Short

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

excerptsLet us begin with on obvious fact – Urmuz is a myth, is he not? Useless like all myths, functioning due to inertia, the coronation of certain clichés. Who reads Urmuz these days? Urmuz was the object of critical studies, his work has been translated, and his name

1. His parents christened him Dimitrie, but he knew the appropriate name for himself, so he changed it to Demetru. He had said this himself, people should find names for themselves in tune with their own personal reality, or they should change themselves, while that is still

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

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…

[1]Algazy is an old, loveable, toothless, smiling old man; his beard is shaven and silky, beautifully displayed on a grid, screwed up under his chin and enclosed with barbed wire… Algazy does not speak any European language… If you wait for him, however, at dawn, when

Cotadi is short and thickset, with bulging muscles, his legs articulated twice outwards and once inwards; he is always unshaven. His raven black hair is covered with dandruff, sparklers and precious tortoise-shell combs. Cotadi cannot stand upright because of an armor-like

Cotadi is short and big-bellied, brawny, his legs are curved twice outside and once inside, and he is eternally unshaven. His ebony dark hair is full of dandruff and studded with shiny little crystals and expensive tortoise shell combs. Hardly ever does Cotadi stand upright

Gayk is the only civilian with a rifle carrier on his left shoulder. His neck is drawn in and his morale very high. He will not be hostile towards anybody for long, but from his way of eyeing you, the direction his pointed nose takes sometimes, the air about him that he

Demetru Demetrescu-Buzău, whose pen-name was Urmuz, published his first bizarre pages in 1922 and killed himself in 1923. His life was short, his literary life was one of the shortest ever, and his work is comparably short: just a few short stories. Yet his influence on