Craii de Curtea-Veche

The short epic is not as much celebrated for its plot as much as it is for its style, blending a contemplative attitude inspired by Marcel Proust and fin de siècle decadence, inviting the reader into a decaying, "Levantine" 19th-century Bucharest, and prefigurating the intense debate among a whole generation of Romanian intellectuals about what Romanian specificity is (a controversy which was to culminate in Emil Cioran's philosophy).

The two's mysterious existence is revealed only through conversations and banquet episodes, which tend to end in champagne-drinking bouts and orgies.

They appear versed in Western manners and refined salon culture, but love to refresh their senses by submerging in the muddy atmosphere of Bucharest brothels.

A combination of venality, depravity and bombastic, often demagogic discourse, Pîrgu is meant to illustrate the alternative and undertoned "Balkan-like" Romanian identity.

Craii.. is unique in Romanian literature through its ability to recall a rather fragile moment in history, and its distanced, discreet, and sober way of detailing a decaying social environment (and most of all its casual mixture of abjection and a high sense of morality).