Stephan Roll

Stephan Roll (pen name of Gheorghe Dinu, also credited as Stéphane, Stefan or Ștefan Roll; June 5, 1904 – May 14, 1974) was a Romanian poet, editor, film critic, and communist militant.

An autodidact, he played host to the Romanian avant-garde at his father's dairy shop, publishing his work in short-lived reviews and in two volumes of poetry.

As one of the editors of the magazine unu, he turned from Constructivism, Futurism and jazz poetry to the more lyrical format of Surrealism.

Roll's political radicalism seeped into his avant-garde activity, and produced a split inside the unu group; Roll's faction discarded Surrealism in favor of proletarian literature, and affiliated with the underground Romanian Communist Party.

An antifascist who supported groups such as Amicii URSS and promoted Soviet viewpoints, Roll worked on various leftist periodicals, including those of the Adevărul group and Cuvântul Liber.

He kept a low profile during World War II, when he was employed by the daily Timpul, discreetly expressing his criticism of Nazi Germany, later contributing to the clandestine România Liberă.

Reemerging under the Romanian communist regime, he became a propagandist and, in his final years, worked on reducing the avant-garde content of his debut works, republishing them in altered editions.

He was survived by his painter wife, Medi Wechsler-Dinu.

Roll was a native of Prekopana village in the Ottoman Empire's Manastir Vilayet; today, this is Perikopi in the Florina regional unit of Greece.

His parents were Bulgarian peasants: Enache Dinu, a komitadji who fled to Bucharest in 1907, and his wife Paraschiva.

His formal education consisted of four grades at the Bulgarian school in Bucharest from 1911 to 1915.

As his letters show, he always had difficulties writing proper Romanian, and devised his own spelling of various words.

Dinu spent his youth in a multicultural environment, spending time in the Romanian Jewish neighborhoods, and acting as the shabbos goy, preserving links with the Zionist A. L. Zissu.

From 1915 to 1929, he worked as a shop boy at his father's dairy, Lăptăria Enache (or Secolul), near the Bucharest Bărăția.

During the 1920s, Enache's shop became a meeting place for avant-garde poets and artists such as Victor Brauner (who painted its exterior), Ilarie Voronca, and Sașa Pană.

Inspired by the more senior poet Ion Vinea, the group stated its allegiance to Constructivism, and published in Vinea's Contimporanul.

His links with radical left-wing circles were documented from late 1921, when Siguranța, the Romanian Kingdom's secret police, was informed of his possible connections with the terrorist Max Goldstein.

Together with Voronca and Brauner, Roll edited 75 H.P. magazine, which appeared for one number in October 1924.

Later, he and Voronca joined Scarlat Callimachi's Punct.

He signed his articles with his birth name, and his poetry as Stephan Roll, a pen name he allegedly picked up at random from a Swiss magazine, after noting that he was the only non-pseudonymous writer of his intimate circle.

Dinu worked as an editor for Integral magazine (1925–1928), where he also made his debut as a film critic, alongside Benjamin Fondane and Ion Călugăru.

While visiting Câmpina in 1927, Roll met the aspiring poet Geo Bogza, who had read his Contimporanul pieces, and helped him to launch another avant-garde periodical, Urmuz (to which he also contributed).

They were joined in Bucharest by the draftsman Jules Perahim, who was aged fifteen at the time, and later also by Sandu Eliad and M. H. Maxy.

From 1928 to 1932, Roll edited the magazine unu, and, according to Pană, was the "quicksilver"-like animator of its literary club.

However, he also wrote for Meridian and Facla.

By 1930, he and his unu colleagues had signed up to international Surrealism, and were especially interested in cultivating its automatic writing technique.

As noted by Pană, Roll took this affiliation seriously, spontaneously experimenting with absurdist humor.

He "very seriously" recounted stories of pseudo-zoology to an audience of fellow tram riders, insisting that giraffes owed their elongated necks to a diet of drain spouts.

During that episode, unu hosted outsider literature by Petre Poppescu, a psychiatric inmate, as well as cut-out obituaries from the mainstream press.

Also featured were drawings by Brauner with captions by Roll, such as their posthumous homage to Serafina, Roll's she-dog, whom he had trained to lash out at conformist authors who happened to be visiting Enache's dairy.

His defense of the avant-garde led him to publish passionate pieces in defense of Bogza, who was facing trial for his highly erotic collection, Jurnal de sex, a "simulated hymn of voluptuousness and shamelessness, of a sadistic dairy, of spasm and organic inebriation".

According to scholar Paul Cernat, Roll and Pană publicized their "superficial adhesion" to Surrealism only because it provided expression to their dreams of political revolution.

Cernat notes the same for two other unu writers, Miron Radu Paraschivescu and Claude Sernet.

Already during the 1930 Bogza trial, Roll drew parallels between the calls for artistic censorship and the rise of fascism.

Soon, the unu group severed its links with Vinea and Contimporanul: the latter was becoming more mainstream, more eclectic, and more tolerant of "reactionary" figures such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Sandu Tudor, and Mihail Sebastian.

In unu, Vinea was attacked as an "Old Man", his Constructivism denounced as opportunistic and "utilitarian".

The group won a victory over Vinea by obtaining foreign support: Roll published in Der Sturm an introduction to Romanian Surrealism, followed by samples from Bogza, Fondane, Pană, and other poets.

Reportedly, the moderate Der Sturm had to insist that unu radicals grant it this favor.

For his closeness to the banned Romanian Communist Party (PCdR), Roll was under constant Siguranța surveillance.

He opened the magazine to PCdR cadres, publishing a book of poems by Ion Vitner, which was swiftly confiscated by the authorities.