Early life Born in
Cerțești,
Galați County, Ivașcu enlisted at the
Gheorghe Roșca Codreanu High School in
Bârlad. In March 1929, as a terminal year student, he published his first literary contribution: a poem titled "Reveries", in the
Lugoj student magazine
Primăvara Banatului. In 1930, alongside
Nicolae Carandino and C. Panaitescu, he was putting out a magazine called
Bis ("Encore"). Upon completing his secondary studies, Ivașcu moved to
Iași, entered the local university, and graduated from its Letters and Philosophy Faculty in 1933. A librarian at his Iași faculty in 1932, From 1935 until 1937, he was also secretary of the Institute of Romanian Philology and of its publication, Influenced by the left-leaning views of his Iași professors, Ivașcu was, in 1934, founder and editor of the political review
Manifest. It was here that he also had his first published piece as a literary critic: a review of
Ionel Teodoreanu's novel
Crăciunul de la Silvestri (also in 1934). and
Ștefan Baciu. Its advocacy of
literary modernism and its alleged "socialist-communist" tinges were censured at the time by
Nicolae Iorga, the traditionalist doctrinaire and culture critic. Iorga nevertheless noted that, unlike Condurachi and the others, Ivașcu wrote "with sense". Much later in life, Ivașcu told his friends that the murder of
Premier Ion G. Duca by a
Guardist death squad had greatly shocked him. He was involved in several street battles and, in 1936, when he helped Iordan break through an Iron Guard barrage, received a rather deep cut on his cheek from shattered glass. He was also dragged into academic confrontations between the left and the right: the latter denied his application for Iorga's Romanian School in
Fontenay-aux-Roses. he agitated in favor of prosecuted communists such as
Petre Constantinescu and
Teodor Bugnariu, befriending the far-left intellectual
Stephan Roll. In 1971, Ivașcu himself described his "meeting with the Party" as heralding his intellectual coming of age. PCdR ideologue
Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu was allegedly the behind-the-scenes figure at
Manifest, directing the crew's journalistic output. Ivașcu and Pătrășcanu shared a pseudonym,
Victor Mălin, which was associated with a set of articles in
Manifest—including one which condemned the
Italian invasion of Abyssinia. By 1936, Ivașcu's articles were also appearing in
Însemnări Ieșene, a mainstream literary magazine with antifascist highlights that was put out by
Mihail Sadoveanu,
George Topîrceanu, and
Grigore T. Popa; As he himself would later claim, he was troubled by his choices, and equally alarmed by the
Great Purge that was occurring in the
Soviet Union. He attributed its "monstrous crimes" to the overzealous prosecutors. Ivașcu was the real caretaker, fixating the editorial line on the promotion of modernism. He also composed the literary supplement and theatrical column, and answered the letters to the editor. Beyond its conformist facade, which was well-appreciated by FRN officials,
Iașul functioned as an antifascist mouthpiece, involved in open polemics with the far-right press. Ivașcu played a prominent part in the latter disputes, with articles he signed as
Radu Vardaru; these decried in particular the importance still afforded to those intellectuals who doubled as "militants for anarchy and reaction, for the mystical chaining of human freedom". The subsequent period marked the start of Ivașcu's close friendship with the senior literary critic
George Călinescu, whose activities were carefully recorded by
Iașul. Ivașcu was especially enthusiastic about Călinescu's plan to transform Iași into a Romanian cultural capital: this, he noted, was "the very reason why our paper exists." At some point before 1939, he and Iordan joined a literary society formed by Călinescu, known as
Junimea Nouă ("New
Junimea" or "New Youth", in honor of a
19th-century club in Iași). Still, Călinescu paid homage to Ivașcu as an "excellent" journalist and man of letters, with "a great devotion to a certain idea." In August 1939, just before the start of World War II (in which Romania was still neutral territory), Piru took over Ivașcu's office at
Jurnalul Literar. Ivașcu was still a contributor, and, in the magazine's final issues, took over Călinescu's own foreign policy column, "The War in Weekly Recapitulations". It was manifestly apolitical. A year later, Romania found herself trapped between the Soviet Union and
Nazi Germany. By the end of 1940, she had
ceded Bessarabia to the Soviet Union and relinquished
Northern Transylvania to pro-Nazi
Hungary. Following the bankruptcy of
Jurnalul Literar, Călinescu became a regular presence in
Iașul. Also in
Iașul, Ivașcu wrote a foreign policy column,
Situația ("The Situation"), sharply critical of the king, deploring the country's rapprochement with Nazi Germany, and praising the
Western Allies. In July 1940, he found himself arrested, under official inquiry. Ivașcu was released on parole following the intervention of Călinescu, Iordan,
Mihai Ralea and
Petre Andrei. That same month, the National Renaissance Front crumbled and the Iron Guard came to power, establishing its own "
National Legionary State"—in fact an unbalanced partnership with an authoritarian Premier,
Ion Antonescu. The regime immediately stripped Ivașcu of his teaching post. Following arrangements made by his in-laws, Ivașcu relocated to
Bucharest, the national capital. Reportedly, he was in contact with the PCdR and its
Social Democratic Party allies, who provided for Ivașcu with means to join the antifascist underground. This clandestine interval ended in November, when he was arrested by the National Legionary authorities, and interrogated for at least a month. He took the decision only after assuring himself that "not everybody there [at
Vremea] is green from head to toe" (a reference to the Guard's green flag and uniforms). Using the signatures
Paul Ștefan,
Radu Costin, and
Dan Petrea, his work originally consisted of translating articles from the foreign press, drawing maps in ink, and contributing his own pieces. These referred to such topics as the
Italian Imperial consolidation,
Australian participation, or the evolution of the
Norwegian Campaign, and were seasoned with encoded antifascist references. With time, he became a cultural page editor, writing reviews of works by
Alexandru A. Philippide and
Mihai Moșandrei, and gazetteer entries for
Ethiopian Christianity. After the
attack on the Soviet Union, which sealed Antonescu's alliance with Nazi Germany, Ivașcu was drafted into the
Romanian Land Forces, but, being aged 30, was ordered to continue his work at
Vremea in lieu of active service. His presence in the official press became even more controversial after that date. Historian
Lucian Boia identifies him behind the pen name
Victor Pancu, used in articles that praise
Adolf Hitler and describe
Joseph Stalin's as "the most atrocious of dictatorships". With contributors such as
Ion Anestin and
Costin Murgescu,
Vremea was a staple of anti-Soviet propaganda all throughout 1942, leading Boia to conclude that Ivașcu was playing a "double game". Diarist
Pericle Martinescu also identified
Victor Pancu with Ivașcu, attributing him the one-page reportage
Tainele Kremlinului ("Secrets of the
Kremlin"). The piece implied that Stalin was a coward, and also revisited Stalin's early life as a bank robber. Boia's account is disputed by literary historian
Nicolae Manolescu, who reports that the articles and pen name in question were those of a disgraced Iron Guard affiliate,
Alexandru Gregorian. Manolescu notes that Ivașcu "was always a man of the left". This identification is supported by
Pavel Țugui, the literary historian and former communist, who notes that, as
Victor Pancu, Gregorian was already contributing brochures on the
Soviet war crimes. Ivașcu also had contacts with the liberal Doinaș and other
Sibiu Literary Circle members, whose ideas he chronicled for
Vremea. As reported by Piru, Ivașcu was also involved with another newspaper,
Ecoul, nominally put out by Mircea Grigorescu. Here, he employed known leftists such as Iordan,
Ovid Crohmălniceanu, and
Veronica Porumbacu—alongside Piru himself. According to memoirist Niculae Gheran, this venture established another connection between Ivașcu and the Antonescu regime, since
Ecoul was the "controlled opposition" (
cu voie de la poliție, literally: "vetted by police"). He notes that the real person behind
Ecoul was
George Macovescu, at the time employed by the Propaganda Ministry—it now answered directly to
Mihai Antonescu, who wanted to seem more liberal upon the end of a losing war. Gheran also reports that Ivașcu intervened to silence radical critics of the regime, withdrawing his own newspaper from circulation when it inadvertently published an epigram mocking Ion Antonescu.
Communist rise and imprisonment Ivașcu soon attracted unwanted attention: a series of denunciations in the antisemitic newspaper
Moldova brought up his collaboration to the left-wing press and his association with Jewish intellectuals. By then, Ivașcu had affiliated with the
Union of Patriots, an
underground organization led by
Dumitru Bagdasar, and reportedly managed its clandestine newspaper, the future
România Liberă. At
Vremea, beginning 1944, he contributed columns that were openly critical of the "
Nazi New Order", spoke favorably of the
Yugoslav Partisans and the
French Resistance, and noted that the war had entered its "critical phase". In his official capacity at the Ministry, Ivașcu also took part in preparing a fraudulent win for the Communist Party in the
1946 election, keeping notes on the activities of dissident Social Democrats and issuing orders to restrict the activities of visiting Western journalists. With Macovescu, Pas,
N. D. Cocea,
Miron Constantinescu,
Nicolae Carandino, and various others, Ivașcu was elected to the Committee of the
Professional Journalists' Union (UZP). From 1945 to 1946, According to Boia,
Victoria was a nominally independent gazette, but "just as vehement as the genuine communist ones", congratulating the PCdR for its purging of Romania's monarchist elites. Formalizing its affiliation to the Union of Patriots in October 1945,
Victoria signaled a definitive ideological break with Doinaș and the Sibiu Circle. Ivașcu's work, such as his 1946 homage to the socialist writer
Gala Galaction, was taken up by the communist literary journal
Contemporanul. Ivașcu was also a member of the
Romanian Society for Friendship with the Soviet Union and prominent contributor to its magazine,
Veac Nou. From 1947 to 1948, he served as head of the Propaganda Ministry's Press Directorate, during which time he was also created a Knight 2nd Class of the
Meritul Cultural Order. He assisted
Grigore Preoteasa in setting up the Ministry's own Disciplinary Committee, of which Ivașcu was secretary. and made Director of the
Nicolae Bălcescu Museum. Accounts differ as to what happened next. According to one version, he was sentenced to death, but his penalty was commuted to hard labor. The verdict came despite favorable testimonies in his favor from Călinescu and his colleagues in the Union of Patriots. Ivașcu's mother Maria appealed the decision and wrote letters of protest to
Ana Pauker, the communist grandee, but these went unanswered. He was detained for a while in the same cell as another disgraced communist,
Belu Zilber, with whom he became friends and later bitter rivals. In his account of their time together, Zilber claims that Ivașcu was being prepared as a false witness in a
show trial of the former Social Democrats, including those who had aligned themselves with the PCdR. As he puts it, communist leader
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej "gave up on this plan. He discovered that it made more sense to appoint [the Social Democrats] as high dignitaries." Ivașcu was also cellmates with
Adrian Marino, a fellow literary man and Călinescu disciple, within a cell that also housed Bessarabian inmates and militants of the Iron Guard. When Ivașcu began learning Russian with the Bessarabians, the Guardists were infuriated, and he very narrowly escaped a pummeling. Archival research carried out in 2006 indicates that Ivașcu turned informant for the Securitate, spying on his cellmates at
Constanța, Jilava, and eventually
Aiud.
Rehabilitation and Contemporanul Gheran notes that one of Ivașcu's final destinations as a prisoner was a labor camp on the
Danube–Black Sea Canal. He credits a rumor that other Canal inmates found out about his spying, and prepared to have him killed, but that he narrowly escaped this fate when the Securitate had him moved. Following a review of his case, Ivașcu was declared innocent and freed in 1954. As claimed by Zilber, "he proved to be an obedient fella while in prison, and the party rewarded him for it." He rejoined the teaching staff at Lazăr High School, where he remained until 1956. Ivașcu was subsequently assigned to publishing the magazine
Glasul Patriei, which was dedicated to cajoling the Romanian exiles and was officially issued in
Pankow by a "Romanian Repatriation Committee". The task was unusual: Ivașcu, an antifascist and former prisoner, was working under orders from "some Securitate operative", and alongside
Nichifor Crainic, the reformed far-right politico. This team focused its attacks on anti-communist intellectuals who had flirted with fascism, in particular
Vintilă Horia The next step in Ivașcu's
rehabilitation was his 1955 appointment to the position of
Contemporanul editor-in-chief, where he was seconded for a while by Ion Mihăileanu (later a noted screenwriter and critic of communism). Boia notes that the authorities' sudden change of heart offers a glimpse into "the impeccable communist logic"; This is because Ivașcu was "a born editor": "He gets high on printers' ink, can spot a missing letter out of one thousand words, can detect a
text alignment error at a glance". In May 1958, Ivașcu published in
Contemporanul a critical piece on "
revisionism" as experienced by the
Communist Party USA; also then, he presided over an international meeting of press reporters—which doubled as an anti-nuclear protest (held in Bucharest, it had
Drew Pearson and
Yannis Kapsis as guests). In August 1959,
Lupta de Clasă hosted his festive essay praising
peaceful coexistence, and describing the
Warsaw Pact as Romania's "keystone" alliance. at the
Contemporanul headquarters, As noted in 2006 by critic Constantin Coroiu, Ivașcu's
Contemporanul was "the bridge that linked (or, one could say, salvaged) the interwar era to the contemporary era". Consecrated writers (Călinescu, Philippide, Arghezi,
Lucian Blaga,
Mihail Sadoveanu) were featured alongside young talents (Manolescu,
Nichita Stănescu,
Ana Blandiana). Ivașcu also helped Marino, his former cellmate, by having him published in
Contemporanul. Nevertheless,
Contemporanul maintained the status of an elite propaganda magazine. Looking back on the period, writer
Gheorghe Grigurcu describes it as a collaborationist tribune, a Romanian answer to the
Nouvelle Revue Française, with Ivașcu as a communist
Drieu La Rochelle. Here, Ivașcu personally handled the debut of
Ion Crânguleanu, who was primarily noted for exploring communist themes. In the early 1960s, official publications listed Ivașcu as one of sixteen literary critics whose work supported "socialist construction". In 1961, Răutu, as head of the Agitprop Directorate, selected Ivașcu to oversee and preface the complete edition of Blaga's poetry. Blaga had enjoyed a precarious standing with the regime, and had basically been forbidden from publishing for some 15 years. As reported by Blaga's daughter Dorli, he was personally assigned by Răutu to look after her father, who was braving a terminal illness; Blaga "rejoiced in this, because he liked [Ivașcu] a great deal." In effect, Ivașcu acted as a censor, cutting out stanzas, destroying the inner continuity of poetic cycles, and inserting misleading critical commentary. Reportedly, he regretted his role in the affair, privately confessing that he had "exploited [Blaga's] fears and cravings". As an official emissary of the party, Ivașcu helped coax another banished poet, Arghezi, to collaborate and adopt
socialist realism. In 1969, after the poet's death, he published in
Books Abroad the short essay
Tudor Arghezi: Poet for Contemporary Man, praising him as "the inspired prophet", victorious "in the conflict between cognizance and noncognizance." Gheorghiu-Dej allowed Ivașcu to travel abroad in a private capacity, urging him to convince Romanian defectors and exiles, such as conductor
Constantin Silvestri, to return home. According to Manolescu, Ivașcu consciously failed at this task, hinting to Silvestri that a return would not be in his best interest.
University professor and Lumea editor From 1958 to 1968, Ivașcu headed the
University of Bucharest's History of Romanian Literature department, also directing the History of Contemporary Romanian Literature department there from 1966 to 1968. His promotion there came immediately after the resident
Stalinist,
Ion Vitner, had been sacked; Ivașcu was also able to employ his friend Piru as a junior professor. He worked closely with the other Călinescu disciple, Marino, and
Eugen Simion as his assistants. He helped clear Manolescu of charges that he was from a fascist family, Reportedly, Ivașcu also cut off the connections between
Contemporanul and a communist hardliner,
Dumitru Popescu-Dumnezeu. As his university colleagues noted, Ivașcu was a good manager of his department, one who helped the faculty as a whole, and whose arrival there helped restore "the normalcy of values". According to Gheran, Piru was especially active in defending the "controversial" Ivașcu against accusations that he was a "writer with no opus", highlighting instead his merits as a journalist and his left-wing credentials, including his "seniority in the [wartime]
resistance movement." Ivașcu founded and let a literary society representing the faculty, again called
Junimea. Its reopening in March 1967 was made in the presence of over 800 students; guests included young poets
Ioan Alexandru,
Gabriela Melinescu,
Adrian Păunescu, and
Gheorghe Tomozei, joined by seniors such as Doinaș,
Emil Botta, and
Romul Munteanu (Botta also contributed the poetry recital, alongside
Carmen Galin,
Aimée Iacobescu, and
Florian Pittiș). The group enjoyed a flurry of activity during the later 1960s, but was virtually defunct by 1970. he also founded
Lumea, a magazine of international politics which gave readers an alternative to the official news. Modeled on Western news magazines, its imprimatur a sign that Gheorghiu-Dej was moving away from the Soviets, an "
extensive de-Russification process". Imprimatur was therefore provided under the new guidelines of
national communism, as noted by party functionary
Paul Niculescu-Mizil. According to Mizil,
Lumea effectively replaced a Romanian edition of
Novoye Vremya, while returning to a "national line" in politics. Ivașcu would direct
Lumea to 1966. Probably using his contacts in the communist elite, Ivașcu managed to protect and hire at
Lumea Doinaș, who was also just returning from prison. During his tenure, Ivașcu also obtained that his wartime friend Mircea Grigorescu, who had similarly passed through communist prisons, be allowed to serve as
Lumeas editorial secretary. The eccentric poet-translator
Mircea Ivănescu was also employed by Ivașcu as a columnist. Ivașcu asked him to fictionalize himself into an Italian correspondent, which allowed Ivănescu to study Italian politics. Similar practices were imposed on other staff members of the staff (among them Felicia Antip, Florica Șelmaru, and
Cristian Popișteanu), but the magazine also hosted translations from Western intellectuals: Pearson,
Art Buchwald,
Sebastian Haffner,
Walter Lippmann,
Jean Schwœbel, and
Daily Workers John Gritten. Ivașcu still intervened to remove articles that went too far in praising non-orthodox stances, as with a 1964 piece honoring
Nicolae Titulescu. In 1964, after an eight-year wait and numerous character checks, Ivașcu was reinstated a member of the Communist Party (or, as it was known then, Workers' Party) by Gheorghiu-Dej. The ailing communist leader died in March 1965, and Ivașcu made a public show of his grief. As he recounted in 1968, he "respected and loved Gheorghiu-Dej", a "standard bearer" for the party and the writers' community. During that same interval, Ivașcu invited Călinescu to visit and lecture at his university department, thus facilitating the ailing scholar's very last meetings with young writers. and one of the disciples who oversaw his vigil and funeral. He also carried on with editorial work, putting out a 1967 edition of
Nicolae Filimon's 1862 classic,
Ciocoii vechi și noi. It was published with Ivașcu's footnotes, which bracketed out and toned down Filimon's critique of
egalitarianism. In 1969, Ivașcu clashed with his pupil Manolescu over political and literary matters: Manolescu had insisted on publishing a poetry anthology which included unfrequented anticommunists, seeing their removal from literary history as a form of induced "amnesia", which resulted in a literary void. As the volume was being withdrawn from bookstores, Ivașcu published a
Contemporanul article which insisted that communist poetry was fertile enough to fill that void. According to
Radio Free Europe's
Monica Lovinescu, his demonstration was "long and useless". She also notes that Ivașcu's attempt to invalidate the contribution of formerly fascist poets contradicted the regime's policy of recovering them at
Glasul Patriei.
România Literară and doctoral research Under the spell of liberalization promoted by the new communist leader,
Nicolae Ceaușescu, Ivașcu was free to revisit the work of his 1930s friend Pătrășcanu, who had been executed by Gheorghiu-Dej and rehabilitated since. His article on this topic, called
Resurecție morală ("Moral Resurrection"), appeared as the introduction to a
Contemporanul issue of May 3, 1968. Ivașcu himself became a member of the Academy of Social and Political Sciences. In 1969 and 1971, he received the
Romanian Writers' Union Prize. From 1971 until his death, Ivașcu directed
România Literară, the Writers' Union magazine. According to Manolescu, who was to succeed him there, the move from
Contemporanul to
România Literară was rather a demotion, signaling that Ceaușescu did not trust him. Ivașcu was asked to contribute propaganda editorials honoring Ceaușescu's stance—beginning with a piece celebrating the July Theses, published as an editorial in November 1971. As his colleague
Mircea Iorgulescu noted, he only regarded such pieces as an "editorial task" that required his "technical skill". Other authors contrarily assess that Ivașcu had been assigned a leading role in the subsequent "cultural revolution". Media analyst Claudia Chiorean sees Ivașcu as one of Ceaușescu's "first violinists", whose bad reputation also harmed Manolescu's own. Musicologist Alex Vasiliu likewise notes that Ivașcu's arrival immediately enforced communist propaganda at
România Literară, with topical contributions by
Pavel Apostol,
Demostene Botez,
Radu Boureanu,
Liviu Ciulei, and
Alexandru Ivasiuc. By then, Ivașcu was making occasional returns to agitprop as film industry supervisor, this time by promoting Ceaușescu's national communism. Ivașcu still made a point of promoting foreign literature and the more daring aspects of Romanian modernism, putting out poetry by Blandiana,
Mircea Dinescu, and
Ion Caraion, as well as essays by Iorgulescu and
Sami Damian. The magazine also hosted debates on culture and society, Moreover, Ivașcu made it his goal to promote awareness of
Romanian grammar, employing the services of linguists
Alexandru Graur, Theodor Hristea, Ștefan Badea, and Alexandru Niculescu, who wrote special columns for the correction of
vulgarisms. The following year, at
Editura Politică, Ivașcu oversaw an edition of articles and speeches by the communist potentate
Petru Groza. Although he had held a professorship, Ivașcu had not obtained his Ph.D., and was pressured into correcting that error. He eventually enlisted for the university's own doctoral program, with a paper on the early history of Romanian literature, and with
Șerban Cioculescu as his
doctoral advisor. Other academics gave his volume poor reviews, in particular for its political content. Ivașcu took an "ultra-orthodox"
nationalist stand on
Romanian language history, downplaying the contribution of Slavs; his work did not differentiate at all between religious and lay literature, formulating the claim that all ancient texts could be understood as "cultural instruments" and therefore secular in their purpose. Historian
Florin Constantiniu found fault with Ivașcu's views on Romanian social history, which suggested that
boyardom was already insignificant in the 17th century, and that its degeneration was recorded first-hand by
Miron Costin: "Even if we were to admit that boyardom 'was living through its last moments', it could not have been aware of this supposedly looming demise". Among the critics,
Eugen Negrici notes that Ivașcu had annexed
Slavonic texts to his area of study, covering up the paucity of literary sources, and had taken for granted
protochronistic claims about "baroque literature" in Romania. The result, Negrici concludes, is "pitiful", the probable result of a "political command". As Niculescu notes, Ivașcu found his degree "utterly useless", being "a man of the fleeting everyday facts, of generic notes, and certainly not one to spend time documenting himself at any length." Despite such controversy, Ivașcu joined a staff of writers who put out an official edition of Romanian literary history at
Editura Academiei. Negrici describes the collective volume, published in 1970, as an "antiquated or, at the very least, inopportune" mixture of
aestheticism and socialist realism, which unwittingly showed the limits of Ceaușescu's liberalization.
Final years and death Living a withdrawn life from 1976, Ivașcu was described by Niculescu as a figure of the "
Western left", whose personality encompassed a love for "the literary tradition" and public displays of
Francophilia. A "
sui generis independent", he was also personally responsible for allowing
D. I. Suchianu to have his permanent film column at
România Literară. In public, he was showing himself a devotee of the Ceaușescu regime—as Manolescu puts it, "he feared Ceaușescu". in 1975, he joined
Mihnea Gheorghiu,
Octav Livezeanu,
Ștefan Voicu and other interwar communists for a collective interview, which saw print in
Manuscriptum magazine. Three years later, he and Antoaneta Tănăsescu put out a 500-page anthology of antifascist works from the 1930s and '40s. He traveled freely to the West, but, as reported by exile author
Sanda Stolojan, spoke admiringly of Ceaușescu's anti-Sovietism, and claimed that the anticommunist
Radio Free Europe interested nobody but Romania's "old age pensioners". Stolojan wrote: "I found his cowardice fascinating. He no longer believes in anything, at his very core he just plays the regime's card." Ivașcu and Florica Georgescu-Condurachi had one daughter, Voichița, Georgescu-Condurachi fled to Paris in 1978, followed by their daughter in 1981. Visiting Paris the following year, Ivașcu met secretly with his wife and daughter, with help from the Lebanese Embassy. In early 1985,
România Literară hosted a piece by Vadim Tudor himself, lampooning Lovinescu. Upon reading this, the latter noted in her diary: "The neo-
proletkult crowd are invading [that magazine] in droves, and Ivașcu is giving up ground." Some Romanian officials openly took Ivașcu's side. Macovescu, his friend at the UZP, addressed him a letter intended for publication on his 70th birthday. He noted there that Ivașcu had been made to endure "terrifying torments" by "those who believed that the new world [of communism] was their own profitable business." Around 1986,
România Literară had spearheaded a campaign against the more radical forms of national-communism; Ivașcu allowed the magazine to feature an article by the more liberal communist,
Gogu Rădulescu, which ridiculed the nationalists. The nationalists' reply was handled in a brochure by
Iosif Constantin Drăgan, who argued that Ivașcu was an instrument of foreign enemies. It also featured letters from someone calling himself "Calafeteanu", who claimed to have known Ivașcu since his youth, and who detailed various other accusations. As noted by critic and diarist
Mircea Zaciu, the letters were most likely forged by Drăgan. Late in life, Ivașcu was tasked by the regime with editing the work of philosophers
Gabriel Liiceanu and
Andrei Pleșu, both of them disciples of
Constantin Noica, the former political prisoner. His work was another participation in censorship: his cuts in Pleșu's text were preserved by Liiceanu as illustrations of a "pathology of culture" under communism. Ivașcu had erased all visible hint that Noica had spent time in prison. In 1992, poet and literary historian
Marin Mincu similarly accused Ivașcu of silencing the more overt forms of opposition to Ceaușescu, including Mincu's own. Mincu sparked some controversy by recounting that, around 1987, Ivașcu would only tolerate anticommunists if they were "greenlit from Paris". As recounted by his attending physician Mihai Voiculescu, Ivașcu became fatally ill with
pneumonia upon visiting
Warsaw in 1988. He checked himself into "some hospital" after his return home; though under medical supervision, he could no longer handle a subsequent
myocardial infarction. He died in Bucharest on June 21, 1988, His death was also marked by
România Literarăs adversaries at
Luceafărul: in July,
Artur Silvestri noted that, "in rather symbolic fashion", Ivașcu, the Moldavian, had died just days apart from Cioculescu of
Muntenia and
Mihai Beniuc of
Transylvania. Silvestri expressed the belief that they would all be reunited in the "complete organicity" of Romanian literary culture. ==Legacy==