Oh, ideal lost in night-mists of a vanished universe:
People who would think in legends - all a world who spoke in verse;
I can see and think and hear you - youthful scout which gently nods
From a sky with different starlights, other Edens, other gods..
(Venus and Madonna - Mihai Eminescu)


On the 15th of January, in Botosani, a North Eastern town of Romania, the future poet Mihai Eminescu is born. His parents, Gheorghe and Raluca Eminovici were small land owners and Mihai was the 7th of 11 children. The future poet spends his Childhood in Ipotesti, a village where his parents had a small estate, 8 km away from Botosani. Today, here we can find Mihai Eminescu Memorial House.

First of all, Eminescu's personality was characterized by an overwhelming intelligence assisted by a memory that never let go of what it had recorded, not even during the period when he was certified as mentally ill. Willingly and according to his nature, he used to live almost exclusively in a world of abstract ideas, which he had a very firm grasp over, so they were always at hand. He was indifferent to any individual case, external event, social convention, fortune or poverty, high standing or ordinary status; even the external fate of his own person left him cold. Talking of Eminescu's material poverty would mean using an inappropriate pattern to refer to his individuality - a pattern that he might have been the first to reject. From a material point of view, Eminescu always had as much as he wanted to have for his living. He never found himself restrained by any material difficulty during his period of intellectual strength. When he could not earn money by himself, his father or friends financially supported him. Moreover, he always despised public charity. (Titu Maiorescu - Eminescu and his poems)


Surprisingly, 120 years after the death of the poet and national thinker, little is yet known related to his life or death. In completing the approach to recover the history of Eminescu, there are few to hold details about Eminovici family's religion and what reflecting his faith in the institution of the church, as a former political prisoner meant.
Bucharest has made note that were turned 120 years after the death of the greatest Romanian poet. Young and old, lovers of poetry have been gathered at the summer theater Herastrau Park. On stage they recited the best known and loved poems of the great poet and interpreted some lyrics of his songs. And even if more than a century has passed since the great poet was extinguished, children have shown that they know his work.

For 120 years we have known that Eminescu died in 1889, June 15, six years after having been socially killed: arrested, declared insane and banned. The commemorative plaque on the building located at no. 9, Street Plant, certifies: "He died on June 16 1889". This is Weird! And yet there is an explanation (and asserted by certain more or less official): Eminescu's autopsy was done on 16 June 1889, and there is a report submitted to the Academy. A proper examination of his brain could not have been made due to negligence, poor conditions, especially heat. His work was also destroyed before being examined by specialists. There is a legend that only a few days after the brain autopsy, Eminescu was sent to the young genius doctor Gheorghe Marinescu for the review. Many years later, in 1920, scientist Gheorghe Marinescu declared about this case as being very odd: The brain was brought to me from the Institute Sutu in a state of decomposition which allowed a fine study of the circumvolutions structure. The putrefaction was due to the high heat. Unfortunately, the brain was, as I said, split and I could not make a histological study". Al these are like specific general progressive paralysis - syphilis - the sickness which many geniuses including Nietzsche, Lenin, and some say, even Hitler had suffered from.
Another state of Eminescu's death would be that a woman named Poenaru gave a stone at his head. The poet was suffering from syphilis, but that coup would have hurried his death. And after he died, the doctors have removed his brain and it was left on a ledge in the sun. And his brain was eaten by birds.

Eminescu is omnipresent in present-day Romania. His statues are everywhere; his face was on the 1000-lei bill issued in 1998 and is on the new 500-lei bill issued in 2005 as the highest-denominated Romanian bill; many schools and other institutions are named after him.
Several young Romanian writers provoked a huge scandal when they wrote about their demystified idea of Eminescu and went so far as to reject the "official" interpretation of his work.
Due to his conservative nationalistic views, Eminescu was easily adopted as an icon by the Romanian right. A major obstacle to their fully embracing him was the fact he never identified himself as a Christian and his poetry rather indiscriminately uses Buddhist, Christian, agnostic, and atheist themes.
After a decade when Eminescu's works were criticized as "mystic" and "bourgeois", Romanian Communists ended up in adopting Eminescu as the major Romanian poet. What opened the door for this thaw was the poem Împărat şi proletar (Emperor and proletarian) that Eminescu wrote under the influence of the 1870-1871 events in France, and which ended in a Schopenhauerian critique of human life. An expurgated version only showed the stanzas that could present Eminescu as a poet interested in the fate of proletarians.

There were and still are all kinds of legends about Eminescu's death. The fact is our great poet suffers from immortality. Some people build their legends, to establish and find a route that could possibly run along any form of immortality. Eminescu was a self-centered man dissatisfied with his own destiny. It was made eternal by a more serene kind of melancholy, caused by meditation over mankind's fate. His typical feature was abstract serenity, showed both when he was melancholic or joyous. Another interesting thing to be noticed is that even the expression of his madness was exuberant joy.
Around any national symbol a lot of legends are formed, unfortunately, we rarely account for their credibility, but thus a scout-performing type of envisaging existence is being marked for us.


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Photo: Pablo Pina, Argentina
Some of the informations are taken from the central press and from Eminescu and his poems - Titu Maiorescu