Vasile Voiculescu Memorial House

The Vasile Voiculescu Memorial House stands in Pârscov commune, Buzău County, about 32 kilometres from the city of Buzău, in the Buzău Valley. It is a listed historic monument, coded BZ-IV-m-B-02537, and is administered by the Buzău County Museum. The building is not the original structure. It was rebuilt from the foundations in the 1980s, with the restoration dated to 1986, following the plan of the house that belonged to the writer's family. The interior, laid out in four rooms, recreates the atmosphere of the late 19th and early 20th centuries using original furniture and numerous ethnographic pieces: a documentary room devoted to family life and career, the old rural room where he was born, a literary hall, and the Voiculescu parlour. Vasile Voiculescu was born in 1884 at Pârscov, the sixth child of Costache Voicu, a prosperous farmer, and of Sultana, born Hagiu, a merchant's daughter. The writer later adopted the name Voiculescu. He began his university studies at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy in Bucharest, between 1902 and 1903, then continued at the Faculty of Medicine, earning his doctorate in 1910. He practised country medicine and served as a physician during the First World War, an experience that directly shaped his writing. He made his literary debut in the journal Convorbiri literare in 1912. For twelve years he worked at Radio Bucharest, first as a literary editor, then as director of cultural programming, appointed to the post by King Carol II. He launched the segment "At the Writing Desk," a kind of open literary workshop still continued in various forms, and on the programme "The Village Hour" he ran a standing column of medical advice. He received the Romanian Academy Prize in 1918 and the National Prize for Poetry in 1941. Contemporaries called him "the physician who took no silver" and "the poet of angels." On the night of 4 August 1958, aged 74, he was arrested following a violent search of his Bucharest home, during which more than 6,000 books were confiscated from his library. He spent four years as a political prisoner in communist jails, from 1958 to 1962, and died shortly after his release, in 1963. He is buried in Bellu Cemetery in Bucharest. In 1993 he was elected posthumously to the Romanian Academy. The memorial collection comprises more than 200 exhibits: his medical doctoral thesis, identity papers, certificates, civil records, family photographs, letters and facsimiles, paintings, drawings, watercolours, icons on wood and on glass, furniture, textiles, and a gramophone. Among the most affecting objects are the toothbrush and the sleeveless jacket he used in prison. The exhibits evoke his friendships with Alexandru Vlahuță and Tudor Vianu, alongside the stages of his life, from childhood in the family house to the years of imprisonment. In the courtyard stands the writer's bust, made by the sculptor Oscar Han and unveiled on 13 October 1974, on the ninetieth anniversary of his birth. Each October the memorial house hosts the awards gala of the "Vasile Voiculescu" National Literary Creation Competition, held with the support of the Writers' Union of Romania. The house is worth visiting for the documentary density of its collection, uncommon for a rural memorial house, and for the way its personal objects, from the doctoral thesis to the prison toothbrush, compress into a single space the fate of a man who was at once a country doctor, a writer, and a political prisoner.