Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Constantin

(pseudonym of Solomon Katz). Born May 21, 1855, in the village of Slavianka, Kharkov Province; died May 7, 1920, in Bucharest. Rumanian sociologist, literary critic, and publicist.

Persecuted by the tsarist government for participation in the populist movement, Dobrogeanu-Gherea emigrated in 1875 to Rumania, where he published socialist newspapers and magazines. He was one of the organizers of Rumanian social democratic circles (for whom he wrote a program in 1886) and a cofounder (1893) of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Rumania.

In his literary criticism, Dobrogeanu-Gherea supported tendentious, ideological art and demanded that art realistically reflect life. His views on aesthetics were influenced both by H. Taine and the Russian revolutionary democrats. Dobrogeanu-Gherea’s work as a literary critic contributed to the development of realism in Rumanian literature.

Dobrogeanu-Gherea advocated the ideas of dialectical and historical materialism in his works Karl Marx and Our Economists and Slavery and Socialism (1884). His mistakes, opportunistic in character, led him to support the Menshevik theory of neoserfdom, which he expounded in the book Neoserfdom (1910). Dobrogeanu-Gherea’s refusal to accept the idea of an alliance of the working class and the peasantry had a detrimental effect on the Rumanian labor movement for a long time.