Before he was admitted to the Faculty of Economics of the Chișinău Polytechnic (1966), Nicolae Rusu had not the faintest thought of writing poetry or prose, unlike those authors who dream of becoming writers from early childhood. Reading, however, was his first and greatest passion.
Prose writer, essayist, playwright.
Out of sheer curiosity, in his very first year he began attending the Ritmuri literary circle at the Polytechnic and, urged on by a friend, wrote his first short story in the spring of 1968. His fellow members discussed the text and, to his surprise, it was published in the Polytechnic’s newspaper, Inginerul.
After several stories appeared in the national press, he made his debut in 1978, at the age of thirty, with the short prose collection “The Old Woman’s Sails”. Two years later he became a member of the Writers’ Union of the USSR, realising that literature was not only a passion but a calling.
That conviction was confirmed in 1983 by his first novel, “Lia”, a surprising success with teenagers and young readers; in 1986 this novel and several stories appeared in Russian with a Moscow publisher in a print run of 100,000 copies. The volume received
the all-Union N. Ostrovsky literary prize, a distinction previously awarded to only two well-known Moldovan writers: Liviu Damian (1967) and Aureliu Busuioc (1974).
With the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991 and the appearance on the world map of the Republic
of Moldova, the Writers’ Union of the second Romanian state awarded him a second literary prize for the short prose collection “We Have Tomorrow to Live Too”. Yet what matters to Nicolae Rusu is neither the number of prizes (over 20) nor of published books (over 40), but his characters. They are a kind of representatives of his own authorial people, for at the birth of each he dresses them in his own clothes and gives them a soul taken from his own.
The author’s ideas, obsessions, attitudes, frustrations and dreams are dissolved into the nature of his characters; those curious to know his inner world need only open and read his books.
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