Ion Biberi

Elise's father, Pierre Gayraud, was a native of Narbonne who arrived in Romania in 1870, and worked as an architect, designing a marketplace in Craiova.

He married Iulia Servatius, a Romanian of Transylvanian Saxon origin who came from Brașov; the couple had ten children.

Due to his multiethnic background and the cultural environment of Turnu Severin, the writer grew up trilingual—he was proficient in Romanian, German, and, to a lesser degree, French.

Biberi began his education with a stint at Turnu Severin's Catholic German School.

For a short while, he was sent to a faraway school, located in either Dorohoi or Iași.

Upon returning to his hometown, he enlisted at the No 3 School, where he completed all remaining three grades of his primary schooling.

Ion Biberi (21 July 1904 – 27 September 1990) was a Romanian psychiatrist and anthropologist, also active as an essayist, fiction writer, dramatist, translator and critic.

Born into a mixed Romanian–French–German family, he spent most of his life in the Oltenian city of Turnu Severin, and was rather cut off from the center of culture in Bucharest.

Young Biberi was interested in philosophy, literature, and popular science, including amateur astronomy and human genetics; his worldview was shaped by the works of Mihai Eminescu, Hippolyte Taine, Erwin Baur, and later Henri Bergson.

He was also a child soldier in World War I, and his early experience of human disaster informed a lasting interest in thanatology.

His first works were articles on scientific subjects published when he was still a teenager.

At around that time, he also crossed paths with the younger author Mircea Eliade, who later became an additional influence on his work, and a generational leader.

In Craiova between 1914 and 1921, he attended gymnasium, and then, upon his father's command, the military high school.

Debuting with essays in the late 1920s, and with novels in the mid-1930s, Biberi sparked controversy for his commitment to experimental literature—bridging his work in psychiatry and his appreciation of James Joyce.

He was welcomed by Eliade as an exponent of the Trăirists, who cultivated authenticity and investigated liminal states; later critics, as well as Biberi himself, noted that his role within that movement was somewhat marginal.

His regular contribution was as a literary columnist for the Francophone daily Le Moment, wherein he introduced Romanian literature to foreign readers; he defended artistic freedoms against threats of censorship from the far-right, and as a result forged strong bonds with a few likeminded critics, including Șerban Cioculescu and Mihail Sebastian.

As a social scientist, he aspired to bridge Bergson's theories with the products of structuralism.

Biberi's interdisciplinarity, which evolved into a personal claim to multiple expertise, was appreciated in some circles, but always derided in others.

Inactive during most of World War II, Biberi reemerged on the literary scene after the August 1944 coup, as one of the intellectuals who collaborated with the Romanian Communist Party.

Though he openly rejected Marxism, he was inducted into the communist-aligned Union of Patriots, joined a council for the supervision of theaters, and contributed in the generic left-wing press.

His works of that time include a book of interviews with various peers in the literary world, noted in retrospect for its vain hope that the coming regime would be an enhanced democracy.

The proclamation of a communized republic saw him marginalized and braving starvation.

Biberi was recovered only around 1965, when the regime had entered its national-communist stage.

He could return as a social scientist, but also as a biographer, theater columnist, debuting dramatist, art critic, textbook author, anthologist, and researcher of poetics.

As an interviewer, Biberi contributed directly to the regime's propaganda.

His final and synthetical works were celebrated investigations into fantasy tropes.

He died at the age of 86, shortly after the end of communism, leaving a large corpus of works in manuscript.

Born in Turnu Severin on the Danube, Ion Biberi's parents were Constantin Biberi, a captain in the Romanian Naval Forces, and his wife Elise (née Gayraud).

It is known that the couple had another son.

Ion's paternal grandfather was a physician who studied at Leipzig University.

In a 1985 interview, Biberi confided that he had never gotten along with his strict father, and that he was deeply affected at age five, when his mother, a woman of "perfect artistic culture", died unexpectedly.

Feeling encouraged by Elise's example, he followed training in music, and was passionate about Richard Wagner; it "provided me with a new outlook on the spectacle of life."

He was also deeply familiarized with German art, from being shown paintings by Moritz von Schwind and Caspar David Friedrich to discovering Albrecht Dürer and Albrecht Altdorfer.

The boy's humanistic education was for a while shaped by the philosopher Ștefan Bârsănescu and by the Latinist Ion Ionescu-Bujor, who were his schoolteachers.

Around the age of twelve, Biberi began reading the major authors of German Romanticism, including E. T. A. Hoffmann and Novalis, before becoming enthusiastic about Edgar Allan Poe and Mihai Eminescu's fantasy literature (he later recounted that he had learned Eminescu's short novel, Poor Dionis, "almost by heart").

Following the example of another schoolteacher, Marin Demetrescu, Biberi was also introduced to popular science—his scientific interests first led him into amateur astronomy; he was equally interested in philosophy, becoming an avid reader of Arthur Schopenhauer and Ludwig Büchner.

His preoccupations centered on psychiatry and psychoanalysis, after going through topical essays by Théodule-Armand Ribot, Hippolyte Taine, Philippe Tissié, and Nicolae Vaschide.

Of these, Taine remained a particularly strong influence—seen by critic Henri Zalis as Biberi's "spiritual patron", who also fixated the stylistic coordinates of his later essays.

Another formative experience came as he witnessed first-hand the Romanian debacle in World War I: a member of a Scouting troupe, he assisted the Romanian Land Forces just behind the front line.

As he recalled in 1985, he was surrounded by death, especially after the arrival of epidemic typhus, which killed three of his Scouting colleagues; this period informed his interest in thanatology.