For four years, he observed the difficult lives of the mountain dwellers and the problems encountered in the nearby gold mines.

Born among the Romanian peasant class of Transylvania, he was originally an Orthodox, but chose to embrace Eastern Catholicism.

Assisted by the Catholic congregation of Blaj, he graduated from Budapest University, after which he was ordained.

Agrbiceanu was initially assigned to a parish in the Apuseni Mountains, which form the backdrop to much of his fiction.

Before 1910, Agrbiceanu had achieved literary fame in both Transylvania and the Kingdom of Romania, affiliating with Astra cultural society in 1912; his work was disputed between the rival schools of Smntorul and Poporanism.

After a debut in poetry, he became a highly prolific author of novels, novellas, and other forms of prose, being rated as Chekhovian or Tolstoyan for his talents in describing the discreet suffering of common folk.

Committed to social and cultural activism in Transylvania, Agrbiceanu spent the 1910s officiating near Sibiu, with a break during World War I that saw him taking refuge in the Russian Empire, the Ukrainian Peoples Republic, and eventually the Moldavian Democratic Republic.

He served as a chaplain for the Romanian Volunteer corps, and was decorated for his service.

In 1919, Agrbiceanu moved to Cluj, where he lived for most of the remainder of his life.

After the war, he involved himself in both the political and cultural life of Greater Romania.

He moved between the National Peasants Party, the Peoples Party, and the National Agrarian Party, all while remaining engaged with organizing specifically Greek-Catholic interest groups.

Already in the 1920s, Agrbiceanu expressed disappointment with the cultural decline he felt was encouraged by an emerging political class, embracing instead radical-right positions and eugenics, while also demanding administrative decentralization and encouraging the peasantry to improve its economic standing.

Voted into the Romanian Academy, he served terms in the Assembly of Deputies, and assumed the office of Senate vice president under the National Renaissance Front dictatorship.

He was eventually forced out of Northern Transylvania during World War II.

He spent his last decade and a half under a communist regime that outlawed his church, an act in which he refused to cooperate.

Much of his work, with its transparent Christian moralizing, proved incompatible with the new ideology, and was banned by communist censors; however, especially after 1953, the regime found him useful for its image, and bestowed honors upon him.

He was never allowed to publish his complete works, and continued to struggle with his censors during his final years.

The name Agrbiceanu came from the familys ancestral village, Agrbiciu.

According to various report, at least some members of the family were traditionally Orthodox, 4 and he was himself originally baptized as such.

Writer Ion Breazu argues that Ana Agrbiceanu was not tied to either Orthodoxy of Eastern Catholicism, and instead channeled a religious sentiment shared by both denominations.

The adversaries were Saxons, Hungarians, and Hungarian Jews, who occupied positions of power: Agrbiceanu would not spare any sympathy for either one of these groups, in his work as a writer.

From about 1900, Nicolae became a respected forester and estate administrator, described upon his death in 1931 as a cultured peasant.

According to the novelists own notes, his father subscribed to a number of Romanian-language publications that appeared in Transylvania.

His mother, although a great lover of stories and storytelling, was illiterate.

His teachers included Gavril Precup, who introduced Agrbiceanu to world philosophy and the tenets of Romanian nationalism, and Ambrosiu Cheianu, who cultivated his taste for natural sciences.

His later works suggest that, aged eleven, Agrbiceanu was in the Romanian crowd which greeted the Transylvanian Memorandum leaders, arrested by the Hungarian authorities and paraded through Blaj.

There, Agrbiceanu published a feuilleton (signed as Alfius ), poetry, and, in 1900, the short story n postul Patelui (At Lent).

He soon became a correspondent of Rvaul, a Cluj-based newspaper, signing his first pieces there with the pen name Alfius, then as Agarbi or Potcoav (Horseshoe).

One of his essays there, published when he was aged twenty, was a critique of social democracy (defining its adherents as enemies of Jesus Christ and of any people, save the Jews), with some praise reserved for Christian socialism as a non-revolutionary alternative.

Agrbiceanu also noted that the Hungarian Social Democrats could not prevail among the Romanians, despite the success of propagandists in duping some destitute Transylvanians: When has our salvation ever come from a kike, and not even from a kike, but from any sort of foreigner 19 In other pieces, Agrbiceanu denounced publicist Imre Salusinszky for his claims that social democracy was compatible with the Romanians Christian faith.

Urged by friends and receiving a church scholarship, he returned to Budapest to study literature.

He spent just one semester there, during which he also taught primary school catechism.

In March 1906, he married Maria Reli Radu, the daughter of an archpriest from Ocna Mure.

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