Urmuz
Sign in to saveUrmuz (, pen name of Demetru Dem. Demetrescu-Buzău, also known as Hurmuz or Ciriviș, born Dimitrie Dim. Ionescu-Buzeu; March 17, 1883 – November 23, 1923) was a Romanian writer, lawyer and civil servant, who became a cult hero in Romania's avant-garde scene. His scattered work, consisting of absurdist short prose and poetry, opened a new genre in Romanian letters and humor, and captured the imagination of modernists for several generations. Urmuz's Bizarre (or Weird) Pages were largely independent of European modernism, even though some may have been triggered by Futurism; their valorization o
Person · Open Library
- Born
- March 17, 1883
- Died
- November 23, 1923
- Works
- 4
Top works
- Pagine bizzarre
- Das gesamte Werk
- Schițe și nuvele ... aproape futuriste ...
- Pagini bizare
via Open Library + Wikidata
Listeners · Last.fm
- Listeners
- 17
- Total plays
- 280
Tags
heavy metalelectronicsynthdadaism
<a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Urmuz">Read more on Last.fm</a>
via Last.fm · Urmuz
Recent publications · Crossref
2 total works indexed
- Urmuz
· 1971
- Cotadi and Dragomir
· 2015
via Crossref · CC0
Key facts
- Writer <! for more information see [[:Template:Infobox writer/doc]] >.name
- UrmuzDemetru Dem. Demetrescu-Buzău
- Writer <! for more information see [[:Template:Infobox writer/doc]] >.image
- Urmuz.jpg
- Writer <! for more information see [[:Template:Infobox writer/doc]] >.imagesize
- 250px
- Writer <! for more information see [[:Template:Infobox writer/doc]] >.caption
- Urmuz,
- Writer <! for more information see [[:Template:Infobox writer/doc]] >.pseudonym
- Ciriviș, Hurmuz
- Writer <! for more information see [[:Template:Infobox writer/doc]] >.birth_place
- Curtea de Argeș, Kingdom of Romania
- Writer <! for more information see [[:Template:Infobox writer/doc]] >.death_place
- Bucharest, Kingdom of Romania
- Writer <! for more information see [[:Template:Infobox writer/doc]] >.occupation
- writer, humorist, judge, clerk
- Writer <! for more information see [[:Template:Infobox writer/doc]] >.nationality
- Romanian
- Writer <! for more information see [[:Template:Infobox writer/doc]] >.genre
- Absurdist fiction, antinovel, aphorism, experimental literature, fable, fantasy literature, mythopoeia, nonsense verse, parody, sketch story
Key dates
- Born
- 17 March 1883
- Died
- 23 November 1923
via Wikidata · CC0
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- human
- Gender
- male
- Citizenship
- Kingdom of Romania
- Place of birth
- Curtea de Argeș
- Place of death
- Bucharest
- Occupation
- prose writer
- Position held
- judge
- Educated at
- Gheorghe Lazăr National College
- Languages spoken
- Romanian
- Conflict
- World War I
Article
31 sectionsContents
- Name
- Biography
- Childhood
- ''Pahuci'' brotherhood
- Dobrujan career and military life
- Debut
- Suicide
- Urmuz's ideas and stylistic affinities
- The avant-garde herald vs. the conservative
- The buffoon vs. the professional writer
- Kafka, Jarry and "antiliterature"
- Esoteric layers
- Works
- Early prose
- "Ismaïl and Turnavitu"
- "The Funnel and Stamate"
- "The Fuchsiad"
- "Emil Gayk" and "Going Abroad"
- Unclassified prose
- "The Chroniclers"
- Legacy
- ''Contimporanul'' circle
- ''unu'' and the 1930s literati
- ''The Drake's Head''
- Communist ban and diaspora recovery
- From Onirism to the ''Optzeciști''
- Postmodern Urmuzianism
- Notes
- References
- Internal links
- External links
Urmuz (, pen name of Demetru Dem. Demetrescu-Buzău, also known as Hurmuz or Ciriviș, born Dimitrie Dim. Ionescu-Buzeu; March 17, 1883 – November 23, 1923) was a Romanian writer, lawyer and civil servant, who became a cult hero in Romania's avant-garde scene. His scattered work, consisting of absurdist short prose and poetry, opened a new genre in Romanian letters and humor, and captured the imagination of modernists for several generations. Urmuz's Bizarre (or Weird) Pages were largely independent of European modernism, even though some may have been triggered by Futurism; their valorization of nonsense verse, black comedy, nihilistic tendencies and exploration into the unconscious mind have repeatedly been cited as influential for the development of Dadaism and the Theatre of the Absurd. Individual pieces such as "The Funnel and Stamate", "Ismaïl and Turnavitu", "Algazy & Grummer" or "The Fuchsiad" are parody fragments, dealing with monstrous and shapeshifting creatures in mundane settings, and announcing techniques later taken up by Surrealism.
Urmuz's biography between his high school eccentricity and his public suicide remains largely mysterious, and some of the sympathetic accounts have been described as purposefully deceptive. The abstruse imagery of his work has produced a large corpus of diverging interpretations. He has notably been read as a satirist of public life in the 1910s, an unlikely conservative and nostalgic, or an emotionally distant esotericist.