Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu (born Moise Cahn[1] or Cohn;[2] 16 August 1921, inGalați,Romania – 27 April[3] or 28 April[1] 2000, inBerlin,Germany) was a Romanianliterary critic andscience fiction writer.
After graduating from high school in his home town, he began to study, in 1939, at thePolitehnica University of Bucharest, but had to interrupt his studies in 1940. In 1944, he resumed his studies, and got a diploma inconstruction engineering in 1947.
AfterWorld War II, he had a series of jobs in the magazines (Contemporanul,Viața Românească,Gazeta literară) and in a publishing house (Editura Didactică și Pedagogică) before beginning to work as anacademic, eventually becoming a professor at the Department of Romanian Language and Literature of theUniversity of Bucharest.[1]
During the first two decades after World War II, at least, Crohmălniceanu was known as a promoter ofsocialist realism,[1] branding any kind of freedom writers dared take as being "reminiscences of bourgeois thinking" and "influenced by reactionary circles in the West."[3] But, at the same time, he is one of those who played a major role in bringingTudor Arghezi andLucian Blaga back into the limelight, after they had been marginalized.[3]
In his last decade in Romania, before emigrating to Germany in 1992, he supported many young writers, encouraging them to follow another path than that of communist nationalism.[3]
He died during the night of 27 to 28 April 2000.
