Ivan Turbincă
In the beginning of the story, God rewards Ivan's charitable nature with a pouch with which he can trap all things in existence, and used by the soldier to subdue Satan and the multitude of devils, and eventually serve his purpose of cheating Death.
The soldier falls asleep on a divan, only to be rudely awakened when his pillow is thrown away by invisible hands, and again when the entire room is animated by loud, onomatopoeic sounds.
At daybreak, Ivan takes his revenge on the boyar by awaking his entire household, and claiming that he has spent the night trapping rabbits in his bag, and asks the host to provide him with ramrods so that he may peel the skin off the animals.
The boyar, understanding of what Ivan means, hands him "a cartload" of sticks, whereupon the protagonist drags the devils out one by one and gives each of them a severe beating, making them promise never to return.
The emotional boyar embraces the rescuer of his property and offers him permanent lodging, but Ivan declines, stating that his task is to defend God, "every man's emperor".
They are left despondent by their new master's drunken partying and exploitative demands, until the creature known as Talpa iadului ("The Foundation of Hell"), portrayed as the cleverest demon, promises to overturn the situation: she creates a drum, and bangs on it the rhythm of march, tricking the inebriated soldier into believing that war has started.
The latter, the narrator informs, is aware of Ivan's ruse, but decides to play along: he lets his guest know that he should tell Death to capture the young for three years, and then misbehaved children for another three.
Writing early in the 20th century, researcher Tudor Pamfile integrated "Ivan Turbincă" within a large framework of Eastern European folkloric accounts in which Death or Samodiva are the antagonists.
"[3] Literary historian Mircea Braga, who discussed the presence of folkloric narrative motifs in Creangă's main stories, noted that such texts are usually introduced by a "perturbing situation"—in the case of "Ivan Turbincă", the acquisition of "an item with miraculous qualities.
"[4] Another such omnipresent element, Braga argues, is the series of "trials" which are imposed on the various protagonists, and which, in this case, are found "in the haunted house episode, in that of hellish partying or in Death's successive pressures.
At that stage, retrospectively called "cultural megalomania" by historian Lucian Boia, protochronist ideologue Dan Zamfirescu claimed that Ion Creangă was equal or superior to world classics Homer, William Shakespeare and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and found Ivan Turbincă, "the character who dominates world history in our century", to be "more contemporary than Hamlet, Faust, Don Quixote, and Alyosha Karamazov".
"[8] The "Ivan Turbincă" story is also popular in Romania's neighboring state of Moldova, which, as the Moldavian SSR, has been part of the Soviet Union and is historically included in the region of Bessarabia.
The 1967 film Se caută un paznic, made by writer Vlad Ioviţă and director Gheorghe Vodă, was loosely based on the Creangă narrative, and constituted an early sample of Moldovan cinema.
[9] Plămădeală also believes that the music and film both created a discreet satire of Soviet pressures on the local population: "The synthetic style of the melodic structure helps the young filmmakers to transfer Creangă's ideas into a world of totalitarian oppression, highlighting the eternal aspiration of a nation haunted by the atrocities of history toward spiritual emancipation.
"[9] A similar verdict was passed on Ioviţă's original text by literary critic Viorica Stamati-Zaharia, who detected possible ironies aimed at the guidelines of socialist realism.
