Iordan Chimet

Iordan Chimet (November 18, 1924 – May 23, 2006) was a Romanian poet, children's writer and essayist, whose work was inspired by Surrealism and Onirism.

He is also known as a memoirist, theater, art and film critic, book publisher and translator.

Chimet, who was an opponent of totalitarianism in general and of the Communist regime in particular, was persecuted by the latter as a dissident, and lived much of his life in obscurity.

His experience as an employee of the cooperative society Centrocoop also made him one of the first professional copywriters in his country.

The poems, fantasy works and fairy tales he authored, although largely ignored locally upon being published, have since drawn acclaim for their accomplished style, and are considered by many unique in Romanian literature.

They explored the themes of innocence and melancholy, and have themselves been seen as a venue for a discreet advocacy of disobedience.

Chimet was also the author of critical essays on Latin American studies and Western or popular culture, and a publisher of anthologies on some of the major themes in Romanian society.

In addition, he collected and published material on the life and legacy of playwright Mihail Sebastian, as well as on the history of the Romanian avant-garde.

The Romanian Kingdom's secret police, Siguranța Statului, had Chimet under surveillance from 1943 until the 1944 Romanian coup d'état.

Chimet, unlike his friends, was not drawn into collaboration with the Romanian Communist Party, being apprehensive of communism in general and of Soviet influence in particular.

He was a graduate of the Philology and Philosophy Department (1948), and of the Law Department (1957) of the University of Bucharest.

Ursu and Baciu were themselves disillusioned with communism after 1949–1950, and broke with the Communist Party around that time.

Chimet was subject to an inquiry for "anti-people activities", and sentenced to work as a lathe operator for a worker cooperative.

Soon after, he was moved to what was considered a lower position, that of copy-editor for Centrocoop commercials, an office whose equivalent in capitalist countries was that of copywriter (Chimet was thus one of Romania's first persons to have this job description after World War II).

It was in this field that he gained first-hand experience in marketing, which was to prove an important theme in some of his essays.

Refusing to adapt his style to Socialist realism, Chimet was himself considered a suspect, and lived in extreme poverty during the 1950s.

Literary critic Paul Cernat indicated that Chimet was able to evade arrest only because Tonegaru, who had been arrested, did not give in to violent interrogation.

He was allowed to publish beginning in the late 1960s, with the liberalization coinciding with the early years of Nicolae Ceaușescu's leadership.

At the time, Chimet also found employment as a lecturer at the "Friends of Film" club at the Cinemateca film archive, where he kept company with film critics such as Paul Barbăneagră, Tudor Caranfil, Eugen Schileru, and D. I. Suchianu.

His works of criticism touched aspects of Western culture that he intended to popularize in Romania: two of them were dedicated, respectively, to the American-born Western genre (Western. Filmele Vestului îndepărtat—"Western. The Films of the Far West") and to the American cinema in general (Eroi, fantome, șoricei—"Heroes, Ghosts, Little Mice"); other works dealt with the visual arts in South America, with Latin American art and Latin American studies.

This focus, together with the praise to innocence he provided in his fairy tales and fantasy works, as well as in his 1972 Editura Ion Creangă anthology (Cele 12 luni ale visului. O antologie a inocenței, "The 12 Months of Dreaming. An Anthology of Innocence"), have themselves been seen as signs of resistance through culture.

While his work was ignored at home, it brought Chimet a measure of success abroad.

His essays on American culture were generally not distributed in Romania, but were translated in other Eastern bloc countries, where they became appreciated for their subversive undertones.

In parallel, his works of children's literature were translated into several languages, and became known in America, as well as in Western and Central Europe, on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

He was selected to be part of the jury for the University of Oklahoma's Neustadt International Prize for Literature (the only Romanian to enjoy this appointment), but the communist authorities' hostility prevented him from honoring the request.

Chimet did not cease his contacts with Western writers, and generally appealed to clandestine mail in order to have his messages sent across.

In 1977, he began corresponding with Michael Ende, who was living in West Germany.

The two shared a rejection for normative control over literature: while Chimet centered his criticism on the cultural guidelines imposed by Ceaușescu (see April Theses), Ende depicted in negative terms the impact of Neorealism and the Marxist aesthetics popularized by Bertold Brecht.

Chimet had a lifelong friendship with Gheorghe Ursu, a dissident who was killed by the Securitate secret police in 1985, and with science fiction author Camil Baciu.

He was also a friend of the German writer Michael Ende and the Greek poet Odysseas Elytis, with whom he kept in touch in spite of the difficulties posed by their living on different sides of the Iron Curtain.

Born in Galați, Chimet belonged to a family of middle-class intellectuals.

His first works of poetry were published by the magazine Vremea when he was still in high school.

Politically active while still a teenager during World War II, he was part of an anti-fascist group in his native city.

The cell, which opposed Ion Antonescu's rule and Romania's alliance to the Axis Powers (see Romania during World War II), also included Ursu and Baciu.

Following the start of Soviet occupation, he was active in supporting writers proscribed by the new authorities and joined a clandestine society to offer them help—known as the Eminescu Association, after Romania's famous 19th century poet Mihai Eminescu, it sought assistance from the Western Allies.

Other people involved in this project were the authors Pavel Chihaia, Vladimir Streinu, and Constant Tonegaru (aided by the French Catholic cleric Marie-Alype Barral).

According to Chihaia: "We realized, from the very beginning, what the new ideology imposed on us, as an adversary to the traditional culture, to the freedom of thought, attempting to compromise the values in which we believed and which we professed, really meant."

In the years leading up to the Communist regime's establishment, Iordan Chimet published poems with anti-communist undertones (ExiL, "ExiLe") in Revista Fundațiilor Regale and Revista Româno-Americană.

At the time, he met the art and literary critic Petru Comarnescu, who helped him publicize his works.

Reportedly, Comarnescu proposed his poems for an award, but this was never granted.