As can be seen, although we have created a reflex since high school that when we refer to the writers of the interwar period, to say "Arghezi, Barbu, Blaga" in one breath, the one who searched for them still dared a timid ranking "in the heat". The 28 names (poets, prose writers, actors) are arranged in good alphabetical order. There is only one exception: Tudor Arghezi. Aderca, it seems, wanted to open this precious collection of interviews with the poet whom he considers the most important of his generation and whom he believes neither more nor less that "justifies a generation and an age". Beyond this subjective intervention, reading the following pages, the dominant feeling is that we have the chance to witness the crystallization/self-definition of the most important period in the history of Romanian culture. You can feel from the first reading the pressure of the great literatures, the way in which the Romanian writers related themselves through a kind of controlled emulation to the great names in French, English, Russian literature. One can feel, equally, the strong air of the interwar cultural movements and currents that have sustained the entire Romanian literature up to our present. Xenia Karo
