---
title: "Eugen Relgis"
chunk: 11/12
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Relgis"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:03:21.362889+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Poetry ===
During his time at Fronda, Eugen Relgis and his fellow writers published collective, experimental and unsigned poems, largely echoing the influence of Arghezi and Minulescu, but, according to Cernat, "aesthetically monstrous". This perspective is echoed by Șerban, who notes that Relgis' debut as a poet was largely without "convincing results". In Triumful neființei, the main stylistic reference was, according to Lovinescu, the Romanian Symbolist prose poet Dimitrie Anghel, imitated to the point of "pastiche".
With time, Relgis developed a style deemed "the poetry of professions" by George Călinescu. According to Călinescu's classification, Relgis the poet is similar in this respect to fellow Symbolists Alexandru Tudor-Miu and Barbu Solacolu, but also to Simona Basarab, Leon Feraru, Cristian Sârbu and Stelian Constantin-Stelian. The same critic notes that Relgis "attempted, with some beautiful poetic suggestions, to establish a modern-era mythology with abstract gods [...] and other machinist monsters." Lovinescu describes the poet in Relgis as one who "survived" through humanitarian propaganda, returning "in a compact Verhaeren form, rhetorical and accumulative." Lovinescu includes the resulting works in a category of "descriptive" and "social" poems, relating Relgis to Feraru, Alice Călugăru, Aron Cotruș, Vasile Demetrius, Camil Petrescu and I. Valerian.
Relgis' poems, Călinescu notes, were individual portraits of industrial machinery ("The Elevator", "The Cement Mixer") or workers ("The Builder", "The Day Laborer"), as temples and deities; by "natural association", the critic suggests, Relgis applied the same technique in his lyrical homages to the very large animals ("The Giraffe", "The Elephant"), but "this requires greater means of suggestion". In one piece quoted by George Călinescu, Relgis showed a bricklayer contemplating the modern city from the top of a scaffolding structure:

== Legacy ==
The political ideas of Eugen Relgis were largely incompatible with the totalitarianism prevalent in Romania between World War II and the Romanian Revolution of 1989: as Rose notes, the scholar was persecuted by "four dictatorial regimes in his native country". Before this, Șerban writes, Relgis' intellectual contacts may have stimulated public debate, even though the writer himself could not claim the status of "opinion maker". Likewise, Boris Marian describes Relgis as "almost forgotten" by Romanians after his self-exile. In addition to Iosif Gutman, Relgis' Jewish Romanian disciples included Fălticeni journalist Iacob Bacalu, founder of a Relgis Circle. According to journalist Victor Frunză, Relgis' targeting by communist censorship had a paradoxical antisemitic undertone, as one of the repressive measures which touched Jewish culture in general.
Attempts to recover Relgis' work were made during the latter half of Romanian communist rule and after the 1989, several of them from within the Romanian Jewish community. In April 1982, the Jewish cultural journal Revista Cultului Mozaic published Leon Volovici's note about Relgis and Judaism. Late in the 1980s, Volovici also contacted Relgis' surviving sisters, then Relgis himself, becoming curator of the manuscripts left behind by the philosopher upon his relocation to South America. These were later donated to the Philippide Institute of the Romanian Academy, where they are kept as the Eugen Relgis library fund.
Relgis enjoys a more enduring reputation abroad. Initially, his anarchist eugenics enjoyed some popularity among Spanish anarchists; his pacifism also inspired Llorenç Vidal Vidal, the Balearic poet and educator. Some of his tracts have been reissued after 2001, with the Anselmo Lorenzo Foundation (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo). Italian-language versions of his novels, poems and political tracts, including Cosmometápolis, were published by Gaspare Mancuso and his Libero Accordo group, over the 1960s and '70s.
By then, Relgis' works had been translated into fourteen languages, although they still remained largely unknown in the United States; Principiile umanitariste alone had been translated into some 18 languages before 1982. The popularization of Relgis' ideas in America was first taken up by reviews such as The Humanist and Books Abroad, while Oriole Press reprinted Muted Voices. A second revised edition of Profetas y poetas, prefaced by the Spanish intellectual Rafael Cansinos-Asséns, saw print in Montevideo (1981). At around the same time, in Mexico, his poems were being reprinted in Alfonso Camín's Norte literary review.
In addition to the Philippide Institute collection, part of Relgis' personal archive is being preserved in Jerusalem, at the National Library of Israel. His other notebooks and letters are kept in the Netherlands, at the International Institute of Social History. Relgis' likeness is preserved in drawings by Marcel Janco, Lazăr Zin, Louis Moreau and Carmelo de Arzadun.

== See also ==
List of peace activists

== Notes ==