LEWISTON – A Romanian writer and dissident arrested earlier this month on charges of beating his wife at their Auburn home remained in jail Wednesday.

Leonard C. Oprea, 55, of 81 Briarcliff Knoll was charged with domestic violence assault, domestic violence criminal threatening and obstructing report of a crime. Each charge is punishable by up to 364 days in jail.

Auburn police said Oprea hit his wife, Brigitte Hristea, 42, repeatedly in the face and head, kicked her back, pulled her hair and choked her. He also threatened to kill her, police said.

Police went to the home the night of May 10 when Hristea called 911. She and Oprea were seen running through the house, Oprea chasing his wife, police said.

As Hristea ran past the locked door, she screamed to Auburn Police Officer Bernice Mowatt: “Help me! He’s beating me!” Mowatt wrote in a sworn affidavit. Oprea then ran past, lunging at his wife, Mowatt wrote.

Hristea ran out of the garage door, her face swollen and bruised, yelling that Oprea was beating her and that their 4-year-old daughter was inside the house, according to the affidavit. Mowatt told Hristea to run toward another officer at the scene, while Mowatt grabbed Oprea by his shirt at the chest and stepped in front of him, she wrote. She ordered him to sit on the steps and radioed for an ambulance.

Mowatt wrote that Oprea appeared to be drunk, his hands swollen. When she asked him to describe the scene, he put his head in his hands and cried, Mowatt wrote. He said: “I hit her. This is all my fault. I am stupid. I did this again. I hit her again. You arrest me,” Mowatt wrote in her affidavit.

Mowatt checked on their daughter, who was upstairs in bed.

She visited Hristea at Central Maine Medical Center and advised her of her rights as a victim of domestic violence, Mowatt wrote in her affidavit.

Hristea told Mowatt she had been in the living room watching television after putting their daughter to bed. Oprea was on the phone in the kitchen talking to a Canadian friend, Hristea said.

She told Oprea to lower his voice and to stop drinking. He got upset and, after hanging up the phone, started arguing with her about her not liking his Canadian friend, Hristea told Mowatt.

After Oprea chased Hristea around the house, assaulting her, she tried to call his mother on a cell phone, but he took the phone, Mowatt wrote. Hristea ran upstairs and tried to call 911 on the home phone, but Oprea grabbed that phone from her, Mowatt wrote.

She described in her affidavit Hristea’s injuries, including a footprint-like bruise on her back. Both of her eyes were badly bruised; her right eye bloodshot and nearly swollen shut.

Oprea appeared in 8th District Court and pleaded not guilty to the charges. He remained Wednesday in Androscoggin County Jail in lieu of $1,200 bail. The case is being transferred to Androscoggin County Superior Court for a jury trial.

Bail conditions bar Oprea from possessing or using alcohol and illegal drugs and from having contact with Hristea and their daughter.

Online sources describe Oprea as an anti-communist dissident in Romania during the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu in the 1980s. Oprea published a book and several short stories that won national literary prizes.

The secret police of the Communist regime officially blocked the publication of his writings in 1987, calling them subversive.

Two years later, after the Romanian Revolution of 1989, he became a well-known Romanian writer, journalist and editor, Web sources said.

He has been living in the United States since 1999 and had lived in Boston before moving to Maine.