Donici, Alexandru

Born 1806 in the village of Bezin, Bessarabia; died in laşi, 1866. Moldavian and Rumanian writer.

The son of a landowner, Donici studied at the St. Petersburg Cadet School. In 1835 he went to Rumanian Moldavia and served as a judge and lawyer. As the creator of the Moldavian national fable, Donici voiced a brave protest against social injustice in his collection Fabule (books 1-2, 1840-2). He also ridiculed the arrogance of the gentry in “Leaves and Roots” and attacked servility in “Two Dogs.” Donici’s works criticize public vices; his poem “Thought” is permeated with confidence in the triumph of reason over mysticism and religion. He translated into Moldavian Pushkin’s poem “The Gypsies” (Bucharest, 1837). Together with C. Negruzzi he translated A. D. Kantemir’s Satires (1844, 1858).