Provocateur, Anthologist, Lecturer
At Junimea, Pogor was a picturesque figure. Ornea suggests that, despite being a respectable boyar and the oldest among the founders, Pogor was also the most "child-like" in his reactions. Witnesses recall that he was always amused by the literary works presented for analysis, laughing "till his new teeth jumped out of his mouth", and casually reclining on a sofa as the debates were taking place. Negruzzi recalled that, in defiance for "any social habit", Pogor left his guests unattended to read his books; he writes that, on first impression, Pogor appeared "cheeky and missing something upstairs". Moreover, Pogor embarrassed his friends with his obscene anecdotes, his name-calling, and his occasional outbursts, during which he would hurl his cape at them.
However, Pogor's lolling habit and thundering laughter soon became fashionable, and his yawning during the others' recitations was intentionally loud, provocative and contagious. He justified such heckling with the expression Entre qui veut, reste qui peut (French for "enters who wishes, stays on who can stand it"), later a Junimea motto. The slogan resonated with the caracudă ("small game") wing of Junimea—mostly passive youngsters who came in for entertainment, and who, Ornea notes, were "apparently immune to beauty and ignorant".
For all his unorthodox stances, Pogor was regarded by all his colleagues as a towering intellect, and referred to as "the contemporary library". The Junimist colleagues repeatedly noted that he was the man to bring in not just irreverence, but also genuine innovation. Vianu describes his "merciless gibes" as stemming from a conviction that the others were too uptight, and in general from a rejection of "dogmatism"; Pogor, he writes, would "embrace in turn all sorts of attitudes". Another scholar, Şerban Cioculescu, describes Pogor as by character "a free, unambitious, spirit, an epicurean of intelligence". Similarly, Ornea cautions: "If Maiorescu has conferred a consistent substance to Junimea, then Pogor gave it a pinch of salt, wit, humor and—an essential element—skepticism, that is to say a sense of relativity."
Encouraged by the other club members, Pogor became the anthologist of bad journalism and literature, scouring anti-Junimist periodicals and picking out the most amusing enormities and the most embarrassing platitudes. These he then pasted into his Dosar ("Dossier"), which is for most part a subtle political attack on the "Red" ideology of Romanian liberalism and Romantic nationalism. Ornea notes: "those who have discussed the Junimea Dossier as politics in disguise, practiced by a literary circle that had denied itself—under pain of sanction—any politically derived conversation, they were not at all in the wrong." Already in 1863, the Junimists had engaged in battle the literary representatives of Romanian liberalism, including Din Moldova's B. P. Hasdeu. The latter dedicated his activity as a journalist to deriding or condemning the Junimea group, Pogor included, accusing it of standing for values not complementary with the Romanian way: cosmopolitanism and Germanophilia, elitism and philosemitism.
While these debates gathered in notoriety, Pogor was also joining in the yearly cycle of Junimea conferences, or prelecţiuni. He, Maiorescu, and Carp were the core group of lecturers during the first age of the prelecţiuni. The subjects were broad and the inspiration spontaneous, but the speakers still followed Maiorescu's elaborate ceremonial, which reduced direct contact with the listeners. In 1864, Pogor discussed the French Revolution, and specifically its "impact on modern ideas". There was a break in the following year, with Maiorescu having been involved in a sex scandal, but the lecturers returned in 1866, when the common theme was "factors of national life throughout history". Pogor was also contributing to the Junimea who's who of Romanian poetry, selecting for reading pieces by the 18th-century boyar Ienăchiţă Văcărescu.
At the prelecţiuni, Pogor spoke about Ancient Greek art; in 1867, about Shakespearean tragedy; during later cycles, he discovered and introduced for the general public the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Still focused on national identity constructs and the philosophy of history, he promoted at Junimea the evolutionist treatise History of Civilization in England, by Henry Thomas Buckle.
Read more about this topic: Vasile Pogor, Biography