Ion Heliade Rădulescu was a
Wallachian-born
Romanian academic,
Romantic and
Classicist poet, essayist, memoirist, short story writer, newspaper editor and politician, as well as prolific translator of foreign literature into
Romanian and the author of books on
linguistics and history. For much of his life, he was a teacher at the
Saint Sava College in
Bucharest, which he helped reopen. He was a founding member of the
Romanian Academy, and the first President thereof. Heliade Rădulescu is considered one of the foremost representatives of
Romanian culture from the first half of the 19th century, having first become noted for his association with
Gheorghe Lazăr and the latter's support for discontinuing education in
Greek. Over the following decades, he had a major contribution in shaping the modern
Romanian language, but raised controversy when he came to advocate the massive introduction of
Italian neologisms to the
Romanian lexis. A
Romantic nationalist landowner siding with moderate
liberals, he was among the leaders of the
1848 Wallachian revolution, after which he was forced to spend several years in exile. Adopting an original form of
conservatism, which emphasized the role of
boyars in
Romanian history, Heliade Rădulescu was rewarded for supporting the
Ottoman Empire, and came to clash with the
radical wing of the 1848 generation.