Paul Zarifopol

Paul Zarifopol was a Romanian literary and social critic, essayist, and literary historian. The scion of an aristocratic family, formally trained in both philology and the sociology of literature, he emerged in the 1910s as a rebel, highly distinctive, voice among the Romanian press and book reviewers. He was a confidant and publisher of the Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale, building his theories on Caragiales already trenchant appraisals of Romanian society and culture. Zarifopol defended art for arts sake even against the Marxism of his fatherinlaw, Constantin DobrogeanuGherea, and the Poporanism of his friend, Garabet Ibrileanu. He was also a noted censurer of neoclassical trends, of philistinism, and of inauthentic customs, advocating renewal, but not revolution. A skeptic reviewer of modernist literature, he reemerged during the interwar as its dedicated promoter, but his preference for literary entertainment over substance and many of his literary bets were shortly dismissed b

The future critic was born in Iai to Paul Zarifopol, or Zarifopoulo, and his wife Elena . His paternal family had attested Greek, and more generically southern or Balkan, roots. Originally horse traders and assignees for Ottoman Turks settled in Moldavia, they were elevated into the Moldavian boyar nobility after 1850.

Source: Wikipedia