“The exemplary honor of a man who yearned for purity, struggling all his life to achieve it.”
I met Vasile Voiculescu through Ion Marin Sadoveanu when I was working as a bookseller and antiquarian in the Nastratin shop, near the Boema summer theatre, between 1946 and 1949. Both of them had huge libraries from which they began to sell, not without pain, as they were passionate about books that they could hardly part with, even though they had read them, annotated them and fished them out.
Voiculescu impressed me with his advice and a certain sober honesty. He was usually quiet, reserved, with an expression that was sometimes friendly, sometimes stern. More importantly, this first good impression remained unchanged, although I came to know the man in many guises.
He invited me to his house in Staicovici Street, where Kogâlniceanu is said to have lived. It was the day before Christmas, in a very cold month, the like of which I had not experienced in recent years. Doctor Voiculescu didn’t have enough wood to heat his study, which also housed his huge library. There you could find anything: books on medicine and magic, poetry and novels, biology, philosophy, theology and folklore. And there was a lot of it. I didn’t have to rummage around too much to make a pile of books, according to the immediate needs of a man who could see that he was not completely detached from his wealth, but not clinging to it either. We easily agreed on the price, as I did not want to get rich from the man’s financial need and he did not understand – it was not in his nature – to haggle.
The poet-doctor was weak, even ill, and the cold in the study made him visibly ill, so whenever I went to his house we moved from the library to the bedroom, where, according to the custom of the house, tea awaited me with a few biscuits.
Until then I had known him as a poet. During one of my visits, I discovered a scientific book written by the doctor, one of the most important in our literature, on medicinal plants and their healing virtues. Seeing my interest, he gave it to me. A work written with the passion of a poet and the rigour of a scientist.
Later I met Voiculescu again in a philosophers’ circle discussing soteriology, and I loved the way the poet, who was also a scholar, intervened with the competence of a man versed in the biological sciences, bringing arguments that enlightened the discussion, which had become arid in the casuistic-philosophical inconclusiveness of those present.
The last time I saw the great poet of the sonnets, I was moved by his face, thinned by illness and suffering, his tragic frown, his hushed voice, which revealed the exemplary honesty of a man who longed for purity and fought all his life to achieve it, despite all the obstacles of body and soul. Purity? Is it not an illusion of the mind? And yet this illusion is such as to transfigure and ennoble at least part of our lives. After a while we met in Jilava, brought as a witness for Dinu Pillat. He was disfigured.
He died soon afterwards, and I was not allowed to express – as so many of the poet’s post-mortem apologists did – my boundless admiration for both the author of the sonnets and the man in one piece that was Vasile Voiculescu.
(Arșavir Acterian – Portraits and Three Memories of a Prisoner, 2nd edition, Ararat Publishing House, Bucharest, 2004, pp. 151-152; evocation republished in Intelectualitatea interbelică între ortodoxie și tradiționalism, edited by Fabian Anton, Vremea Publishing House, Bucharest, 2008, pp. 39-40)