Iuliu Cezar Săvescu is at the heart of Year Zero, which lasts from 1869 to 1914, until the "apocalypse" of the first world war, reverberating, in Eugen Ionescu's opinion, until the 1930-40s, because political nihilism would be a materialization (and a vulgarization) of the poetic-philosophical nihilism of the 1880s. The Romanian poet who died in 1903 in Bucharest in a cruel misery lies at the intersection between a dying world and another in statu nascendi. Nihilism appears precisely in such turning moments, when the shadow of the numinous is at its peak, the crisis of culture and civilization meeting the personal crisis of the poet-seismographer. Savescu is an "enfant de la fin du siècle", to modify Musset's expression. His death, like the passing away of Nietzsche or Wilde (both in 1900) symbolizes "the rise and fall of Year Zero", the death of a form of expression, which in its drift created modernity, producing in its so-called decadence another Renaissance. Stefan Bolea
