Viaţa Basarabiei (Romanian for "Bessarabia's Life", pronounced [ˈvjat͡sa basaˈrabi.ej]) is a Romanian-language periodical from Chişinău, Moldova. Originally a literary and political magazine, published at a time when the Bessarabia region was part of Romania, it was founded in 1932 by political activist Pan Halippa and writer Nicolai Costenco. At the time, Viaţa Basarabiei was primarily noted for rejecting the centralism of Greater Romanian governments, to which they opposed more or less vocal Bessarabian regionalist demands and a nativist ethos. Declaring itself to be a traditionalist venue, interested in preserving local specificity in the cultural field, Viaţa Basarabiei was in effect a voice for cultural innovation and a host to modernist writers such as Vladimir Cavarnali, Bogdan Istru or George Meniuc. After the Soviet Union's 1940 annexation of Bessarabia, the editorial board split, and Halippa revived the magazine at a new location in Bucharest. It was published there for most of World War II, and was eventually disestablished. Its editors were subject to persecution in both Soviet territory and Communist Romania. The magazine was revived in 2002 by Mihai Cimpoi, being printed under the auspices of both the Romanian Writers' Union and the Moldovan Writers' Union.
History
Creation Viaţa Basarabiei, founded as the literary voice of Bessarabian regionalism, was first printed in January 1932. Its first issue included a foreword by Halippa, in which the latter, previously a key figure in the 1918 union with Romania and activist of the National Moldavian Party, outlined and pledged to follow a set of political and cultural ideals. The name adopted by Halippa's publication was homonymous with that of two other press organs: a newspaper published in 1907; and a daily of the National Peasants' Party, published from 1930 to 1944. The name was also equivalent in translation to those of non-Romanian Bessarabian papers: the Russian-language Besarabskaya Zhizn' (published around 1917) and the Yiddish Dos Besaraber Lebn (1918-1940). The new magazine was, according to Romanian literary critic Ion Simuţ, a "regional adaptation" of the Moldavian-based journal Viaţa Românească. According to Moldovan writer and researcher Călina Trifan, the connection between these two platforms was the theory of "national specificity" in Romanian culture, first elaborated by Viaţa Românească before World War I, and resurrected into an "evidently regionalist" ideology by Halippa and Costenco (see Poporanism). Himself a member of the Viaţa Românească circles, Romanian literary historian George Călinescu spoke of Viaţa Basarabiei and other cultural platforms of the day as proofs that Bessarabia manifested "great interest in literature." The popularization of literature in the 1930s, Călinescu noted, meant that "even the hospitalized people of the sanitarium in Bugaz had their own [literary periodical]".
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