Vrabie Olga

About

Olga Vrabie was a poet from Bessarabia, born on November 11, 1902, in Chișinău, into the family of Dimitrie Vrabie and Elena Andrianov. She spent her childhood and studied in Bălți, where she graduated from the Ghenșche Girls' High School, studying in Russian, but in her work, she also tried to express herself in Romanian. Her literary talent was noticed and encouraged by Garabet Ibrăileanu, and her first poems appeared in the magazine "Viața românească," a sign of her early integration into the interwar Romanian literary scene. In 1920, she enrolled in the Faculty of Philology at the University of Iași, but her studies were interrupted by health problems. She also worked as a substitute teacher, and from the correspondence and testimonies of the time, it is evident that she had a constant concern for perfecting the Romanian language and for reading classical and modern literature. In 1923, she married Gheorghe I. Năstase, an assistant at the University of Iași, and during the period spent with him in Iași and then in Paris, she continued to write poems, short prose, and notes, in a discreet but intense effort to assert her poetic voice. Olga Vrabie's life was short and marked by suffering: after returning from France, she was admitted to the TBC sanatorium in Bârnova, then to the Văratic Monastery, where she died on August 14, 1928, at the age of only 25. She left behind a voluminous notebook of poems, as well as manuscripts with prose and Bessarabian folklore, some of which were later published in magazines such as "Viața românească", "Însemnări ieșene", and "Viața Basarabiei". Although she was a forgotten presence in literary history for a long time, Olga Vrabie remains one of the sensitive voices of Bessarabian women's poetry and a representative figure for Romanian literature in the Republic of Moldova.