stylistic:style_transfer
Posthumous controversies

The many polemics which surrounded Tzara in his lifetime left traces after his death, and determine contemporary perceptions of his work. The controversy regarding Tzara's role as a founder of Dada extended into several milieus, and continued long after the writer died. Richter, who discusses the lengthy conflict between Huelsenbeck and Tzara over the issue of Dada foundation, speaks of the movement as being torn apart by "petty jealousies". In Romania, similar debates often involved the supposed founding role of Urmuz, who wrote his avant-garde texts before World War I, and Tzara's status as a communicator between Romania and the rest of Europe. Vinea, who claimed that Dada had been invented by Tzara in Gârceni ca. 1915 and thus sought to legitimize his own modernist vision, also saw Urmuz as the ignored precursor of radical modernism, from Dada to Surrealism. In 1931 the young, modernist literary critic Lucian Boz evidenced that he partly shared Vinea's perspective on the matter, crediting Tzara and Constantin Brâncuși with having, each on his own, invented the avant-garde. Eugène Ionesco argued that "before Dadaism there was Urmuzianism", and, after World War II, sought to popularize Urmuz's work among aficionados of Dada. Rumors in the literary community had it that Tzara successfully sabotaged Ionesco's initiative to publish a French edition of Urmuz's texts, allegedly because the public could then question his claim to have initiated the avant-garde experiment in Romania and the world (the edition saw print in 1965, two years after Tzara's death).

A more radical questioning of Tzara's influence came from Romanian essayist Petre Pandrea. In his personal diary, published long after he and Tzara had died, Pandrea depicted the poet as an opportunist, accusing him of adapting his style to political requirements, of dodging military service during World War I, and of being a " Lumpenproletarian ". Pandrea's text, completed just after Tzara's visit to Romania, claimed that his founding role within the avant-garde was an "illusion which has swelled up like a multicolored balloon", and denounced him as "the Balkan provider of interlope odalisques, with narcotics and a sort of scandalous literature." Himself an adherent to communism, Pandrea grew disillusioned with the ideology, and later became a political prisoner in Communist Romania. Vinea's own grudge probably shows up in his 1964 novel Lunatecii, where Tzara is identifiable as "Dr. Barbu", a thick-hided charlatan.

From the 1960s to 1989, after a period when it ignored or attacked the avant-garde movement, the Romanian communist regime sought to recuperate Tzara, in order to validate its newly adopted emphasis on nationalist and national communist tenets. In 1977, literary historian Edgar Papu, whose controversial theories were linked to " protochronism ", which presumes that Romanians took precedence in various areas of world culture, mentioned Tzara, Urmuz, Ionesco and Isou as representatives of "Romanian initiatives" and "road openers at a universal level." Elements of protochronism in this area, Paul Cernat argues, could be traced back to Vinea's claim that his friend had single-handedly created the worldwide avant-garde movement on the basis of models already present at home.