Alexandru D. Xenopol and the Development of Romanian Historiography by Paul A. Hiemstra

Author:Paul A. Hiemstra [Hiemstra, Paul A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Historiography, General
ISBN: 9781317243410
Google: ElD7CwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-04-14T16:14:20+00:00

IV. THE MATURE HISTORIAN

The scholarly work of Hasdeu, Panu, and Xenopol had all been conducted by 1882 outside the history faculties of the Romanian universities which had been established in the 1860s at Jassy and Bucharest. Although Hasdeu had been teaching at the University of Bucharest since 1874, his chair was in the department of philology, his writings were increasingly focused within that discipline, and he argued repeatedly that philology was the key to understanding the Romanians’ early history: “We persist in believing that the methodical study of the Romanian language, in all its phases and dialects, clarifies and shall continue to clarify this question (of the Romanians’ continuity) better than any purely historical text.”1 Of the history professors at the Romanian universities Maiorescu wrote, in 1882, that

“all four together have done almost nothing to advance the discipline in which they profess. Not a single archival study, no publication of documents, no monograph of any value on any of the many obscure or controversial aspects of our past, and no hint of a synthesis — nothing, absolutely nothing. Thus we see that the Romanian universities in the twenty years of their existence have not produced a single historical writer; the expectations of the country have been betrayed with regard to those men in whom she had entrusted this, her most precious science.”2

Writing in 1975, Lucian Boia agreed with Maiorescu’s assessment; of Andrei Vizanti, who in 1882 was holding a position at the University of Jassy as professor of Romanian history and literature, Boia declared that Vizanti’s work had not included any “noticeable scholarly achievement.”3 In his memoirs, Alexandru Xenopol offered the information that Vizanti, a gambler, had been driven to leave his country to avoid facing charges of embezzlement: “(Vizanti was) an unfortunate man who …, controlled by a taste for card games, consumed large sums from the theatre box office where he was president of the trustees; to avoid prosecution, he fled to America where his traces have been lost.”4

Even before Vizanti’s departure for America, the Liberal prime minister, Ion C. Bratianu, determined to separate Vizanti’s responsibilities at the university and, reserving a chair in Romania literature for Vizanti, in 1883 created one in Romanian history for Xenopol, who recalled: “Bratianu had a good impression of me from my works, which several politicians had recommended to him. Invited one day to dine with Bratianu, I asked him to separate the department of Romanian history from the department of literature, so that I might present myself in the competition for a chair in history. Bratianu listened to my request.”5 Xenopol began to teach in the fall of 1883, “thus fulfilling one of the most ardent dreams of my life.”6

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