page_title: Urmuz
section_title: Pahuci brotherhood
hierarchical_section_title: Urmuz / Biography / Pahuci brotherhood
caption_attribution_description: English: Gheorghe Lazăr National College (Bucharest). This is a photo of a historic monument in București, classified with number B-II-m-B-18689
context_page_description: Urmuz was a Romanian writer, lawyer and civil servant, who became a cult hero in Romania's avant-garde scene. His scattered work, consisting of absurdist short prose and poetry, opened a new genre in Romanian letters and humor, and captured the imagination of modernists for several generations. Urmuz's Bizarre Pages were largely independent of European modernism, even though some may have been triggered by Futurism; their valorization of nonsense verse, black comedy, nihilistic tendencies and exploration into the unconscious mind have repeatedly been cited as influential for the development of Dadaism and the Theatre of the Absurd. Individual pieces such as "The Funnel and Stamate", "Ismaïl and Turnavitu", "Algazy & Grummer" or "The Fuchsiad" are parody fragments, dealing with monstrous and shapeshifting creatures in mundane settings, and announcing techniques later taken up by Surrealism.
  Urmuz's biography between his high school eccentricity and his public suicide remains largely mysterious, and some of the sympathetic accounts have been described as purposefully deceptive. The abstruse imagery of his work has produced a large corpus of diverging interpretations.
context_section_description: Some years later, while enrolled at the Gheorghe Lazăr National College, Urmuz turned his interest toward mocking the severity of his teachers and challenging the dominance of artistic traditionalism. One such early episode is attested by Ciprian: amused by the creation of a Vivat Dacia ("Long Live Dacia") association of nationalist students, Urmuz subverted its meetings, and, with deadpan snark, suggested that membership fees should be paid in duck heads. Also according to Ciprian, these events soon lost their shock value, leading him and Urmuz to "take to the streets", where they began their activity as pranksters. Their initial experiment was to pressure law-abiding and credulous passers-by into presenting their identity papers for inspection, and the apparent success earned Urmuz an unexpected following in school (his fans even heckled Vivat Dacia into accepting poultry heads as means of payment, before the society dissolved itself with ceremony). Another colleague, future traditionalist poet Vasile Voiculescu, recalled young Urmuz as "genially knavish", his humor being "cerebral, harder to detect and appreciate".
  The core group of Urmuzian disciples, organized as a secret society, comprised Ciprian (nicknamed "Macferlan" by Urmuz), Alexandru "Bălălău" Bujoreanu and Costică "Pentagon" Grigorescu, together known as the pahuci. Allegedly, the obscure word originated from the Hebrew for "yawns". Their activity centered on daring pranks: Urmuz and the other three young men once made an impromptu visit to the isolated Căldărușani Monastery, in Ilfov County, where the deposed and disgraced Metropolitan Ghenadie was living in banishment. Passing themselves off as newspaper editors, they demanded (and received) honored guest treatment, tested the monks' patience, and were later introduced to a well-disposed Ghenadie. Ciprian also recalls that Urmuz's philosophical musings or deadpan surreal humor were a direct inspiration for other pranks and experiments. He describes how Ciriviș acted out sadness for the plight of a screechy sledge (declaring "my heart is at one with all things in existence"), but then duped onlookers into believing that the squeaks came from a woman somehow trapped under the vehicle. Reportedly, Urmuz also approached his seniors training at seminaries or other traditionalist institutions, earned their attention by claiming to share the nationalist agenda, and then began reciting them nonsense lyrics such as an evolving draft of his mock-fable "The Chroniclers".
  Outside school, the young man was still introverted, and, Sandqvist notes, "extremely shy, especially with girls." Ciprian recalls Ciriviș's engrossing pick-up lines: he acted familiar to any young woman who caught his eye, assuring her that they had met once before, and, having stirred her curiosity, falsely recounting how they both used to kill flesh-flies for sport.
  The pahuci welcomed their graduation with one final act of defiance against the school principal, whom they visited in his office, where they began hopping about in circles. Even though their group did not survive once its members took different career paths, they had regular reunions at the Spiru Godelea tavern, where they earned notoriety for their rude and unconventional behavior. Urmuz enrolled at the Bucharest Medical School, allegedly after pressures from his stern father. According to Ciprian, this training did not agree with his friend, who would complain of being "unable to make himself understood by the cadavers." This was probably a sign that the young man could not bear to witness dissection. He eventually entered the University of Bucharest Faculty of Law, which was to be his alma mater, while also taking lectures in composition and counterpoint at the Music and Declamation Conservatory. Additionally, he completed his first service term in the Romanian Infantry.
  Urmuz became head of his family in 1907. That year, his father and two younger brothers died, and his sister Eliza was married. He also continued to take the initiative in daring acts of épater le bourgeois. Cipri
caption: Gheorghe Lazăr National College
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