Ffe

Chronicles Of An Optimist

excerpts NOISES OF THE CAPITAL For reasons I cannot exactly explain, the flow of ideas circulated by the independent press has strikingly dwindled to a mere trickle. One can only put it down to the times of fatigued irritation we are living through as we wait for the much

The Procrustean Bed

excerpt Bucharest is a city with bleak winters and decomposingly hot summers. The sewage system is primitive and complicated, because it follows twisted streets. Repair works, lasting forever, produce trenches, hindering the traffic. There is no room for relaxation, or refreshing.

Magic Lantern Projections: A Dialogue With Octogenarian Actress Dina Cocea, Honorary Citizen Of Bucharest

The oldest recollections of actors of your generation used to begin with the scene of a provincial school festival: the future star winning a well-known, sympathetic audience made up of parents, grandparents, family friends, touched aunts. The memory of past reality is overwhelmed

Elena Văcărescu: An Unforgettable Character Of Bucharest

Special attention should be given to Elena Văcărescu, whose outstanding personality and whose life contributed greatly to the revival of the Romanian spirit, inherited from her forerunners. Until not long ago, mention was often made of the four Văcărescu poets and the

Familiars Of The Old Royal Court

excerpt …sage citoyen du vaste univers. [1] La Fontaine With you I liked to live through, in the memory, my thirty years of voyages, with you, again, should you not feel bored, I shall live through, in the memory, my childhood and early youth. This will entail returning

Bucharest - Memory Walled-In

Architecture represents a means of interrogating history. Rather ominous, it is to be feared, when the question applies to the Romanian capital. Why so? The way Bucharest has been subjected to transformations in the last century accounts for the living changes affecting

Letters From Budapest

in Hungarian, Papirusz Book, Budapest, 1999 Budapest literary historian Martos Gabor (b. 1953), an expert in the Magyar literature written in Romania between 1970-1990, well-known in the Transylvanian cultural milieu, held a regular column in the Bucharest Hungarian cultural

Memory And Strolls

If you read travel notes by simple tourists or people on journalistic, cultural or political assignments, from the 1920s or 30s, if you peruse recurrent images about a Bucharest imprinted with evil or good charms, equally decrypted and encoded, moving and repulsive, you

Paul Morand And The Dwellers Of Bucharest

The author of the brilliant Ouvert la nuit series seems to be in a state of conflict with some Bucharest dwellers. Out of incontestable affection for our Capital, he tried to picture it as a city portrait for the Western world, and he managed to make enemies out of the very

Bucharest

excerpts From Winter to Summer Two seasons, rather than four, by all means. Late fall, with powerful stags calling. After the horse races in Moldavia and the first fires in the remotest houses of Bukovina, winter comes. The only flowers left are those in the carpet wool

Paul Morand

The 1850 generation appealed to science, but the 1914 generation appealed to the body. The elliptical mechanisms devised by Morand found their audience in 1924, writes Thibaudet. Who is Paul Morand? Poet, novelist, essayist, diplomat, French ambassador to Romania, Italy,

Three Controversial Books

What is one supposed to understand by image and to what extent should one take it to heart? Physiologically, the image is the consciousness one is left with about an absent object. It is, therefore, the opposite of perception, i. e. representation of a present object. In