Lupan, Andrei

Born Feb. 2 (15), 1912, in the village of Miguleny, in present-day Rezina Raion. Soviet Moldavian writer and public figure. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Moldavian SSR (1961). Member of the CPSU since 1956.

Lupan comes from a peasant family. In 1941 he graduated from the agronomy department of the Kishinev Agricultural Institute. His works were first published in 1932. While he was a student, he joined the underground Rumanian Communist Party and participated in the revolutionary movement.

Even in his earliest poems Lupan proved himself to be a citizen-poet sympathetic toward the working masses. Published in 1947, his first collection, Verses, describes Moldavian village life and the events of the war years (1941-45). Later collections include Prelude to a Ballad (1954), The Master Creator (1958), Brother of the Earth (1959), and The Law of Hospitality (1966; State Prize of the Moldavian SSR, 1967). Lupan’s poetry becomes more profound and more philosophical with every year. It is linked organically with modernity and expresses the thoughts and moods of Soviet man—the builder of a new world. The play Light (1948) focuses on the collectivization of the Moldavian villages. Lupan is the author of a number of essays and articles on literary criticism, and he has translated A. S. Pushkin, N. A. Nekrasov, and V. V. Mayakovsky into Moldavian.

Lupan was chairman of the board of the Writers’ Union of the Moldavian SSR from 1946 to 1960 and secretary of the Writers’ Union of the USSR from 1959 to 1971. He was a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR at its fourth and fifth convocations and a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Moldavian SSR at its second, third, sixth, and seventh convocations. He has been awarded the Order of Lenin, three other orders, and various medals.