Anima

Almost no one in Vintileasa saw on TV the scene when the revolutionaries broke into the famous Studio 4 in the afternoon of 22 December 1989. The villagers were busy doing other, more important things. Some were killing their Christmas pigs. Others were stealing wood. Most

'Make your stores - they're cutting it off,' calls the bobby, pushing the entrance door ajar. And every member of the household hurries to grab a pail, a mug or any of the tinier pots and pans, dashing forward to the tap (the house is endowed with a tap -

In our parts, at Jassy, autumn starts late in May and lasts until Christmas. There is no summer in Jassy. If from time to time, winter did not come we could say we have only autumn over here. Nice weather begins with foul smells, green flies and heat. Then it turns nasty.

In the forty-fifth year of his life, Mr. Matache Pisălog noticed he could no longer button up the last three buttons of his brand-new waistcoat he had had made barely three years before. He also noticed then that his belly had started following the fashion of balloons -

excerpts EPIZOOTIC A few years ago, Captain Scabbard's company was transferred to the border to protect the country from cattle diseases. He found this very convenient, as by the frontier there is far less discipline among officers, and life is more regular. Besides,

Sometimes I happen to have beautiful utopian dreams. Sometimes I dream that it was not Lenin in that sealed car crossing Germany and going to Russia in 1917, rather there were three or four odious American capitalists: Russia, Europe would have been saved. Imagine all those

You like any book if you want to. You dislike any book if you want to. I believe literary criticism is useless, and I believe literature has no metaphysical significance. If I do literary criticism, I do it because I have nothing else to do. I do not feel I am committed

When at only 19, Nicolae Iorga (1871-1940) defended his university degree examinations one of his examining professors characterized him as a true phenomenon both in point of memory and power of ratiocination. Then Iorga worked hard in Paris and in Germany, obtaining a

As a princely seat Bucharest was once, for the Romanian authorities, a citadel watched over by God just like Byzantium was for the Eastern Christian world. Then, naturally, it was also the place where scholars needed by the Prince's Chancellery made their studies. They

We think too often that a museum is a repository where you discard all sorts of objects. Arts, history, natural sciences, technology, curiosities. You place exhibits from all these domains into bright and spacious halls; you range them nicely one next to the other and sometimes

from The Hatchet I It is the mountain peasant's lot to earn his daily bread either with the axe or with the sheep hook. Those of them that work with the axe fell firs from the forest and take them to the Bistriţa; there they bind them together into rafts and float

from Don Juan CHAPTER VI Sometimes he would run into Tonia by chance. This is one way of putting it, because he often walked the streets close to her house, he went to a beer joint two corners away, sometimes he was in the park nearby speaking kindly, helping small groups