In Short

In Romanian, Bucharest is a plural noun. This implies it is a multifaceted city, dazzling in its diversity. However, it is not a conglomerate of villages, of boroughs, like London or New York. There are not self-contained neighborhoods, each with its main street (High Street),

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

That summer, teacher Caranfil had gone to spend his holidays at Neamţul Monastery and on the day when the events he related to me had occurred to him, he had taken a trip with a company of friends in the surroundings of the monastery, beyond Procov hermitage. When he had

Women artists (originally women-painters) became a reality in Romanian culture only by the turn of the 20th century. Barely having an artistic tradition of the western kind (that is, academic), the national cultural milieu in the 19th century was rather deprived of a professionally

from The Lost Letter ACT II SCENE V ZOE(alone; nervous, she takes out the newspaper and reads)In tomorrow's issue of our gazette we shall reproduce an interesting sentimental letter from a notable of our town to a lady of great influence. Beginning tomorrow, the original

I have meant to decompose and recompose the forms and the colors in order to prove and disclose their essence. Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu After a short story debut dominated by lyricism (Deep Waters, The Woman in front of the Mirror) and while trying (and managing) to

excerpts The Diary and Its Readers We should not overdo it with diaries and letters. We usually tend to deem them more revealing of the man than his public work. All that is secretive, familiar draws us as if it were a confession. It is the pleasure of breaking an interdiction,

Arabesque Graceful silhouettes, jumps, pirouettes, endless rehearsals, precision, tenacity, discipline, harmony between body, movement and music to attain the purity given off during that glissade in which glided the white ballerinas in Bacovia's poem or in a painting

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

Foreword The few words that I put as motto at the beginning of this book can be translated like this: God must have had a hidden plan for this people that the western states rediscovered on the banks of the Danube and adopted like Pharaoh's daughter adopted Moses.

On 20 November 1921 an enthusiastic letter written by the poet Cincinat Pavelescu is published in Rampa, a letter which we see fit to transcribe in full: Dear Mr. Editor in Chief, My life's absorbing activities of incessant work at the head of a newspaper without any

excerpts I could find antiques and old objects evoking sad memories on still another deserted floor in my grandfather's house. There the walls were covered by strange pictures having thick, gilded, wooden frames, or thinner frames of red plush. There were also several