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The New Man

An Individual without Individualism To a new society – a new man. Naturally, one would not fancy a communist world inhabited by middle-class people in disguise. That was the most delicate problem raised by transformist mythology. One could not rebuild the economy and

A History Of The Imaginary. The Truth Of The Myths

CHAPTER I Structures and Methods An Ambiguous Condition What if the history of the imaginary did not exist? Beyond all paradox, the question deserves to be raised. Following a hectic and contorted history, this discipline is hindered by theoretical and ideological difficulties.

The Eroticized Universe

The Bucharest Surrealist Group1939-1947* […] Madness, black humor, dreams, eroticism, revolt: if one cannot speak of Unu (One) and Alge (Algae) as surrealist magazines in the strict sense, these themes indicate however the increasing attraction of a number of Romanian

1922-1928

1922-1928. The Beginnings. Magazines and Manifestos. The Intellectual International. The Theorizing Machines. 75 HP – the New Start of the Romanian Avant-garde. Integralism and Synthesis. Synchronism and Internationalism The first avant-garde magazines and manifestos

The Gentle Whisper Of The Magic

I certainly am neither the first, nor the only person to notice that the fantastic appears as a distinctive feature of Nordic, non-Latin peoples, rather than of the meridional spirit. The solar, mercantile, skeptical-rationalist South, and the sanguine, outgoing, relativistic

Everyone With The Bucharest He Deserves

After my first visit to Bucharest, in the mid-eighties, I returned to my native province with a splitting headache; I recounted the details of this anecdote elsewhere* – anyway, they had to do with two mugs of beer and a few mititei – spicy burgers – swallowed on a

Bucharest - Memory Walled-In

Architecture represents a means of interrogating history. Rather ominous, it is to be feared, when the question applies to the Romanian capital. Why so? The way Bucharest has been subjected to transformations in the last century accounts for the living changes affecting

Memory And Strolls

If you read travel notes by simple tourists or people on journalistic, cultural or political assignments, from the 1920s or 30s, if you peruse recurrent images about a Bucharest imprinted with evil or good charms, equally decrypted and encoded, moving and repulsive, you

Laugh To The Left

In the visual arts, the laugh, the ridicule and caricature have a certain regime, which is rather different from the one developed in literature, mainly because it is an expression of criticism and contempt much more immediate and politically engaged. Starting in Germany

A Barrack Story

The barracks has always been an endless source of colorful and comic stories, of funny tales subsequently raised to the status of anecdotes… We heard them, we all keep hearing them and we transmit them to others. Who hasn't heard, for instance, the pieces attributed

Brâncuşi Vs. Brâncuşi

Modernism has brought to paroxysm the need of personal mythologies, immanent to Western civilization. No wonder that some of the heroes and saints of the avant-garde came from those peripheral European territories still uncharted from a spiritual point of view. By the beginning

George Enescu At The Beginning Of A New Millennium

The history of world music has witnessed many spectacular overturns in the hierarchy of values, when names of purely local interest whose death was not even announced in an obituary (Johann Sebastian Bach) became world famous personalities a century later. Quite often, internationally