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In White Moor by Ion Creangă, the Rabelais-tinged philosophy of Gaster (the Belly), (Mikhail Bakhtin) represents one of the tests the main character has to pass in order to marry the daughter of the Red Emperor. As in any fairy-tale, be it in its cultivated variant, nothing

excerpts At the end of every winter, in a hall illuminated by electric lights and covered by wooden floors, near the Central Station, at Locomotiva, the Craftsmen's Ball was the event of the season. Craftsmen from all over Bucharest brought their wives to party and

In General Ionescu's garden, the April dusk brought a harsh wind and sprayed dust in the horizon like a bluish mist, spreading heaps of apricot tree flowers over the fresh vegetable beds. Ion, the general's first orderly, in charge of sweeping the flowers laid

excerpt In the end, after much talky talk, the priest managed to completely lay the guilt on Father Mitrofan from the monastery, who was now to be held accountable and punished. And since there was nothing there to eat, the priest's wife being sick, priest Bolindache

It seems almost provocative to launch such an issue on the local pleasures, pastimes and delights, while nowadays a troublesome Romania appears as plunged into unending economic and social difficulties, striving to cope with various shortcomings and weaknesses. However,

European travelers such as Antonio Maria del Chiaro were struck long time ago by the uncommon abundance of woolen carpets in each Romanian home, be it aristocratic, bourgeois or peasant. Carpets were laid mainly onto the walls of the rooms, but they also covered the beds,

In the field of iconography the rhetoric of the end manifested itself initially as a history of silences, the absence of the motif being possibly equally significant as its presence since, as Michel Vovelle demonstrated, images interest us as expression of a selective, oblique

excerptsTHE WATER PIXY. Representations. The Water Pixy and the Human Head. The Water Pixy's Wraith. Stories. The Water Pixy in Other CulturesAccording to Romanian popular beliefs in Bucovina, the Water Pixy is a tall, heavily- built woman, some say as tall as a camel,

excerptsTHE LIFE OF MANDeath. The Signs of DeathDeath is no longer visible to people and dying men no longer are aware of their time like once; still, there exist certain premonitory signs that show one the moment has come to embark upon the journey with no return. Not everybody

The essential resemblance between the legend recorded by Bandinus in 1647 and the folk legends about the Flood, collected at two and a half centuries' distance (around 1900), is conspicuous. In all these variants (but especially in the one chronicled by Bandinus) some

To the achievement of literary impact, Argeş Monastery comes up with a simple and ingenious solution: the absolute contrast between the soft and caressed tenderness of form, on the one side, and the wild graveness of the underlying tragedy, on the other. In the style and

Historian The National Village Museum in Bucharest is the kind of museum in which the traditional exhibition halls are replaced by authentic households, consisting of dwellings and their extensions, technical devices, churches and triptychs transplanted from their places