Panait Cerna - Legacy

Legacy

Panait Cerna's lifetime success and literary fame made him the target of adulation among his fellow traditionalists, a camp which united various Junimea affiliates and Sămănătorul contributors. According to Călinescu, this group saw him as Romania's answer to Schiller and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Junimea saw in him one of its most important members of the early 20th century, while several historians note that he was so only because, at that stage, the literary society was declining. Mehedinţi's 1914 account of the Junimist promotion of the "original manifestations of Romanian culture" listed Cerna alongside Alexandru G. Florescu and other minor writers. Literary historian Z. Ornea argues that this evidenced not just a decline in standards, but also Mehedinţi's "tastelessness". Also according to Ornea, the association with Dragomirescu was also characteristic for the Junimist twilight, given that this circle had failed to impose "a new literary direction", and was tributary to the legacy of various traditionalist groups. At the same time, both Dragomirescu and his disciple Ion Trivale upheld him as a model to follow, equating him with the mid-19th century Classicist Grigore Alexandrescu. Zarifopol deplores Cerna's submission to traditionalist and Classicist goals, arguing that it eventually ruined Cerna as a poet and made him unhappy.

The poet's adoption of a mainstream approach to poetry also pleased his public, and, Călinescu notes, schoolbooks of the day celebrated him as a Romanian classic while completely ignoring more controversial Symbolists such as Macedonski and Dimitrie Anghel. His contributions have helped shaped the style of 20th century poets with traditionalist tendencies from different schools. Among them are the socialist Alexandru Toma, later known as an official poet of Communist Romania, and Sămănătorul 's Ion Sân-Giorgiu, whose career later took him through an Expressionist stage and eventually to fascist politics. Demostene Botez, another author to have been influenced by Cerna's style, dedicated his mentor a poem which read:

In his essay Din registrul ideilor gingaşe ("From the Register of Gentle Ideas"), where he satirizes the Romanian public's reception of literature, Zarifopol looks into the problems faced by Cerna in satisfying his readers. Using one of Cerna's own accounts as the basis for this analysis, he notes that a group of his young "female admirers" where unpleasantly surprised to find out that their idol was "short, pudgy, wide-necked and ruddy-faced." He writes: "the girls ... were thus in full agreement with the philosophical tradition which, since the old days, has set as a supreme ideal a mosaic of perfections that is naive and unlikely."

Like Lovinescu, other advocates of modernist literature rejected most of Cerna's contributions. One of the first to have done so is Ovid Densusianu, who stated his belief that an artist's work should be separated from his life. Lovinescu, who commented on Densusianu and his thoughts on Cerna, opined that Densusianu had a tendency to reject all poets who registered popular success, and that he treated Dimitrie Anghel's work in much the same way.

The poet's house in Cerna is presently a museum, dedicated in part to his memory, and also housing a permanent exhibit dedicated to the traditional arts and crafts of Tulcea County. It also features a bust of the poet. The county library in Tulcea city is named after him, as are a high school in Brăila and streets in Bucharest, Brăila, Bistriţa, Hunedoara, Lugoj and Petroşani. The local authorities in Tulcea County organize an annual Panait Cerna National Poetry and Essay Contest.