Maria

One should add to the romantic universe of Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt and Wagner the love story of Maria Cantacuzino and the composer George Enescu, as the mystery of its extraordinary tension has been revealed in the recently published Ombres et lumières, Souvenirs d'une

excerpts  So closeSuddenly, the interwar people make the body visible: men are allowed to shave off not only their beards, but also their moustaches – a facial change that overthrows an aesthetic canon with centuries-old resistance – and women, punished and ridiculed

At a time of psychoanalysis, and of the study of the subconscious mind and sexual perversion, art too adopts the instruments provided by the new science. The avant-garde author (Dadaist, surrealist or expressionist) rediscovers the physiological, already explored by naturalists,

The beginnings of Lipovan Russians in Romania need to be sought in the dramatic events that caused considerable upheaval in Russia, in the late 17th century, eventually leading to the division of the Russian society, and prompting a religious and social crisis the consequences

excerpts . . . Chaplin. Einstein, Rubinstein, Chagall, Spinoza. I summon these exalted spirits above all because their proximity feels good; their genius, both innocent and supple, has a wholesome quality about it, and their absence from any intellectual banquet worthy

Lilac-less is your hair, your beautiful face in the looking glass. From one eye to the other glides the cloud, like Sodom toward Babel:like leafage it scatters the tower and foams round the sulfur thicket.  Then a lightning twitches your mouth – that den with violin splinters.

The baptized JewIn the late 1990s I had planned to include at the end of my book The Imaginary Jew in Romanian Culture a chapter entitled The Baptized Jew. As I worked on this subject I realized that it had been extensively discussed by the historian Mihai-Răzvan Ungureanu

* The boom of geographic discoveries and trading expeditions that began on the eve of the Renaissance and continued throughout that era developed a new taste for describing remote, if not downright imaginary, countries and peoples. Before being discovered, the savage was

excerpts Motto: It is known that, when a people is about to disappear, first its high society disappears, and with it the literature. (Milorad Pavici, The Khazar Dictionary) Lazar Saineanu and his studies in folklore. An ethnographic controversyLazar Saineanu was a very

None of the minorities living in Romania had a tenser relationship with the majority of inhabitants. Still, Romanians and Hungarians have been living together for centuries. The Hungarians in Transylvania praise their past, values and traditions within a context that permits

I think I would never have come to love Balkania so much, had I not met Marina Marinescu in Munich several years back. We had been acquainted since we met for the first time in Athens. Florin Marinescu, the specialist in Byzantine history to whom I was talking one day in

We do not hate the Greeks; quite to the contrary, we love them and we share the same heritage: a nationality to build; for we have the same interests, the same pains, the same hopes; and when we say 'we love them' we can bring proofs to support this statement: