The founder of many newspapers and magazines, including Viața Socială, Rampa, Facla and Chemarea, collaborating with writer friends such as Tudor Arghezi, Gala Galaction and Ion Vinea, he fostered and directed the development of early modernist literature in Romania.

After the România Muncitoare circle organized a socialist rally in Brăila, Dezrobirea's entire staff was arrested on orders from Prefect Nicolae T. Faranga, who also confiscated most of the printed issues (although some 1,000 were still freely distributed among the intrigued peasants).

[39] It enlisted collaborations from a number of anti-establishment journalists, from agrarian militant Vasile Kogălniceanu and socialist physician Tatiana Grigorovici to writers Ion Minulescu, Lucia Demetrius or Constantin Graur, and republished contributions from some of Europe's known social critics: Eduard Bernstein, Rinaldo Rigola, Vsevolod Garshin, Leo Tolstoy, Jean Jaurès, Emile Vandervelde, Hubert Lagardelle[17] and Gustave Hervé.

The latter, identified as Romania's first socialist and satirical magazine by Arghezi himself,[57] was soon joined by the 18-year-old poet Ion Vinea, as literary columnist and campaigner for post-Symbolist literature,[58][59] with painters Iser[60] and Camil Ressu[61] as illustrators.

The other noted contributors to Cocea's publications were Toma Dragu, Saniel Grossman,[57] George Diamandy,[62] Camil Petrescu[63] and avant-garde critic Poldi Chapier, whose 1912 article for Rampa chronicled the international success of Futurism.

Its attack was concentrated on Drum Drept and Convorbiri Critice magazines (the focus of Vinea's articles)[72] and on antisemitic historian Nicolae Iorga, who had earlier dismissed Facla as a venue for Jewish Romanian interests.

[81][96] Its other staff writers were young men who later built career in the political press, both left- and right-wing: Vinea, Demostene Botez, Alexandru Busuioceanu, Cezar Petrescu, Pamfil Șeicaru[81] and Adrian Maniu.

[102] In opposition to the People's Party and the anti-communist consensus, Cocea spoke positively in Parliament about Soviet Russia, arguing that the Bolshevik foreign policy had saved the whole of civilization, and citing favorable statements made by the returning war prisoners.

[117] According to political scientist Stelian Tănase, this enterprise was secretly financed by Soviet Russia as external agitprop: notes kept by Siguranța Statului intelligence agency suggest that Cocea was a regular guest at the Russian mission in Romania.

[142] In November of that year, Siguranța Statului was reporting that Cocea and Callimachi, together with Petre Constantinescu-Iași, were going to establish in Bucharest a "far left platform" with a "pronounced Semitic tendency"; known as Ideea Socială ("The Social Idea"), it was supposedly part of the Adevărul-Dimineața network.

[17] Siguranța agents also noted that Cocea, with Dobrescu and Callimachi, was making efforts to assist the PCR activists tried in Chișinău, and trying to obtain further support from the left-wing National Peasantists (Virgil Madgearu, Grigore Iunian).

[143] Era Nouă's main contributors were young communist essayists such as Sahia, Miron Radu Paraschivescu, Ștefan Voicu and Silvian Iosifescu, but the magazine also published avant-garde authors with Marxist sensibilities: Ion Călugăru, Stephan Roll, Virgil Teodorescu, Dolfi Trost[145] and Paul Păun.

[150] In an editorial for Reporter, Cocea made comments similar to the Era Nouă program, with a more pronounced satirical tone and allusions to fascism: "however massive the stupidity of dictatorial rules, man's intelligence, honesty in convictions [and] the fervor of the masses will in the end topple them.

"[151] Reporter's agenda was generically anti-fascist: campaigning for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, it lampooned Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, and repeatedly attacked the Iron Guard or other Romanian fascist groups.

[154] Other members of the Reporter circle, whose contacts with Cocea were closely investigated by the authorities, included a diverse gathering of PCR figures: Foriș, Trost, Marxist sociologist Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, unionist Ilie Pintilie[3] and the Bessarabian poet Emilian Bucov.

[155] Reporter also published the militant poems of Demostene Botez, Liviu Deleanu and Al. Șahighian, and samples of international left-leaning literature (Ilya Ehrenburg, André Malraux, Nikolai Ostrovsky).

[125] Stelian Tănase also describes Cocea as a double agent, notoriously close to Siguranța director Mihail Moruzov (his Bucharest neighbor), trafficking in information from the communist movement and the court of Carol II, but still advising PCR Agitprop.

[158] A 1939 entry in Cocea's own diary admits that the "unexpected" Non-Aggression Treaty between the Soviets and Nazi Germany was the source of "doubting" and "bitterness" among left-wing Romanians, but scolds his old friend Nicolae L. Lupu for having then lost faith in socialism.

[3] Cocea's actress sister Alice, who was living in Nazi-occupied France, was taking a different path: she and her manager, Robert Capgras, had a friendly relationship with the Germans and were later deemed collaborators with the enemy.

[176] Other Victoria contributors, including Iosifescu, Constantin Balmuș, the avant-garde writers Radu Boureanu and Geo Dumitrescu, wrote articles which condemned the various traditional seats of learning and the Romanian Academy, as "reactionary", while naming the senior far right supporters in culture (from Ioan Alexandru Brătescu-Voinești and D. Caracostea to P. P. Panaitescu and Ion Petrovici).

[3] Likewise, critic Mihai Zamfir calls Cocea's republican pamphlets "filthy", accusing them of promoting, together with the "stupid little poems" of the much older Alexandru Vlahuță, a distorted image of the Romanian monarchy.

Scarlat Callimachi spoke of his comrade, the "feared polemicist", as in reality "a good man" of "amazing generosity", and, stylistically, "a poet": "Even in his most violent articles one finds glimpses of true poetry.

According to George Călinescu, the book, "vehemently priapic and monotonous in its excess", borrows its tone from Alexandru Macedonski, its titillating subject from Pierre Louÿs, and its plot from Mihai Eminescu (the novel Cezara).

[7] Fellow literary historian and critic Ștefan Cazimir has included Cocea's work among the Symbolist novels directly influenced by Vienna Secession art and the Secessionists' feminization of nature.

[193] In 1908, when he castigated both Symbolism and "perverted eroticism", Cocea left a detailed list of authors he considered "degenerate" and "bourgeois": Gabriele d'Annunzio, Dumas-fils, Maurice Maeterlinck, Anna de Noailles, Georges Ohnet, Marcel Prévost, and Oscar Wilde.

[194] According to literary historian Angelo Mitchievici, the substance of such "class-based criticism" was equivalent to the biological determinism of Cocea's nationalist adversaries, announcing the absolutes of fascism ("degenerate art") and communism (the Zhdanov Doctrine).

[197] Having reached a venerable age, he slowly reveals the secret of his longevity in conversations with the much younger judge: after decades of experimentation, the Arcaș estate produces a special sort of Moldavian wine; the grapes were pressed by Manole and a Romani (Gypsy) girl, in the course of their love-making.

[205] Pentr-un petec de negreață, with its name borrowed from peri-urban Romanian folklore,[180] shows its male protagonist Andrei Vaia alternating between dreams of free love in the countryside and the adulation of Bucharest as a hotspot of erotic pursuits.

[180] Pentr-un petec... doubled as a barely disguised satire of the interwar political class, in this case specifically directed at the National Peasants' Party—according to Călinescu, this was Cocea's selling tactic, as were its advertised depictions of "fornication" and "sexual abnormalities", or its licentious quotation from the Book of Proverbs.

[90] The former only featured redacted portions, communist censors cut out Cocea's critique of Soviet foreign policy, which were rendered sensitive by the recent intervention in Czechoslovakia, and also excised his thoughts on the Stalin cult.