Constantin Gane (en)

From advocacy to writing and from diplomacy to mercy through suffering. Glimpses into the novel life of writer Constantin Gane

In Aiud’s Zarca, the administration did not move much. Generally speaking, you entered it as a “top” and stayed there for years before being released in one of two ways: death or the end of your sentence. In this regime of melting of body and mind, where time was grey, clothes grey, food grey, cells grey, and where only immersion in oneself sustained, enlivened and coloured one’s life, our preference, though rare, always brought something new, the hope of a revival, of meeting someone we knew or a personality we had longed to meet.

Constantin Gane – the historian with a face gilded with immaculate morality

When, in the summer of 1954, I was transferred from the ground floor to the floor of Zarca, to the cell where two illustrious figures of Romanian culture, the poet Radu Gyr and the great historian and writer Constantin Gane, spent their days and nights, I was reminded of the wonderful work of this Moldavian scholar, ”Trecute vieți de doamne și domnițe” which has delighted so many generations, a book that represents and defines him as a personality, as a vocation and as a concern. Perhaps no other book has confused its author as much as this one. Although he […]

Constantin Gane, a phenomenal man

One day, after a cursory search, I was put in a cell with two Aromanians from the commune of Tudor Vladimirescu (formerly Potur) in Constanta County. (…) They told me that in the next cell was the university professor Manu, who had been imprisoned since the time of Antonescu. In the same cell with him was the writer Constantin Gane, whom I had known long before his imprisonment, since he had published his three volumes of “Trecute vieți de doamne și domnițe”.

Constantin Gane – a writer of Christian dignity

In the beginning of time there was the writer Constantin Gane, author of the incomparable ”Trecute vieți de doamne și domnițe”. He was old and ill. They had put a young student in his cell to take him back to the bed from which he could not get down. The Colonel would come in now and then, and he’d say: – Colonel, I’d like some medicine to relieve my illness. – We’ll give it to you if you write something for us. – I won’t write anything! – Then we won’t give you any medicine. They kept him there to […]

Contantin Gane – a good Romanian and patriot

I was moved again in pairs with the writer Constantin Gane. Mr Gane came from a family of Moldavian boyars, now rather lost. He knew the thread of his family’s genealogy back to 1453, when Constantinople fell; he was older, since 1887, I think. He had played in the royal palace with Ferdinand and Queen Mary’s daughters. I found him extremely rheumatic and couldn’t walk to carry the cane. “The boys,” he told me, “have arranged for me to go abroad. The date was fixed, 1948. But I put it off to see what I could do with my library. […]

“The few words I exchanged with Constantin Gane will remain among my most cherished memories of Zarca”

From the first moments I was in solitary confinement,[1] immediately after the guard left, I tried to make contact with the neighbouring cells. From the right, no sign of life! From the left I got an answer. Every time I knocked on the wall I got an answer, but that was all. My neighbour didn’t try to talk to the wall. Suspecting that he didn’t know the system, I began to move my knocks along the wall, trying to make him understand that he should come to the window. Only after much persistence did I finally hear him open the […]

The end of Constantin Gane

One evening, after the count, [Alexandru Mironescu n.n.] came into contact through the pipe with Constantin Gane, who was in the cell below us, on the first floor. He was at the end of his tether, barely breathing. He suffered from spondylosis. – Gentlemen,” said the professor, “his life is barely flickering, he’s on his last legs!” Shortly afterwards, with a last effort, Constantine Gane stood up at the window and shouted through the blinds: “This is Constantine Gane. You know I’m dying in this prison, innocent!” After this last cry, which he addressed to this evil world, he was […]

A noble writer, literally and figuratively.

A figurehead, a writer of old vines, noble literally and figuratively. A man simple in faith and vast in culture. Author of the book “Trecute vieţi de doamne şi domniţe”. Died in Aiud shortly before liberation. (Ioan Ianolide – Return to Christ. Document for a New World, Bonifaciu Publishing House, Bucharest, 2012, p. 312)