European

As everything modern, the fantastic mode, which seems to be still one of our great favorites in these last years of the modern millennium is to be defined through the series of transformations of the traditional forms of the fantastic art. In her excellent reference book

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

The early-20th-century major Romanian art is not a block, but a very particular construction of intertwined cultural layers. One could not affirm that the most fertile and valuable Modern cultural period of this country was characterized by a certain, homogenous Romanian

South Pacific, December 1999 To be a Romanian writer (therefore in the minority) in New Zealand! Ibi patria, ubi – wife. In New Zealand, I think about the confluence of our lives. We come from so far apart, we meet unexpectedly, we link our lives, our fates together.

Four years ago, in June 1996, the World Conference on Language Rights held its session in Barcelona, the capital of the Spanish region Catalonia. As the result of several years' work of preparations, the Universal Declaration of Language Rights was adopted here. PEN,

Visiting cities, a consumer tourist practice, is usually presented in the same image wrapping like shopping in a boutique, or attending to a show: one goes for the glossiest package, the funniest label, the wildest excitement vouched for. As a tourist product, a city is

It may be said about some cities that they are theatrical; that – in other words – they look like a stage set. Take, for instance, Venice or Naples. It may be only an illusion, however, given a host of plays by Goldoni or Eduardo de Filippo whose plots revolve around

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

excerpts NOISES OF THE CAPITAL For reasons I cannot exactly explain, the flow of ideas circulated by the independent press has strikingly dwindled to a mere trickle. One can only put it down to the times of fatigued irritation we are living through as we wait for the much

The history of Bucharest art museums begins in 1836, when the painter Carol Wallenstein inaugurated the first of them on the premises of St. Sava high school. In 1864, the School of Fine Arts was established. The concept of a museum exists in every art collection, thus many

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

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