Dr. Vasile Voiculescu (en)

“It was like an oak tree in whose shade we let ourselves be embraced and which drew its sap from our souls and warmed itself in the summer of our eyes.”

One of the activities of the Brătianu family, which became a tradition in the life of the poet Ion Pillat and then of his son Dinu, was to be in constant contact with contemporary writers. […] At these pleasant and simple banquets, followed by discussions, I participated with Dinu, Marie Pillat presiding at one end of the table and asking me to preside at the other. It seemed to me that angels were flying above us. […]

“That man full of kindness and goodness was the great writer Vasile Voiculescu”

– Dear Mr. Aristide Dobre, as the old saying goes, better late than never. It is more than thirty years since you carried the burden of a sacred message. All kinds of obstacles have prevented you from delivering it. Here I am, ready to be your messenger. The circumstances in which I have been entrusted with this message are dramatic; they are not just the drama of a few people, but the drama of a whole country. In 1958, while working at the Câmpina refinery, I was arrested for reasons that now seem ridiculous. As you can see from my […]

Confession of a writer and doctor

Many of the things you ask me to tell you are not only impossible to share, they are mysteries to me. Although they are mine, I feel they are inaccessible. My religious verses are less than a hint of these mysterious realities, just as a map shows the world instead of real mountains or waters, and translates heights into figures. We can only understand each other through sympathy and identity of inner experience!

Doctor Vasile Voiculescu – gentle, mild-mannered, peaceful, with a reassuring presence

The van took us slowly and hurriedly from Malmaison to Jilava before noon[1]. We got off at Fort 13. We were greeted by Lieutenant Ștefan, with the face of a primate, of an anthropoid, the gestures and the look of a prison sergeant in a film noir. He takes great pleasure in it, playing his role in slow motion, like a gambler spinning his cards.

“Doctor Vasile Voiculescu carried his Cross with great dignity”

It was the winter of 1959. It was cold and hungry enough in Jilava. New “clients” arrived in the cell (not quite “cell” because it was a rather large room with about 60-80 inhabitants – the cell was only 2/4 m, 3/4 m with a smaller load), only at night, in the early hours […]. One night the door opened and three old men and a younger man entered the room (cell). I remember them all, because they were all people known in Romanian culture […].

“He was a particularly good man and he didn’t want us to suffer because of him. His mercy and faith were extraordinary.”

A few steps further on, after escaping the congestion of the Unirea metro station, the noise dies down. I hurried down the quiet street of the United Principalities. On the right, the emblematic dome of the Patriarchate rises into the clear sky, and on the left, I mentally count the streets with evocative names – Ienăchiță Văcărescu, the Olympic Museums – as if in a ritual that I am repeating for the umpteenth time? – on this journey of the soul. I am moved by the thought that, perhaps even forty years ago, these houses had the same eyes that […]

The last months of suffering in the life of Dr. Vasile Voiculescu

Whenever I try to write down memories of the last year of my father’s life, after they brought him home from prison, my thoughts refuse to come together. But I’ll try. The whole family was waiting for him at the front of the house, on the steps, with a sign saying “Welcome home”. My sister Gaby Defour was very shocked when my father came upstairs and said: ‘Godfather (his sister Florica Ștefănescu), I missed you and Nichilina’ (Daniela Defour). We put him in the room opposite where Ionică’s mother-in-law slept, who moved into the next bedroom with Lizi, and Ionică […]

“I admired and loved him in his threefold aspect of great poet, of a man of great distinction, and of an apostolic ‘holy unmercenary'”

I first met V. Voiculescu at the beginning of 1925, in the company of Ion Pillat, in a brasserie in the former capital. I was struck by his Byzantine holy figure, his slender hands with long fingers, like those of an icon, his soft and calm speech. I saw him on many occasions afterwards, at the home of the author of “Limpezimilor”, whom he often visited, and at the editorial office of “Gândirea”, where he came to see Nichifor Crainic. We were not bound by a close friendship, but only by a good literary collegiality, the “Pârgăi” poet – always […]

Vasile Voiculescu remains in Romanian literature as an authentic religious poet

[…] I am still obsessed – and my obsession should be shared by all – by the harrowing scene described to me by a witness to the poet’s last years: old, ill, in an unheated room, in the middle of the Bucharest winter, V. Voiculescu received a visit from Tudor Vianu, who came to persuade him to allow some of his poems to be published under the current regime. Tudor Vianu wanted to persuade the poet of Destiny to finally give up the asceticism (the aesthete called it stubbornness) in which he had ostentatiously wallowed. V. Voiculescu looked deeply into […]

Vasile Voiculescu’s prisons

Vasile Voiculescu was born, according to family testimony, on the night of 12-13 October 1884, in the family of Costache and Sultana Voicu. The name Voiculescu was given to him in his first school records. He attended the school in Pleșcoi and the high schools “BP Hașdeu” in Buzău and “Gheorghe Lazăr” in Bucharest. After a year at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, he entered the Faculty of Medicine, graduating in 1909 and defending his bachelor’s thesis in surgery the following year. He went on to specialise in internal medicine and epidemiology[1]. He “devoured” Romanian literature from secondary school, […]

Vasile Voiculescu – the hesychast poet with the appearance of a Byzantine saint

The author of Poems with Angels has crept into my life, as he has into my memories, with the discretion with which he has probably crept into the lives of his contemporaries throughout a century of human existence. It’s been years since I asked for my memory, and I still can’t give myself the icon of the moment when I met him, when I sat face to face with him for the first time, and when I should have been happy to shake the hand of the poet I had read so fervently. [I suddenly find myself with him in […]

“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.

Dr. Voiculescu – a presence of gentleness and intellectual elegance

Dr. Vasile Voiculescu [has] risen among us, at the “liturgical” Antim[1], since very early 1946. Beyond the prestige recognised to a cultural personality, we discovered the man closely, in his presence of gentleness and intellectual elegance. Originally from the region of Buzău (“a family of not very well-off Bohemians…”), his early faith had never faded, but according to his own confession, the turbulence of life and the opacity of the ecclesiastical institution had pushed it to the margins of his conscience. A classic situation: perhaps that is why the spontaneous and free community of Antim – “laity” and “clergy” – […]

“To all the legionaries of Radio he was a good example of honesty and modesty, of good manners and tolerance”

In Zarca were imprisoned in diabolical isolation the legion leaders: Professor Nicolae Pătrașcu, Alex. Ghica, lawyers Radu Mironovici and Nistor Chioreanu, Alexandru Constant, Radu Gyr, Victor Biriș, Radu Budișteanu, Petrică Țocu, Eugen Teodorescu, Filon Lauric, etc. There were no more political prisoners working in the prison’s workshops, only ordinary prisoners, and the wards were full, as were the “mad rooms” in Section I and the “punishment cells” (a section set up after 1954).

“It was the sum of the human being’s sublimation”

– Dear Mr. Vasile Boroneaț, when did you meet Vasile Voiculescu in prison and under what circumstances? – In February 1961 I fell ill with a severe form of polyarticular rheumatism and after a long series of sufferings I was admitted to the small prison hospital. I was exhausted and the ward was quiet. Shortly afterwards, probably as a result of the injections I had received, I fell asleep on the bed where they had put me. When I woke up after a while, unable to move, I just rolled my eyes around the room, trying to get to know […]

Vasile Voiculescu – a supplicant and a confessor

He passed among us modestly, silently, discreetly, almost unnoticed, leaving in our souls heavenly beauties, angelic wings, human splendour. Lacking dynamism and aggressiveness, he was a contemplative, a supplicant, a confessor. Carefully and painstakingly, he polished his soul until he saw the heavens open. Reading him makes us as beautiful and good as his soul.

I saw him then in prison for a moment as long as eternity

I think it was around 1960 when I was taken to the fort at Jilava, but I didn’t stay there more than two weeks. I was put in a dark, damp room with 32 bunk beds, 32 people, I was the 33rd. An airless dungeon, where in the morning you had to line up for the “famous” stretcher. But we could talk to each other. We didn’t go to bed at night and we didn’t get up in the morning. On one of those days I was struck by the sight of a man, I would say ageless, with a […]

A doctor with extraordinary intuition

Father Matei told me about a very sick woman with four children and two elderly parents by her side. (…) To my great joy, Father Matei also began to visit her, unblessed, like me. I would go one day, he the next. The woman got better, but I still don’t know why she suffered. The news spread to the village[1] where there were enough sick people. We began to be taken by storm by all sorts of illnesses that none of us knew anything about. (…) The priest’s daughter expressed her regret that we didn’t even have a book on […]

“If ever an intellectual deserved to be canonised, it is Vasile Voiculescu”

Fragment of an interview with Arch. Roman Braga, of the Romanian Orthodox Monastery in Detroit, USA. […] With which great theologians have you been in prison? From the first prison I don’t remember any great theologians, but I met many simple monks. You should know one thing: the Romanian peasant is a great theologian, and his justice, morality and integrity impressed me.

Vasile Voiculescu – a man of seraphic kindness and gentleness

What kind of man was Vasile Voiculescu? Not only humble, modest, but of a seraphic gentleness. A seraphic kindness and gentleness. Once some guards – they were the secretaries who guarded us – made him carry a big barrel, but he was weak, frail, he couldn’t do it. And they told him: “If you can’t work, you can’t eat”. And they prevented him from getting food from the kitchen. So many people starved to death with that small amount of food. They wouldn’t give him that either. And then we, some of us around him, wanted to give him some […]