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(1. 08. 1915-29. 09. 2001) Gellu Naum (1915-2001) was the only writer pertaining to the historical Romanian surrealist avant-garde who survived, rather untouched but also more or less unheard, the vicissitudes of a half a century of Communist rule. He started publishing

Real name: Benjamin WexlerBorn in Iasi, 1898. Boarding school in Iasi. Debut at 16 in O. Densusianu's The New Life magazine (1914). He reads some of his poems to Ion Minulescu during the refuge (Iasi). He establishes the Island avant-garde theatre (with Armand Pascal).

He was more of a unsociable person, a loner, he seemed sullen and morose. Only among his friends he would become again the father of eloquence and paradox. Eugen LOVINESCU There was no one in the house of the great loner but me. From time to time, an old lady with big

excerpts Que voulez-vous, nous sommes ici aux portes de l'Orient, où tout est pris à la légère. Raymond Poincaré*Welcoming the Philanderers…au tapis-franc nous étions réunis. L. Protat**Although no further than the night before I had promised myself under

Mateiu Caragiale was the natural son of Ion Luca Caragiale, the greatest Romanian playwright. However, his literary output appears like a challenge to his heredity rather than a filiation. The world portrayed is the same, the Balkan one, with its mixture of pretension and

IA well-ventilated apartment consisting of three rooms, glass-enclosed terrace and a door-bell. Out front, a sumptuous living-room, its back wall taken up by a solid oak book-case perennially wrapped in soaking bed-sheets… A legless table right in the middle, based on

IFuchs wasn't quite born by his mother… In the beginning, when he came into being, he wasn't even seen, he was only heard, for Fuchs, upon being born, chose to come out through one of his grandmother's ears, his mother having no musical ear to speak of…Fuchs

I Fuchs was not born by his real mother… At the beginning, when he came into being, he was not even seen, but only heard, because when Fuchs was born he preferred coming out through one of his grandmother's ears, as his own mother did not have an ear for music…

Sire,Dear Gentlemen and Ladies,The Somalis' Country, of which I have the honour of relating, stretches along the entire East Horn of Africa and is called Bar-as-Somal in the Somali language. The Somalis belong to the Mohammedan religion of the Shafi'ite sect and

excerptTo put it in a nutshell, there are three races living in Congo today:The Pygmies, scattered all over the territory and on the verge of extinction;Nuba, the invaders who live in the north – and, finallyThe Bantu, the most numerous. Several distinct and independent

Lisbon, a town whose name comes from the mythical traveler Ulysses – so they say – , illustrated in the Middle Ages by so many navigators and explorers curious and eager for adventure, shows to the visitor first its drowsy side. It is true that I first visited it on

(Constantin Golescu, Notes on My Travel, drawn up in 1824, 1825, 1826. Reprinted and accompanied by an introduction by Nerva Hodos, Bucharest, 1910)excerptsWhen today a Romanian travels in all European comfort, by railway; when he can, even without changing car, get to Paris