The future folklorist was a native of the
Bessarabia Governorate, who rejected
union with Romania and emigrated to the MASSR. Romanian author
Sergiu Grossu notes that both Neniu and
Dmitrii Milev were ethnic Bulgarians "who came over from Romania"; he opposes them to other MASSR writers, such as
Nistor Cabac and
Filimon Săteanu, who were
ethnic Romanians, and therefore held in lower regard by the communist establishment. Born Nikolai Semyonovich Nenev (Romanian: Nicolae Nenev), in 1905, "Culai Neniu" was educated at the Pedagogical School in
Balta, which then employed him as a music teacher (1928–1930). In 1928, he established a
chamber choir in
Tiraspol, Also employed by the Moldavian Scientific Center in 1930–1937, Neniu was in contact with writer
Pavel Chioru, who advised him to begin work as a folklorist. This activity resulted in the recording of over 1,000 poems and songs, the first installments of which appeared before 1935 as two volumes (Romanian titles:
Cu ciocanul toc și toc,
Cântăm și noi). Neniu's creative period overlapped with the adoption of Latin script for the Soviet Union's national languages, including "
Moldavian". This change was announced by the
MASSR regional committee of the
Ukrainian Communist Party as an "enormous victory for the
Leninist nationalities policy", since it allowed "Moldavian workers" in Bessarabia and Ukraine to write the same way, advancing communist ideas among the former. The work was primarily political: S. Soloviova, who authored the preface, noted that, though
Cîntece poporane included no works of post-revolutionary folklore, it had successfully evidenced the Moldavians' hatred of
Tsarist autocracy and
Russian Orthodoxy. Although controversial on such grounds, Neniu and Lebedeva's collection had cultural importance for its minuteness of detail and its professionalism, as well as for being the only Latin-script collection of Moldavian folklore to have been printed anywhere in the MASSR. Neniu was drawn into a trial of the Moldovenist (or "originalist") intellectuals, which culminated in March 1934, when Madan was arrested and his books were destroyed. Neniu died in 1939, Shortly after this, the
Soviet occupation of Bessarabia established the new
Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, into which half of the MASSR was folded. Neniu and Pirgov's choir was moved to
Chișinău, where it was reformed as the
Doina chorale. Its first conductor was David Gershfeld. Ethnologist Victor Cirimpei proposes that
Grozescu was reused by Gershfeld in writing the "first Moldavian opera",
Grozovan, in 1955. His memory is cultivated in post-Soviet
Moldova. In 2011, Andrei Sochircă performed a monologue based on works by Neniu and other MASSR writers who were shot in or after the
Great Purge. ==Notes==