Vasile V. Pogor (Francized Basile Pogor; August 20, 1833 – March 20, 1906) was a Moldavian, later Romanian poet, philosopher, translator and liberal conservative politician, one of the founders of Junimea literary society. Raised in the aristocratic circle of Iași, and educated in the French Empire, he had a career in law. He was a civil servant during the United Principalities regime, held seats and commissions in the Assembly of Deputies, and, after the proclamation of the Kingdom of Romania, was Mayor of Iași City. Although he had a major role in creating the Conservative Party, by fusing together the various "White" political clubs and Masonic Lodges, Pogor was more loyal to the Junimist inner faction, and stood by it when it split with the other Conservatives.
An irreligious evolutionist, and taking an interest in Buddhist studies, Pogor represented the Positivist cell at Junimea. He was also one of the first locals to study the work of Henry Thomas Buckle, integrating Bucklean concepts into Junimeas critique of nation building. He supported Romania's Westernization within a conservative framework, tempering nationalist presumptions and valuing a culturally pluralistic society. The notoriously indolent and improvident Pogor had a preference for orality, and was sought after for his Voltairian wit. He left few written works, and many unfulfilled projects, but influenced Romanian literature as a cultural promoter, sponsor, and the first local expert on Charles Baudelaire. He was known to his Junimea colleagues as a one-man "contemporary library".
Pogor's final decades were spent away from the national scene, although he still took on assignments in the Conservative and Junimist chapters of Iași County. Casa Pogor, his main residence, is closely associated with Junimist history. Although sold by its debt-stricken owner in 1901, it was revived in the 1970s as a literary history museum, theater venue and concert hall. Married to the Russian aristocrat Elena Hartingh, Pogor left an illegitimate son, Vasile Panopol.
Biography
Origins and childhood
According to various accounts, the Pogors were a clan of yeomen from the eponymous Pogorăști, raised into boyar nobility ca. 1820. The family's own pedigree claimed otherwise, namely that its members had been "enjoying native privileges" since ancient times. On the basis of such claims, Vasile Pogor Sr had a steady climb through the Moldavian civilian and military bureaucracy: he began his career as a Serdar (1819), before being made a Comis for life. During his 1816–1823 mission into the Bessarabian Governorate, Russian Empire, Pogor kidnapped Zoița Cerchez, granddaughter of a local Clucer. From this marriage, he had three daughters—Antonia, Eleonora, Smaranda—and a son, the future poet. By the time of his birth, the family owned large boyar estates in both Vaslui County (including Buhăiești and Râșești) and Bessarabia.
As a political poet in the Age of Revolution, Comis Pogor looked back with disgust on the late Phanariote period and the Eterist invasion, satirizing the ambitions of Greek immigrants to Moldavia. In the late 1830s, he would be equally opposed to the Moldavian status quo, criticizing the heavy-handed Moldavian sovereign Mihail Sturdza. His rhyming pamphlets envisaged equality before the law, their author having signed up to the "Confederative Conspiracy", planned by Moldavia's proto-liberal boyardom. He still held several high political-judicial offices in the last quarter of Sturdza, including the Agie and the Justice Department chairmanship.
Pogor Sr's worldview also owed much to his familiarity with French literature. He corresponded with Chateaubriand, wishing to publish his poetry in a Moldavian edition, but is probably best known as Voltaire's first Romanian-language translator. His version of the Henriade was published in neighboring Wallachia by the liberal intellectual Ion Heliade Rădulescu. It and other translations by the Comis (Zaïre, Désastre de Lisbonne) may prove that Pogor the younger was already familiar with Voltaire and Voltarianism from early childhood.