Arte

The other Monday walking on Victoriei Road I met a friend. It is a well-known fact that today any guy you treat to a glass of wine at Fialkowsky's or who is in the delightful habit of bumming two or three lei from you is called a friend. Last year, this guy borrowed

*excerpts THE SOPHISTICATED PEASANTS The Romanians are a social phenomenon. As a nation among nations, they are westerners evolved in the East. They are Latins surrounded by Slavs. They are Romans two thousand years away from Rome. They are contemporaries re-produced on

Chapter XII. The Current [1907] Psychological Traits of the Romanian PeopleAll foreigners that visited the Romanian countries were unpleasantly struck by the negative traits of our character. They don't care, says Mr. X. Marmier, for the name of their master. What they

Chapter XI. The Reforms of Romanian Institutions and their Psychological Consequences If, by using a certain amount of imagination, logic and common-sense, we reconstruct mentally what Romanians' life in the Carpathian or Balkan Mountains might have been, we easily

 I must admit I didn't quite understand in the beginning why, shortly after 1989, the Western mass-media has so hastily labeled us as suffering from a deep identity crisis. I was downright indignant: after having sadistically experimented Communism on us for half

Chapter 3Romania's Psychological and Historical Voids If it were true that the Romanian's spiritual disposition does not surpass the one evinced in the past and that the future is not going to uncover any hidden sides to the Romanian soul, then any attempt to

Chapter VIII – The vocation of Romanians1. Expressions through which a people demonstrates its calling2. Misguidance in the study of Romanian vocation3. Characteristics of Romanian culture in the past4. Romanian reality as opposing Europeanization5. Emphasizing individual

Chapter IIROMANIANISM AND AUTOCHTHONISMexcerpts Continuing the clash of ideas of the previous decades, the 1930s too witnessed a confrontation on the evolution formula of the Romanian make-up. Two directions were pitted against each other. One favorable to the maintenance

excerpts I did a great deal of field work in my life. I was on the road a lot, I slept in official rooms, good rooms (for guests), camping grounds, cheap hotels, and especially villages. I visited very different worlds, though some were neighboring. What was preserved in

The esthetic appreciation of the external aspect of the Romanian imposed a non-differential consideration of the two sexes. However, the image of man has usually been in the foreground. To balance things, the numerous descriptions of Romanian women must be reminded. The

Foreword The few words that I put as motto at the beginning of this book can be translated like this: God must have had a hidden plan for this people that the western states rediscovered on the banks of the Danube and adopted like Pharaoh's daughter adopted Moses.

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, the Romanians, until then living in their traditional peasant autonomies, which stand for an entire, complete political order with archaic roots, arrived, after the abolition of anarchy, at their boundaries and, on one side, because of