20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

The Reader (Lepturariul) of Aron Pumnul – a pioneering book 151“that it was impossible to review it later on, because almost every wordneeded correction, that the reviewed manuscript had scared him due to theincommensurate amount of corrections, and that he was no longer surprisedby the opinion I had given him.” 6Unfortunately, this manuscript was not kept (“we don’t know whathappened with the poor Reader (Lepturariul)”, notes Cipariu), in order tocompare it with Pumnul’s Reader (Lepturariul) and find out to what extentthe new version, published a few years later (1862), took into account thereviewers’ opinions. In all probability, some critical appreciations werenot left unaddressed in the version of the unique author Aron Pumnul. Forinstance, Cipariu’s criticism that most of the paragraphs from the initialReader (Lepturariul) were selected from “Moldavian modern writers andonly one or two from those of Wallachia” 7 was taken into consideration,therefore texts by writers from all of the Romanian provinces are includedin the content of the four volumes, as shown already.Constantin Loghin objected that “Aron Pumnul’s Readers (Lepturarele)were not devised in accordance with the Romanian syllabus, cateringinstead for the needs of the Austrian schools in Bukovina, where Romanianwas not the language of tuition, but just an independent subject, likehistory etc., and thus was prone to be – and was – neglected. This matterdepended on the teacher’s qualities and, most importantly, on the depth ofhis Romanian sentiment” 8 .Secondly, information resources were extremely hard to access at thetime. The links between Bukovina and other Romanian provinces werevery difficult (the first train connecting Bukovina to the rest of the Austrianprovinces arrived in Chernovtsy as late as 1866, the year of Aron Pumnul’sdeath!).To overcome these obstacles, Pumnul committed himself to animpressive effort. He started to collect materials on his own, writing tocolleagues, friends or any other acquaintances, appealing to his studentsor travelling in person, at his own expense, for documentation and theacquisition of books, old ones in particular. In a letter to philologistAthanasie Sandor, from Arad, dated 22 April 1862, Pumnul asked the latterto draft no less than eight biographies, namely those of Paul Iorgovici,Dimitrie Ţichindeal, Constantin Loga, Nicolae Tincu-Velia, Al. Gavra,Athanasie Marienescu, Vasile Maniu and Vasile Stǎnescu. Other requests6Ibidem, 611.7Ibidem, 609.8Constantin Loghin 1943, Aron Pumnul – Mihai Eminescu, Chernovtsy: PublisherMetropolitan Sylvester, 30.