 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
| Tadeu Hasdeu | |
|
Tadeu Hasdeu, the son of Ioan Hasdeu and of Margareta Piorkuszewski, was born in Poland, in 1769, one century before the birth, in 1869, of his grandniece Julia. At the age of 14, he wrote poems in Polish. When he was 17 years old, as a result of a love affair, he left Poland and enrolled into the Austrian army. Promoted to the degree of sub-lieutenant and decorated for his courage, carrying with himself his bag full of poems, which, happy or unhappy, child or aged, he never ceased to write, he returned to Poland and married a young lady from the important Denhof family. From this marriage, which lasted for a short period of time, he had a son, Tadeu, in 1806. Later, he married a beautiful Jewish woman, whom he baptized with the name of Valeria. They had two sons: Alexandru and Boleslav. Of his three sons, Tadeu joined the Russian Imperial Guard at a very young age and became famous in 1828, in the war against the Turks. He was a colonel and a regiment commander at the age of 30, but he became a misanthrope after the loss of his fiancée; he left everything behind, retired in the countryside and died in complete isolation, leaving his valet as only heir. He was very skilled with the violin. The second son, Boleslav, a naturalist, died in Vienna with no descendants. In 1812, after the annexation of Basarabia, Tadeu Hasdeu went to that province in order to claim the lands of his ancestors, taken by several allied families. In 1805, the Russian government acknowledged him as a descendant of the Moldavian prince Stefan Petriceicu. After several trials, he succeeded in regaining two properties in the Hotin district and he settled in Basarabia. Tadeu Hasdeu received an excellent education as a child. Besides Romanian, Russian and Polish, he was able to speak German and French and he also knew Latin and Old Greek. He was also skilled with drawing and he could even make oil portraits. Also a bit of a musician, he could play the flute, an instrument that he called – in a song of his first youth – the only comfort for his worries and misery. But he was also a poet, and, regardless the times he was living, he remained a convinced deist for all his life, an honest lover of ideal. After a very agitated and passionate youth, Tadeu Hasdeu became a model citizen, husband and father. Rather medium-sized, and with a very robust constitution, imposing through his pride mixed with gentleness, energetic and open-minded, the peasants from Hotin adored him, while his knowledge, verticality and energy transformed him into a kind of oracle for all his neighbors. Tadeu Hasdeu died in 1835 at the age of 66. He always thought of death cold-bloodily. In the Polish literature Tadeu Hasdeu was known almost exclusively due to two volumes of translations of Kotzebue’s theatre, an excellent translation in Bentkowski’s opinion (Historya literatury polskiey, Warszawa, 1814, t.I p. 549-50). |
|
