[4] If in Bucharest, alongside Ramiro Ortiz, Călinescu realized his vocation as a creative artist and scholar, his attention in Rome was focused on Vasile Pârvan, the director of the Accademia di Romania.

Călinescu observed that while Pârvan's natural aptitude was fairly common, his tendency to exercise all the powers of his mind in the ascetic pursuit of an intellectual ideal was transformed into an existential philosophy: Life is transitory, but man can defeat death and oblivion through creation, thus leaving a permanent record of a temporary existence.

In 1945, he transferred to the University of Bucharest, from which point he collaborated on the prestigious Revistă a Fundațiilor Regale, edited by Alexandru Rosetti and Camil Petrescu, until it was closed down when the King abdicated in 1947.

He was reinvited to his post at the Faculty of Letters only in 1961; in the meantime, he produced numerous writings on wide-ranging subjects, from the aesthetic of folk tales to the history of Spanish literature.

From 1932 to 1962, he published monographs, in separate volumes, on such writers as Eminescu, fabulist Ion Creangă, realist novelist Nicolae Filimon, and poet Grigore Alexandrescu, fictionalized biographies, scholarly studies, and essays.

Călinescu produced heavily descriptive realist novels in the mode of Honoré de Balzac, often with obvious polemical undertones lurking beneath their apparently objective style.

The novel he considered his best, Enigma Otiliei, narrates an unhappy love story; Cartea nunții is a disquisition on marriage; and Bietul Ioanide and Scrinul negru present the problems of intellectuals, all against the backdrop of interwar and immediate postwar Romania.

An intellectual with liberal-left ideas who nonetheless proved flexible enough to write praises of the King under Carol's dictatorship, Călinescu outwardly adhered to the new Communist ideology after 1947, likely noting the practical advantages of such a shift in loyalties.

A veritable "trial by press" resulted in which all of his works and activities were systematically reevaluated, proving Călinescu's perennial value and ability to offer new generations new perspectives on his own times and the whole history of Romanian literature.