Literary Culture
The first Moldovan books, religious texts, appeared in the mid-17th century. Prominent figures in Moldova's cultural development include mitropolitans Varlaam and Dosoftei, Grigore Ureche, Miron Costin, mitropolitan of Kiev Petru Movilă, scholars Nicolae Milescu-Spãtaru, Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723), and Ion Neculce, Gavriil Bănulescu-Bodoni, Alexandru Hîjdău, Alexandru Donici, Constantin Stamati, Costache Negruzzi, historian and philologist Bogdan P. Hasdeu (1836–1907), author Ion Creangă (1837–1889), and poet Mihai Eminescu (1850–1889).
Varlaam published the first books. Dosoftei founded numerous schools and published a lot. Cantemir wrote the first thorough geographical, ethnographical, and economic description of the country in Descriptio Moldaviae (Berlin, c. 1714).
Modern writers include Vladimir Beşleagă, Pavel Boţu, Aureliu Busuioc, Nicolae Dabija, Ion Druţă, Victor Teleucă, and Grigore Vieru. In 1991, a total of 520 books were published in Moldova, of which 402 were in Romanian, 108 in Russian, eight in Gagauz, and two in Bulgarian.
In the early 1990s, Moldova had twelve professional theaters. All performed in Romanian, except the A.P. Chekhov Russian Drama Theater in Chişinău, and the Russian Drama and Comedy Theater in Tiraspol, both of which performed solely in Russian, and the Licurici Republic Puppet Theater, in Chişinău, which performed in both Romanian and Russian. Although, among those controlled tendencies by Soviets, real artists in music formed real art-bands, such as "Ciocîrlia", led by Serghei Lunchevici and "Lăutarii" of Nicolae Botgros. Members of ethnic minorities manage a number of folklore groups and amateur theaters throughout the country.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Moldova
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“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)