Poetry
Poezii alese
Not translated into English
Nicolai Costenco · 1957
Synopsis
Verses published the year after the rehabilitation of their author, who had returned from Siberia: a poetry that has been called volcanic, in which the inner lava of lived experience finds its outlet in jets of flame and clouds of ash.
Context
The collection appeared in Chișinău in 1957; Poezii noi followed in 1960, then Severograd, in two volumes, in 1963 and 1970, awarded a prize in 1976. According to Historia, Costenco had, in the spring of 1941, defended Romanian against Russian borrowings before Nikita Khrushchev, and was then arrested for anti-Soviet agitation; he was deported for having maintained that Moldovan and Romanian are one and the same language. Grigore Vieru hailed him as the poet who wrote his verses in the ice notebook of Siberia.
Who it is for
In Romanian; knowing where the author was returning from, and why he had been sent there, sheds light on the reading.
Prizes and reception
Mihai Cimpoi, Mihail Dolgan and Ion Ciocanu have devoted studies to his work.