Neo-Western Supremacism
Born in Botosani (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) in 1850, Mihai Eminescu is widely regarded as Romania's finest romantic writer, and is recognized as both Romania and Moldova's national poet. Most Romanians can recite line after line of his work, the
Souls For Sale
Unlike Poles, Czechs or Hungarians, most Romanians were left with something after communism: a home in an apartment building or a house with a front yard, a villa if your father worked for the Securitate (the Romanian secret services), a piece of land or just some land in
A Showcase For Kalodont
Gregor von Rezzori has never been part of Romanian-German literature, a fact regretted even beyond his death. The writer, who was born in 1914 in Czernowitz and died in 1998 in his home in Florence, would have, nonetheless, met some of the conditions for qualification. But,
Bucharest – An Oddity Surviving Against All Odds
Bucharest (Rom. Bucureşti) has been some sort of oddity since the very first days of its existence. The legend has it that it was founded by a shepherd, named Bucur, and it was later named after him. Not remotely as glorious a godparent as the goddess of wisdom (the case
The Past: Plus Quam Perfectum
Bucharest is a city in search of identity. Its precise moment of birth is unknown, for the Cetatea Dîmboviţei of the 14th and 15th centuries only played host to its rulers when they occasionally came to ward off threats from south of the Danube or Hungarian attacks form
Perdition, Old-Style
When on the 20th of September, 1459, the throne of Wallachia moved from Târgovişte to Bucharest, the new settlement, which was lying along Dâmboviţa River, was a picturesque settlement, with slow hills, lakes and boundless orchards and especially with venerable forests.
B. Fundoianu / Benjamin Fondane (1898-1944)
B. Fundoianu began to publish persistently and regularly in 1918, when he was twenty; with the determination that characterized him, he embarked upon a tireless mission that took all the attributes of a vocation: that of a messenger of French – hence European – culture
Yesterday Will Be Another Day
I wonder if nature always plays the same game (Einstein) Of course I was coming from sleep, how else is a day supposed to start? However, I didn't know much about the world I was coming from. On the other hand, the world I had landed in should have been very familiar
The Man In My Dream
In short?In short, right now, as soon as you get home, pack up your things. . . Tomorrow morning, on my way to the station, I'll drop by for five minutes: I'm gonna drag you along! Fifteen days of quietness, of fresh air, after a whole summer in this inferno will
The Gentle Whisper Of The Magic
I certainly am neither the first, nor the only person to notice that the fantastic appears as a distinctive feature of Nordic, non-Latin peoples, rather than of the meridional spirit. The solar, mercantile, skeptical-rationalist South, and the sanguine, outgoing, relativistic
Minority Major Artists
The early-20th-century major Romanian art is not a block, but a very particular construction of intertwined cultural layers. One could not affirm that the most fertile and valuable Modern cultural period of this country was characterized by a certain, homogenous Romanian
On Multiculturalism
South Pacific, December 1999 To be a Romanian writer (therefore in the minority) in New Zealand! Ibi patria, ubi – wife. In New Zealand, I think about the confluence of our lives. We come from so far apart, we meet unexpectedly, we link our lives, our fates together.