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Written at the instigation of Romain Rolland at the end of 1922, “Kyra Kyralina” manages to bring into the same epic score, the distant echo of times projected into legend, but also slices of life from the present of the pivotal character of the cycle, Adrian Zograffi. The text is part of a very personal form of autobiography, in which the narrator blends his own stories and the stories of others that he assimilates as life experience. This first Istratian creation pays homage to friendship, but also offers images of picturesque and fascinating femininity captured in an idealizing way. The first female projection is the mother of the narrator-character, Joița, a simple but ambitious woman, who tries to transmit to her only child strong values, principles, sometimes different from those of the world of the slums through which she regularly migrates. However, the most powerful images of this triptych text are the two Chire, who initially have a plausible consistency, and then their presence is projected into the realm of the chimerical, increasingly detached from a tangible reality and becoming a real obsession for the one who loses them.

In the “Feminist Lexicon”, femininity is defined by subordination to three fundamental principles: “the ethic of caring, self-sacrifice for the fulfillment of the other (husband, children) and conformity to a male model of sexual attractiveness” (Dragomir&Miroiu, 2002: 146). In breaking down this understanding of the word, we see that it places femininity in a predetermined behavioural and physical pattern. In psychoanalysis, the feminine essence has been associated with passivity, as opposed to the ever-active masculinity. However, the feminine has acquired the character of a driving force through the role of creative motherhood. “The Stories of Eva Luna”, a novel published in 1989 that brings together seemingly disparate stories in a vibrant weave, united by the seductive voice of a new Scheherazade, is a sequel to “Eva Luna” (1987) and is an undeniable testament to the art of storytelling that Isabel Allende masters with refinement. In a succulent language capable of establishing life, the Chilean writer brings to the attention of an almost hypnotized reader, one by one, slices of the world that combine in a perfect balance revenge, madness, greed, passion, crime and love, generosity, kindness. To the exotic characters, multiple female juxtapositions, a different ethical grid is applied in which capital sins do not succeed in mutilating them, on the contrary, they add a degree of humanity.

Within the interview space, in an exercise of self-reflexive sincerity, Carol Ardeleanu shapes his literary belief, the "innerprinciple" which laid the foundations of his entire creation, regardless of the value fluctuations, anchoring it into the sphere of realism which so much relies on veracity. He denies the tough realism that slips into the artificial, able only "to give us hideous mannequins" while "striving to copy the truth" and promotes a selection principle by which the writer actually retains from reality only those elements required to capture "the essence of the characters/personages", the risk being otherwise to build "hybrid characters entangled in unnecessary details". Vital in the literary formula that he adopts is the "foundation of truth, of real life", an inner imperative to which the creator submits and which facilitates "safe and direct contact between the writer and the lecturer." Originality remains untouched and is based on distorting, changing and recreating the characters, the reality by sophisticated and "careful chemical combinations". Beyond the limitations of the method of truth, signaled in time by the literary criticism, the first novel of Carol Ardeleanu, published in 1926, has the merit of approaching itself to the "poetry of reality" of one of the slums of Bucharest, but it survives in value by illustrating the declassification of a character of Dostoievskian origin, the Consul Barbu Salceanu. In the slumworld, personal distances reconfigure by a redefinition of the steps, of the space bubbles, the main cause being the compression of the physical space. Crowding tenants in poor, suffocating rooms generate undesirable approaches, perceived on one hand as an invasion of the intimate space, and on the other hand as manifestations of friendship and human solidarity.

The extent to which Bucharest or any other dwelling of the Romanian cultural space finds itself on the map of the great cities of literature also depends on the manner in which writers manage to illustrate their specificity, as they should go beyond what we usually call downtown by covering the outskirts as well. The protein appearance of the city, this “cultural construct of all happenings” (1) is outlined by the various tunes in which it allows itself to be depicted because it “regulates its functions and paints its face depending on the chimeras of the individual who conceives it” (2). In an antithesis with the Greek polis, defined by its unitary appearance in tight connection with its smaller dimensions, the nowadays metropolis is defined/characterized by fragmentation, by cleavage: the downtown/center from the outskirts, the black from the white, the rich from the poor. The city thus becomes a space of paradoxes: poverty and richness, civic liabilities and individual needs, public and private. As long as it is associated to a protective space, offering the individual identity and stability, it is conferred positive connotations. As long as the city is traumatized by an industrial, uniform and suffocating landscape meanings degenerate, the contemplating attitude being infected by a form of negativism. Incorporated in the literary area dedicated to the urban space, the outskirts rounds the image of the city, completes it both at a geographical level and especially at a human level, by typologies, by the mentalities which it brings forth/proposes. The relational binomial illustrated by the slum being - the urban downtown being opens» towards a „complex, multi-layer imagological equation"(3) which implies multiplications of each member's hypostases: the real slum man, his image about his self, the real downtown man, his image about his self, the image of the slum man about the downtown man and the downtown man's image of the slum man. These relations must be reshaped within the wider background of the collectivities to which each belongs: „As long as a collectivity (confessional, ethnic or of any other nature) attempts at defining the identity of a different collectivity, it unavoidably relates to the coordinates of its own identity, outlining the resemblances and especially the differences. The reciprocal is nonetheless real: we need «them» to better define «ourselves»"(4). (1) Mihai Ene, Metropola ca topos generator în literatura decadentă, în vol. Dumitru Chioaru (coord.), Oraşul şi literatura. Prefaţă Paul Cornea, Bucureşti, 2009, p. 53. (2) Ibidem. (3) Andrei Oişteanu, Imaginea evreului în cultura română. Studiu de imagologie în context est-central european. Ediția a III-a, revăzută, adăugită și ilustrată, Iași, Editura Polirom, 2012, p. 14. (4) Ibidem, p. 12.

The Carnival and the liturgical, as forms of valorisation announcing the failure, are fundamental notions used by Ioan Derșidan in interpreting Mateiu I. Caragiale’s work: “We understand by liturgical the relationship of matein characters with transcendence, their metaphysical/religious position, their conditioning between esse and non-esse, the corresponding literary motifs and their specialized forms of expression. The Carnival reflects the characters’ relationship with history and with ‘life which lives itself’ and their fall into temporality, indifference and disorder (Ioan Derșidan). A characteristic of Craii de Curtea- Veche (Gallants of the Old Court) is the complementarity of the two, also illustrated by the South-Eastern concept according to which God and the Non-Brother are a simultaneous, indestructible presence. The Carnival style, seen as a bond between two liturgical realities, is not “an illicit presence in the Gates of Transcendence, but part of the script and plays a role in the show” (Ioan Derșidan). The initiation supposes the presence of the liturgical and of the carnival as well, whereas the crossing of a labyrinth path towards the spiritual/ metaphysical centre means not only exaltation through dreaming, but an immersion in the immune/ filth, into that “life which lives itself”. The path to the centre includes in the analysed novel an ascending dynamics by liturgical exploration, by the pilgrimages proposed by two of the three guides, Pantazi and Pașadia, but also the survival in the inferno of the carnival, conducted in real art by another ceremonial master, Pirgu, though in a grotesque manner. Valorisation of existence in a double register, carnaval-liturgical, “certifies a special code of experience and imagining in which mysticism is also present (subl. ns. – M.A.), mystification and the search of a centre in its own being” (Ioan Derșidan).

Coming from beneath the ”sign of gravity”, Simion liftnicul, Petru Cimpoeșu’s novel, ”belongs to those several books written for the mere elation of the reader” and lays under the sign of comic, without diminishing its literary value and with no fear of being thrown into the ungrateful space of paraliterature. All its comic situations, the colorful carnival atmosphere, the marionette show are grafted against a realistic background, the transition period, a prolonged strenuous transition which lacks its terminus point. The novel is an indulgent mirror, mild in contrast with the ”too twisted, too tense, too intellectual, even when or especially when it claims to be self-fiction”. A post-December slum, compressed on the vertical direction, in the womb of a block of flats on Sheep Street (a symbolic name with references to the Bible), reveals itself to the reader who greedily consumes the narratives opened as in a multi-level system and offers, in its turn, to each of its characters, the chance to sustain, to place its score on sales. Jammed in apartments and studios with thin walls, an inheritance of the communist period, people are living as Mircea Iorgulescu underlines, ”in an olfactory” and acoustic collectivism. The author manages to turn this common, yet private space into the axis of his novel, slowing the image and amplifying the sound by generously offering the reader the possibility to taste the full joy, this show of the world, not only through the key hole. ”The archivist of the new humanity after '90” does not miss a thing, surprising all typologies populating the post-December Romania, crowding them on the floors of a block of flats, recreating, in miniature, the image of the entire country. We shall establish, from the very beginning, the common trace of the characters of this novel: a certain naivety and the propensity for miracle, generate the need of a new center, ”a pathological infantilization”, an illness contracted from the communist era, when the citizen was placed into the shelter of a father state which assumes the role of protector in exchange of a blind submission. The desire to neighbor miracle shall also be translated by the ease of accepting a weird shepherd, the humble shoemaker on the ground floor, who could give them what they need: ”a confirmation of the self, a meaning (...), rather a meaning of their own illusions, a meaning of now, of the present, of this day, quite seldom of tomorrow”.

Having a dialogue with yourself and with others, putting face to face what is known to you, identical, with what is foreign, different, is the equivalent of surpassing what Pierre Bourdieu called „own cultural field”. Is there a dialogue between us and the others, between the world of the outskirts and your own organizational culture and space? Radu Adulescu’s novel Amantul Colivăresei illustrates an attempt to have a dialogue between the two realities. Beyond being a space of doom, of moral disorder, the outskirts becomes a land of survival, of the conservation of inner freedom in a period when uniformization, submission represented existential norms. In contrast with other novels that follow the image of the outskirts (Groapa, Maidanul cu dragoste), Radu Aldulescu’s text brings to the forefront another kind of outskirts, that of the workers of „Policolor”, „23rd August”, of the blocks of flats, „matchboxes”, where mouldy, suffocatingly small rooms are crammed, a uniformed humanity which then flows almost without stopping toward the ever-open gates of the communist factories, „small models of hell”.