Romania

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

Mateiu Caragiale left us a literary heritage, fragmentary in its outlook that puzzled and amazed through its originality, through an appetite for mystery it seemed to originate in, through the secret inspiration that fed it and through its old-fashioned lyricism which was

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

*More than a century ago Europe was not yet known as a cultural construction, an intellectual day-dream, a heap of broken images, a copy in a world without originals. Artists tried to escape the big fortress ensconced in coal smog and torn by wars, social conflicts, 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

Urmuz was a great revelation to our generation, and it is reassuring to note that he was that to all generations, indeed: a providential personality, a Christopher Columbus reborn, the founder of a different America, of game and freedom; a native, solitary genius, perhaps

The research with a satyr's eye of the flaccid, common, adjacent mores.  His heroes resemble us in the whims for the sake of which we all are sometimes weak, fictitious, camouflaged. St. ROLL Urmuz… alongside Eminescu, with their turmoil and tragic end, with their

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

(17. 03. 1883 – 23. 11. 1923)Through Urmuz, Romanian Surrealism is previous to the French one and independent. Leaving behind the trivial objective chance, Breton thought it fit to use the inner chance, i. e. that chance grouping of subconscious elements which are not

This issue is dedicated to some of the most significant bizarre, atypical figures in Romanian literature. Although it consists of a selection of literary sketches and fragments of novels, it can be best described as an anthology of twentieth-century poetic prose, stretching

Artists are wanderers par excellence. This is the case not only for the itinerant artists of the Middle Ages, those architects, stone-carvers, painters and stained-glass artists that moved their workshops all around Europe, building and embellishing cathedrals here and there.