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Concept
Alexandru Robot
Summary
Alexandru Robot (alekˈsandru ˈrobot; born Alter Rotmann, also known as Al. Robot; Moldovan Cyrillic: Александру Робот; January 15, 1916 – 1941) was a Romanian, Moldovan and Soviet poet, also known as a novelist and journalist. First noted as a member of Romanian literary clubs, and committed to modernism and the avant-garde, he developed a poetic style based on borrowings from Symbolist and Expressionist literature. Also deemed a "Hermeticist" for the lexical obscurity in some of his poems, as well as for the similarity between his style and that of Ion Barbu, Robot was in particular noted for his pastorals, where he fused modernist elements into a traditionalist convention.
Adopted by the literary circles in the Bessarabia region, where he settled in 1935, Robot was employed by the literary review Viața Basarabiei. In tandem with his avant-garde activities, he was a political-minded journalist with communist sympathies, who wrote reportage pieces and essays around various social, political and cultural topics. During the 1940 annexation of Bessarabia, Robot opted to stay behind in Soviet territory, adopting Socialist Realism and paying allegiance to the Moldavian SSR's official line on nationality issues. This move sparked a posthumous controversy, but some have argued it only implied a formal submission on Robot's part.
Robot was declared missing some two months after the German-Romanian takeover of Bessarabia, dying in mysterious circumstances. His avant-garde literary work remained largely unknown until the 1960s, when it was rediscovered by a new generation of Bessarabian writers.
The future poet was a native of Bucharest, born to Jewish Romanian parents Carol Rotman and Toni Israel, with a working class family background. His father was, according to conflict accounts, either a clerk or the warden of a Jewish cemetery in Bucharest. Alter Rotmann studied for a while at the city's Spiru Haret High School, but dropped out in order to begin work as a reporter for the cultural magazine Rampa, and later had his articles featured in such periodicals as Universul, Cuvântul Liber and Viața Literară.
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