Poet, novelist, playwright and doctor of philosophy, Camil Petrescu remained in Romanian literature as the initiator of the modern novel. Camil Petrescu was born on April 22, 1894, the son of Camil and Ana Cheler. He was orphaned by both parents from an early age and was raised by a nanny from the Moșilor neighborhood. He attended primary school at a school in Obor, while he attended high school at "Sfântul Sava" College and "Gheorghe Lazăr" High School. Due to the very good results in his studies, Camil Petrescu was an internal scholarship holder, and from 1913 he attended the courses of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Bucharest. He graduated with flying colors, receiving the grade "magna cum laude", and later became a high school teacher in Timisoara. He also received his doctorate in philosophy, with a thesis on theater, called "The Aesthetic Modality of Theater", after which he published a study in the work "History of Philosophy", related to a new field, phenomenology in Husserl's work. Between 1916 and 1918 he participated as an officer in the First World War, an experience he described in the novel "The Last Night of Love, the First Night of War" (1930).
In 1916 he was mobilized and left for the front, but was wounded there. He does an internship in a military hospital, but reaches the front line again and is taken prisoner by the Hungarians. During a German bombing, Camil Petrescu loses his hearing and an ear, and this marks him for life, as he also claims in Jurnal: "Deafness has exhausted me, intoxicated me, neurasthenized me. I have to make deadly efforts for things that the normal do naturally (…) I am excluded from all the possibilities of life. In order to walk the streets I have to spend a lot of energy and attention with which others can read a volume. Here, where everything is arranged "in a whisper," I remain forever absent. " In 1918 he was released from the German camp and returned to Bucharest.
The debut in literature...
He started in the magazine "Facla", in 1914, with the article "Women and girls of today" and signed under the pseudonym "Raul D". Since 1920 he participates in the meetings of the "Sburătorul" circle led by Eugen Lovinescu, and now he publishes the first poems in the homonymous magazine. He made his editorial debut with a volume of "Lyrics: The Idea". In 1933, Camil Petrescu published his most valuable novel, one of the most important novels of European Modernism: " Procust's Bed ". In 1930 he was appointed director of the National Theater in Bucharest, but lasted only 10 months, after which he was elected a full member of the Romanian Academy in 1948. In the opinion of Ion Luca Caragiale , his theater represented the most important moment in the history of Romanian drama due to the intensity of the dramatic situations and the purity of the oppositions that come into play, but also by the overwhelming force that the characters had.
When Camil Petrescu died?
Camil Petrescu died on May 14, 1957, in Bucharest, and the social novel dedicated to Nicolae Bălcescu: "A man among people" remains unfinished.
"The last night of love, the first night of war" - novel by Camil Petrescu
Published by Camil Petrescu in 1930, the novel " Last night of love, first night of war " is the way in which the author captures the drama of the intellectual, thirsty for the absolute feeling of love and dominated by uncertainties, which is saved by the awareness of a stronger drama. of humanity experiencing the tragedy of an absurd war. The novel is structured in two parts, with significant titles: "the last night of love", expresses the aspiration for the feeling of absolute love, and "the first night of war" illustrates the image of tragic war as imminent death.