Paul Bujor

Life and work

The story behind the role.

Romanian zoologist, writer and politician (1862-1952).

Paul Bujor (born Pavel Bujor; August 2, 1862 – May 17, 1952) was a Romanian zoologist, physiologist and marine biologist, also noted as a socialist writer and politician. Hailing from rural Covurlui County, he studied biology in France and Switzerland, where he was attracted by left-wing ideas; his evolutionary biology, informed by the work of Carl Vogt, veered into Marxism and irreligion. Returning to the Kingdom of Romania, he was a junior member of the Romanian Social Democratic Workers' Party, active on its moderate wing. He earned the critics' attention in the 1890s as a short story writer with a socialist and pacifist message, but only returned to fiction writing briefly, in the 1930s. An award-winning ichthyologist, Bujor was hired by the University of Iași, where he taught for 41 years, and throughout the period worked on documenting the Black Sea fauna, and made discoveries concerning the environment of Techirghiol Lake. He inaugurated the Romanian study of animal morphology, while also contributing to histology, embryology, and parasitology, and gave popular lectures on evolution and physical culture. Bujor rallied with the Poporanist movement, infiltrating the National Liberal Party from the left. He was among the founders of the leading Poporanist review, Viața Românească, but expelled after expressing disagreement with its refusal to criticize the National Liberal mainstream. As an independent left-winger, constantly pushing for land reform and universal suffrage, Bujor had publicized and sometimes violent conflicts with his far-right colleague at university, A. C. Cuza. Elected to Senate as a university representative, and serving throughout the social upheaval of World War I, Bujor clashed with the National Liberal Prime Minister Ion I. C. Brătianu, wh…

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