TABOR - Tradition and Contemporaneity in the Romanian Orthodox Church
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PAUL STERIAN, the polyvalent christian creator


 

The author outlines a spiritual portrait of Paul Sterian, leading figure of the interwar culture. According to Alexander Mironescu, Paul Sterian was a gifted creator, like a Renaissance man; he was a unique poet, famous journalist and, in the same time, an expert economist with a doctorate from Paris, valued sociologist in the team of D. Gusti, painter and engraver, playwright and librettist who knew all the secrets of theater, a violinist who even at an old age was singing Kreisler studies and César Cranck sonata and even a dancer whose feet knew the pace of modern dance steps. His life`s masterpiece was The unseen war of Paisios the Great. This book reflects his affiliation to orthodox literary and spiritual culture. He was a practicing devoted christian of the Orthodox Church. During the communist dictatorship he has experienced many hardships, tough years of persecution and prison hell for 5 years. Released in late `63, broken destiny, Paul Sterian could not continue his creative work and in order to earn a living, he worked as a shop assistant, bookkeeper assistant and, in the end, as an auxiliary researcher in the sociology team of the Institute of geriatrics in Bucharest. Paul Sterian wrote daily with rigorous discipline of labor; he was sitting at his desk, provoking his inspiration, not waiting for it. To his poems, his first passion, he added essays, plays, librettos for musical works, but also works of economics, sociology etc.

 

Keywords: Paul Sterian, culture, Renaissance spirit, patriotism, interwars period, communism, Orthodoxy


 

ILEANA MIRONESCU