Mihail Kogalniceanu

Born Sept. 6, 1817, in Ia§i; died June 20, 1891, in Paris. Rumanian statesman, politician, historian and writer.

Kogälniceanu completed his education in France and Germany (1834–38). In 1843–44 he lectured on history at the Mikhailovsk Academia Mihăileană (in Moldavia). After the suppression of the revolutionary movement in Moldavia (May 1848), he lived in exile (in Chernovtsy until 1849). Kogălniceanu wrote the work The Wishes of the National Party in Moldavia, in which he proposed a program of bourgeois-democratic reforms and demanded th unification of Moldavia and Walachia into a single Rumanian state. In 1860–61 he headed the government of Moldavia; from 1863 to 1865 he was head of the government of Rumania and in 1876 and 1877–78 was minister of foreign affairs. Kogălniceanu carried out a number of bourgeois reforms (including the secularization of church lands and the 1864 land reform). In April 1877, on the eve of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, he signed the agreement concerning the passage of Russian troops through Rumania, and on May 9 (21), 1877, in the Chamber of Deputies he proclaimed Rumania’s independence.

In 1869, Kogălniceanu became a member of the Rumanian Academic Society, and from 1887 to 1890 he served as president of the Rumanian Academy. He published works on history, archival materials (including Chronicles of the Moldavian State, vols. 1–3, 1845–52), a number of short stories, and sketches of manners (Lost Illusions, 1841; Physiology of a Provincial in Iaşi, 1844). He also wrote plays (including Two Women Against One Man, 1840) and an unfinished social novel entitled Secrets of the Heart (1850). Kogălniceanu published the journals Dacia literară (1840) and Propăşirea (1844).