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George Ivașcu (most common rendition of Gheorghe I. Ivașcu; July 22, 1911 – June 21, 1988) was a Romanian journalist, literary critic, and communist militant. From beginnings as a University of Iași philologist and librarian, he was drawn into left-wing antifascist politics, while earning accolades as a newspaper editor and foreign-affairs journalist. As editor of Manifest magazine, he openly confronted the Iron Guard and fascism in general. In the mid-1930s, he became a member of the Romanian Communist Party (PCdR), though he maintained private doubts about its embrace of Stalinism. Despite enjoying protection from the more senior scholar George Călinescu, Ivașcu was persecuted, and went into hiding, during the first two years of World War II. He reemerged as a pseudonymous correspondent, then editorial secretary, of the magazine Vremea, slowly turning it away from fascism. In parallel, he also contributed to the clandestine left-wing press and supported the resistance groups, preparing for an Allied victory.

Shortly after the pro-Allied coup of August 1944, Ivașcu was assigned to the Information Ministry, and took up work in agitprop. His career in the bureaucracy continued for a while under the communist regime (established during the early days of 1948), but Ivașcu soon after found himself exposed to accusations of perfidy, marginalized, and eventually investigated. Due in large part to a case of mistaken identity, he was prosecuted for fascism and war crimes, and spent almost five years in confinement. Released and rehabilitated by the same regime, his alleged compromises with both fascism and communism have been at the center of controversies ever since. He was also confirmed as an informant of the Securitate, which some of his fellow prisoners had always suspected.

In his later years, Ivașcu profited from liberalization and, as editor of Contemporanul, Lumea, and România Literară, allowed nonconformist talents to express themselves with confidence. He is credited with having advanced the careers of young critics such as Nicolae Manolescu, as well as with having recovered repressed authors such as Ștefan Augustin Doinaș and Adrian Marino. Ivașcu himself oscillated between national communism and Western Marxism. He took his Ph.D. with a thesis covering the entire classical period of Romanian literature, sparking polemics over its perceived endorsement of national-communist propaganda. In parallel, his tolerance of dissent irritated the regime, and Ivașcu was pushed back into accepting and even promoting communist censorship during the final two decades of his life.

Early life

Born in Cerțești, Galați County, Ivașcu enlisted at the Gheorghe Roșca Codreanu High School in Bârlad. In March 1929, as a terminal year student, he published his first literary contribution: a poem titled "Reveries", in the Lugoj student magazine Primăvara Banatului. In 1930, alongside Nicolae Carandino and C. Panaitescu, he was putting out a magazine called Bis ("Encore"). Upon completing his secondary studies, Ivașcu moved to Iași, entered the local university, and graduated from its Letters and Philosophy Faculty in 1933. A librarian at his Iași faculty in 1932, he became a teaching assistant there upon graduation and until 1936, owing his appointment to professor Iorgu Iordan—and replacing Gheorghe Ivănescu, who was studying abroad. From 1935 until 1937, he was also secretary of the Institute of Romanian Philology and of its publication, which hosted Ivașcu's essays on Alf Lombard and Ion Creangă.

Influenced by the left-leaning views of his Iași professors, Ivașcu was, in 1934, founder and editor of the political review Manifest. It was here that he also had his first published piece as a literary critic: a review of Ionel Teodoreanu's novel Crăciunul de la Silvestri (also in 1934). A group of young literary aficionados and militants grew around the magazine, including, among others, Emil Condurachi and Ștefan Baciu. Its advocacy of literary modernism and its alleged "socialist-communist" tinges were censured at the time by Nicolae Iorga, the traditionalist doctrinaire and culture critic. Iorga nevertheless noted that, unlike Condurachi and the others, Ivașcu wrote "with sense".

At Manifest, Ivașcu spoke out against the Iron Guard, a homegrown fascist movement—but, according to Iorga, did so in a "disjointed" manner. Much later in life, Ivașcu told his friends that the murder of Premier Ion G. Duca by a Guardist death squad had greatly shocked him. Several of his articles contained explicit denunciations of the Guard leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, and questioned the Guardists' self-depiction as Christians. He was involved in several street battles and, in 1936, when he helped Iordan break through an Iron Guard barrage, received a rather deep cut on his cheek from shattered glass. He was also dragged into academic confrontations between the left and the right: the latter denied his application for Iorga's Romanian School in Fontenay-aux-Roses.

Under these circumstances, Ivașcu moved into far-left politics. A member of the Romanian Communist Party (PCdR), which had been outlawed by the Kingdom of Romania (according to his own testimony, he joined in 1935), he agitated in favor of prosecuted communists such as Petre Constantinescu and Teodor Bugnariu, befriending the far-left intellectual Stephan Roll. As reported in 1984 by critic and period witness Mircea Mancaș, Manifest was "directly steered by the then-illegal Communist Party, displaying a soundly anti-fascist attitude and supporting some of the working class' demands"; its "dynamic ferment, ensuring that the magazine was printed and circulated, was G. Ivașcu (assisted by Radu Paul)." In 1971, Ivașcu himself described his "meeting with the Party" as heralding his intellectual coming of age.

PCdR ideologue Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu was allegedly the behind-the-scenes figure at Manifest, directing the crew's journalistic output. Ivașcu and Pătrășcanu shared a pseudonym, Victor Mălin, which was associated with a set of articles in Manifest—including one which condemned the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. By 1936, Ivașcu's articles were also appearing in Însemnări Ieșene, a mainstream literary magazine with antifascist highlights that was put out by Mihail Sadoveanu, George Topîrceanu, and Grigore T. Popa; like the other communists, he soon found himself placed under constant surveillance by Siguranța policemen. As he himself would later claim, he was troubled by his choices, and equally alarmed by the Great Purge that was occurring in the Soviet Union. He attributed its "monstrous crimes" to the overzealous prosecutors.

Iașul and Jurnalul Literar

In March 1938, some days after King Carol II proclaimed his authoritarian National Renaissance Front (FRN) regime, Ivașcu, Alexandru Piru and Eusebiu Camilar founded a daily, Iașul. Advertising itself as an "exact and precise" newspaper, it had a cultural program promoting "civic education" and Moldavian regionalism, and was formally managed by the violinist Mircea Bârsan. Ivașcu was the real caretaker, fixating the editorial line on the promotion of modernism. He also composed the literary supplement and theatrical column, and answered the letters to the editor. Beyond its conformist facade, which was well-appreciated by FRN officials, Iașul functioned as an antifascist mouthpiece, involved in open polemics with the far-right press. Ivașcu played a prominent part in the latter disputes, with articles he signed as Radu Vardaru; these decried in particular the importance still afforded to those intellectuals who doubled as "militants for anarchy and reaction, for the mystical chaining of human freedom".

The subsequent period marked the start of Ivașcu's close friendship with the senior literary critic George Călinescu, whose activities were carefully recorded by Iașul. Ivașcu was especially enthusiastic about Călinescu's plan to transform Iași into a Romanian cultural…