Petru Dumitriu [SEP] native language
Petru Dumitriu
Petru Dumitriu (; 8 May 1924 – 6 April 2002) was a Romanian-born novelist who wrote both in Romanian and in French.
Biography.
Dumitriu was born in Baziaş. His father was a Romanian army officer and his mother was Hungarian and spoke to her husband and son mostly in French, so that French was Petru Dumitriu's second language from childhood. After school in Romania, Dumitriu studied philosophy at Munich University with a Humboldt scholarship, but his studies were interrupted in 1944 when Romania changed
for the communist regime. Thus, "Mitrea Cocor" was, together with similar works by Zaharia Stancu and Eusebiu Camilar, among the first wave of Romanian books to have been translated into Czech and published in Communist Czechoslovakia. Alongside similar works by Petru Dumitriu, "Mitrea Cocor" was also among the few English-language editions sanctioned by the Romanian regime, being translated and published, with a preface by Jack Lindsay, in 1953. Nine years later, the collected short stories were a tool for cultural exchange between Romania