Ion Luca Caragiale - Cultural Legacy

Cultural Legacy

The writer's investigations into Romanian culture also resulted in an accurate record of the Romanian language as it was spoken during his day, sampling dialects, jargon, slang, verbal tics, as well as illustrating the experiments undertaken by conflicting schools of linguistics during the 19th and early 20th century, as well as the traces they left on the Romanian lexis. In Tudor Vianu's opinion, this was partly owed to his keen musical ear.

Caragiale was an enduring influence on both Romanian humor and the views Romanians take of themselves. His comedies and various stories have produced a series of catchphrases, many of which are still present in both cultural reference. Nevertheless, his uncomfortable criticism has occasionally seen him assigned a secondary place in the Romanian curriculum and the academic discourse, a tendency notably endorsed by the Iron Guard (Romania's main fascist movement) and the Communist regime.

In parallel, Caragiale's techniques have influenced 20th century dramatists such as Mihail Sorbul, Victor Ion Popa, Mihail Sebastian, and George Mihail Zamfirescu, and various directors, beginning with Constantin I. Nottara and Paul Gusti. Several of his theatrical writings have been the subject of essays authored by director Sică Alexandrescu, whose interpretation of the texts made use of the Stanislavsky System. Caragiale's short stories and novellas have inspired authors such as Ioan A. Bassarabescu, Gheorghe Brăescu, Ioan Alexandru Brătescu-Voineşti, Dumitru D. Pătrăşcanu, I. Peltz, and, in later decades, Radu Cosaşu, Ioan Lăcustă, Horia Gârbea and Dumitru Radu Popa. According to various authors, Caragiale was also a predecessor of Absurdism, and he is known to have been cited as an influence by the Absurdist dramatist Eugène Ionesco. Outside Romania, the impact of Ion Luca Caragiale's literature was much reduced—the 1996 Cambridge Paperback Guide to Theatre attributed this to the technical problems posed by translations, as well as to the tendency of staging his works as period pieces.

Several authors have left memoirs of Ion Luca Caragiale. They include Octavian Goga and Ioan Slavici, I. Suchianu, Luca Caragiale, Ecaterina Logadi-Caragiale, and Cincinat Pavelescu. Among his later biographers was Octav Minar, who stood accused of having forged certain details for commercial gain. Direct or covert depictions of Caragiale are also present in several fiction works, starting with a revue first shown during his lifetime, and including novels by Goga, Slavici, N. Petraşcu, Emanoil Bucuţa, Eugen Lovinescu, Constantin Stere, as well as a play by Camil Petrescu. In 1939, B. Jordan and Lucian Predescu, published a common signature novel on the writer, which was criticized for its style, tone, and inaccuracies. The short story writer Brătescu-Voineşti proposed that Ion Luca Caragiale's love affair with Veronica Micle and Eminescu's anger provide the key to Eminescu's poem Luceafărul, but his theory remains controversial. Caragiale is also probably present in his son Mateiu's work Craii de Curtea-Veche, where his lifestyle and contribution to literature appear to be the subjects of derision.

The writer was elected to the Romanian Academy posthumously, in 1948, upon the proposal of novelist Mihail Sadoveanu. 2002, the 150th anniversary of Ion Luca Caragiale's birth, was celebrated in Romania as the Anul Caragiale (the "Caragiale Year"). Annual theater festivals in his honor are held in Bucharest and the Moldovan capital of Chişinău. Caragiale's work has been the subject of many productions in Romanian cinema and television—films based on his writings include the 1958 Două lozuri and Lucian Pintilie's 1981 De ce trag clopotele, Mitică?. In 1982, a West German film, directed by Radu Garbea and based on O făclie de Paşte, was released as Fürchte dich nicht, Jakob!.

The Bucharest National Theater is currently known in full as "Ion Luca Caragiale" National Theater. Several educational institutions were named in his, including the Theater and Film Academy and the Ion Luca Caragiale National College in Bucharest, the national college in Ploieşti, and a high school in Moreni. Among the statues raised in his honor are Constantin Baraschi's Bucharest monument, and busts in the capital's Cişmigiu Gardens and in Ploieşti. He was the subject of portraits and caricatures by various artists, and, in 2007, upon the completion of a five-year project involving cartoonists inside and outside Romania, he was designated "the most portrayed writer" by the Guinness Book of Records (with over 1,500 individual drawings in a single exhibit).

In 1962, a house in Ploieşti has been turned into a museum honoring Caragiale (the Dobrescu House). His native home in Haimanale was opened for the public in 1979. Memorial plaques have also been set up in Buzău and on Schöneberg's Hohenzollerndamm. His name was given to streets, avenues, parks or quarters in many Romanian cities—such landmarks include the Bucharest street he lived on around 1900, a street in Ploieşti, a quarter in Braşov, and a park in Cluj-Napoca. A street in Chişinău also bears the name Caragiale.