the political and the cultural life of Romanians on both banks of the Prut.

Youth and exile

As early as his school years, Stere became involved in the revolutionary movement against the tsarist regime, for which he was arrested and sentenced to years of harsh imprisonment and exile in Siberia (1886–1892). After his release, he crossed clandestinely into the Kingdom of Romania, where he continued his studies and his career, becoming professor of administrative and constitutional law at the University of Iași, an institution of which he was rector between 1913 and 1916. He was also one of the principal ideologues of poporanism and the founder of the review „Viața românească” (Romanian Life).

The Union of Bessarabia and the literary work

In 1918, Constantin Stere played an essential role in the union of Bessarabia with Romania, being elected the second president of Sfatul Țării (the Country's Council) (2 April – 25 November 1918). His involvement in this historic moment, as well as his later positions, earned him a controversial reputation, and he was sometimes called the „maker-traitor” of the Union.

In the last part of his life he devoted himself to writing, leaving behind the autobiographical novel „În preajma revoluției” (On the Eve of the Revolution), published in eight volumes between 1932 and 1936. The work, which evokes the world of Bessarabia and of revolutionary Russia, enjoyed critical and popular success, establishing him as an important prose writer of Romanian literature.

A controversial destiny

Constantin Stere's political thought profoundly influenced Romanian culture through the poporanist doctrine, which placed the peasantry at the centre of the national project. The review „Viața românească”, founded in Iași in 1906, became one of the most important cultural publications of the age. After 1918, his independent political attitudes brought him marginalisation. Withdrawn to his estate at Bucov, near Ploiești, he devoted himself to writing until his death in 1936. Posterity gradually recovered him as one of the most original Bessarabian thinkers and prose writers.