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 my house, at the entrance to the Patriarchate, as if we had known each other for ages, or going to see him in Dr. Staicovici Street, in the room where he had his books to read, his desk, his bed to rest on and a few chairs for friends, in the solitude of a hermit. His Byzantine saintly face was also elongated, dry, with an intelligent forehead, brightened by a neat white beard. […]

Voiculescu lived simply, very simply, in his house, of which he had kept only one room, crowded with books, many and very different, crammed into shelves in two and three rows, from floor to ceiling, in apparent disorder. At his age, when so many intellectuals are disillusioned with reading, he read every day and was ready to tell you about the latest page. He was a bit lopsided, as you could tell from his dress code, always correct but betraying the repeated intervention of dry cleaners, and the indiscretion of his coat, buttoned backwards. In winter he didn’t have enough firewood and often slept in his hat and boots. When the gas pipe came to his house, he couldn’t afford to plug it, and for a long time he kept blowing on his fists. Along with Arghezi, Blaga, Barbu, Bacovia and others, he was one of the writers who had no access to the printing press. But he never complained, never blamed anyone. Moreover, his state of poverty was a deliberate choice, as in a monastic vow, and combined with a sense of dignity. He still had friends on the board of the Writers’ Union, but he refused their offer to intervene for an honorary pension; it seemed to him that he would accept a handout. Nor did he encourage Zaharia Stancu in her intention to perform a play for him at the National Theatre. It is true that this resistance was encouraged, if not unconsciously applauded, by two or three close friends whom I judged harshly at the time. The poet’s scruples seemed exaggerated to me, and I did not spare him a rebuke, as far as a rebuke could not affect the limits of respect. Voiculescu, however, made no counter-argument; he disarmed me with a transparent smile and a sovereign shrug of the shoulders:

– What do you want, if this is the way I want to live? Am I upsetting anyone?

Indeed, this man was in no position to upset anyone. I’ve never heard him speak ill of anyone, or talk, or insinuate. There was an all-encompassing goodness in his soul. If one of his friends happened to utter a slander against someone in his presence, the poet was most amused by the wit of the malcontent, and not by the address of the malice. I have seldom met a heart so chaste. But this does not mean that he did not know how to be cutting when he had to defend the justice of an idea. When the opposition embraced the absurd, he preferred to shut up and go away.

Sometimes he came to my house alone, but more often he was accompanied by Alexandru Mironescu – Codin, as he was known to his friends – and rarely by more than one person. Voiculescu was a great music lover. […] If I didn’t have many Bach pieces on record – the poet’s first preference – I was proud of my rich harvest of Christmas carols, in several choral versions, recorded and reproduced on one of the few tape recorders we had in those days. We greeted the holidays with such spiritual feasts, which of course did not lack poetry. The profane believe that poets get together to read their own verses to each other. This does happen, but less often. We enjoy reading or reciting verses by a wide variety of poets. […]

The poet tended to read his own verses at home. He seldom offered himself of his own accord, but neither did he allow himself to be asked much. He had a way of reading his poems from within, with the resonance of simplicity. He seemed to write lightly, leisurely, after long, laborious inner accumulations. He once told me that when he was a doctor and had to run from one patient to another, he wrote many poems on the spur of the moment, somewhere in a small room, on the corner of a table, between two trams, to fulfil a request for a magazine. In the years I’m talking about, he worked a lot, almost every day a poem, in a real frenzy of inspiration. […]

When I met him, Voiculescu was in search of his hesychasm. This Greek word, which means peace, inner peace, but with a different meaning from that which the common, uninitiated people attach to it, does not mean much to many people. [For example, I was never an initiate of hesychasm, but Voiculescu was. He was not a theorist but a practitioner, which is why he spoke so little about his inner experiences. I have dwelt on this spiritual dimension of Vasile Voiculescu because, in my opinion, his great poetry, that of the last years of his life, cannot be understood otherwise. As long as the poet was in the initiatory, preparatory phase, i.e. around 1948-1953, his poetry – whether known or unpublished – was marked by a certain descriptivism; the isisha was a source of inspiration for him. Later, when he reached the fullness of contemplation, the hesychasm became his inspiration.

(Valeriu Anania – Rotunda of Burning Poplars. From Beyond the Waters, Polirom Publishing House, Bucharest, 2009, pp. 195-205)