Cantemir

Walking around the city arm in arm with literary recollections… Laying on façades invisible memorial plates with quotes in verse or prose… Experiencing live the sensation of osmosis between fiction and reality… Feeling literature become history, and history – literature…

Let us not be deceived by articles and books issued by courtesy or for which we pay, and this so seldom. We are not loved abroad. Even if people remember the fine welcome we give people – which is so comprehensive according to the customs, and at times even sufficiently

The threshold between the millenniums is an opportunity for evaluation: tributes, jubilees, festivals. Archives are being browsed, masterpieces are reappraised, and writings are redefined in the current context, then recirculated in today's competition. Everything becomes

Some time in the autumn of 1994, Sorin Alexandrescu asked in an interview in 22 magazine why, in the canonical battle between the various radical-democrat and nationalist structures of the opposition (and of the government), more attention is not paid to the real traditions

It will take us a lot of tenacity to modify wrong geographic notions, fanciful historical data, to prove to the Westerner that what we suffer from is too much instruction, that the Romanian intellectual is blasé and smiles condescendingly at the unintuitive foreign lecturer's

 I must admit I didn't quite understand in the beginning why, shortly after 1989, the Western mass-media has so hastily labeled us as suffering from a deep identity crisis. I was downright indignant: after having sadistically experimented Communism on us for half

When we are angry with the country and ourselves, our own people appears to us like a horde of cowards, thieves and idlers; when things go slightly better, we are instantly tempted to raise the temperature of our assessment by two or three degrees. Some believe that there

Chapter XVII. On the Moldavians' Habits (excerpts) While we are trying to describe the Moldavians' habits, about which no-one, or just few foreigners hold a true image, the love we feel for our country on the one hand prompts us to praise the people among which

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, the Romanians, until then living in their traditional peasant autonomies, which stand for an entire, complete political order with archaic roots, arrived, after the abolition of anarchy, at their boundaries and, on one side, because of

*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

Whether the purpose is study, pilgrimage, or entertainment, traveling assumes a great thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge. Ioan Slavici believed that rambling builds one's character. No mean feat, I'd say: were it for this alone, it would still justify an

Another bibliophilist concerned with theoretical problems related to rare, old book evaluation is Ion Iliescu, Aesthetics professor at the University of Timişoara, the possessor of a rich and valuable collection. Author of many papers on aesthetics (Course of General Aesthetics),