Dumitru C. Moruzi

Dumitru Constantin Moruzi (also known as Dimitrie Moruzi or Moruzzi; Russian: Дмитрий Константинович Мурузи, Dmitry Konstantinovich Muruzi; July 1 or 2, 1850 – October 9, 1914) was a Moldavian-born Imperial Russian and Romanian aristocrat, civil servant and writer. A scion of the prestigious Mourousis and Sturdza families, he was the son of adventurer Constantin D. Moruzi, who had switched his allegiance between Moldavia, Russia, and the United Principalities. Dumitru's uncle was Alexandru "Alecu" Moruzi, who briefly led the Moldavian government, while his first cousin, Natalia Keșco was for a while queen of Serbia. Dumitru was also the maternal uncle of historian Gheorghe I. Brătianu.

A French-trained man of letters, Moruzi held office with the Russian military bureaucracy during the Turkish War of 1877. Against his father's Russophilia, he opted for Romanian nationalism and, in the process, lost his family estates in Bessarabia. He emigrated to the newly formed Kingdom of Romania and took up Romanian nationality in the 1880s. He then helped administer Northern Dobruja—playing an important part in the modernization of Sulina, and also in the ethnic colonization of the region.

It was also in Sulina that Moruzi contacted illnesses which eventually left him deaf and bedridden. Financially destitute, he tried to earn his living as an opera composer, before becoming a journalist. Moruzi began writing analyses of Tsarist autocracy during the Russian Revolution of 1905, when he asserted that the multinational empire would crumble along ethnic lines. These serialized essays slowly earned the attention and enthusiasm of more prominent nationalists, including historian Nicolae Iorga. The latter brought Moruzi into contact with his Sămănătorist circle, hosting his memoirs and articles in Neamul Românesc and Unirea, and welcoming him into the ranks of the Democratic Nationalist Party.

Moruzi's main literary contributions are social novels, fictionalizing his family history and, overall, the shared destiny of Bessarabian elites. Such works blend a message of nationalism and conservatism, which veers into antisemitism and anti-Masonry, with the classical tradition of storytelling. They were circulated among Romanian intellectuals on both sides of the border and earned critical accolades, but failed to make a significant impact in culture. Posthumously censored in both Communist Romania and the Soviet Union, Moruzi was recovered after 1993, being recognized as an early contributor to both Romanian and Moldovan literature.