Nicolae Malaxa

Nicolae Malaxa (22 December [O.S. 10 December] 1884 – 1965) was a Romanian engineer and industrialist.

Biography

Born in a family of Greek origins in Huşi, Malaxa studied engineering in Iaşi (at the University of Iaşi) and Karlsruhe (at the Polytechnic University). Late in his life, Petre Pandrea, a Romanian intellectual who was for long a member of the Communist Party and later became a victim of the Communist regime, wrote a memoir which, in part, dealt with Malaxa's biography, recording it with a dose of hostility. In it, he indicated that Malaxa's father died a young man, and that Nicolae was kept in university with money earned by his mother and sister. Pandrea, who called Malaxa "a mama's boy" and argued that this had shaped his character, also noted that, after graduation and contrary to his family's wishes, the engineer married a divorcée (who had been married to one of his early business partners). In time, he claimed, tensions grew between the two Malaxas, after the "Puritan" Nicolae came to resent his "frivolous" wife.