The scion of an aristocratic family, formally trained in both philology and the sociology of literature, he emerged in the 1910s as a rebel, highly distinctive, voice among the Romanian press and book reviewers.

Zarifopol endures in cultural memory as an eccentric—not just because he tackled and derided the literary establishment, but also because he refused to publish most of his work in book form, or take up employment in academia.

[2] Zarifopol eventually bought for himself the baroque manor and Sturdza property at Cârligi, near Roman, then a townhouse in Iași, where he and Stamatiu-Culianu managed Borta Rece tavern.

[10] He made his published debut in Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol's Arhiva in 1897, with a review of a historiographic work by Marie Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville.

The couple turned up at the marriage registrar in street clothes and neither held a church wedding nor baptized their children; all this outraged his mother, a strict Romanian Orthodox.

[14] Co-opted by the latter to write for Viața Românească, Zarifopol made himself known for sarcastic comments about modernist literature, describing Proust, Gide, and Cocteau as difficult "boys and children".

[2][9] He supported himself by turning to regular journalism, but still had trouble making ends meet (though he did not admit to it), and made efforts to keep away from the centers of culture, living mostly in provincial Sinaia.

"[10] Zarifopol, sometimes using the pen names PZ and Anton Gherman,[31] returned as one of the main columnists at Viața Românească and its satellite, Adevărul Literar și Artistic.

[30] In 1924, Zarifopol informed his protectors that he now had "a holy terror of officialdom", and that he resented Iași for its support for the National-Christian Defense League, a form of "nationalist imbecility and charlatanry".

"[32] A guest writer at Camil Petrescu's Săptămâna Intelectuală și Artistică in 1924,[33] and, in 1925, at Cuvântul Liber,[34] Zarifopol became more deeply involved in the cultural debates of Greater Romania.

In 1928, Ralea, Zarifopol, D. I. Suchianu, Felix Aderca and other literati were lumped together as the "irresponsible malcontents", in a neotraditionalist pamphlet put out by Petre Pandrea and Gândirea magazine.

[42] Contested by young and old critics alike, Zarifopol found himself a follower with Mihail Sebastian, who honored him as "a lucid man in a time of visionaries", "a sober teetotaler during a raging drinking bout".

[49] His other contributions appeared in various new magazines and newspapers, including Adevărul (which in 1927 hosted his humorous memoir of a meeting with Radek),[19] Dreptatea, Kalende, Lamura, Gazeta Fălticenilor, and Ancheta.

A traditionalist adversary, Nicolae Iorga, recognized Zarifopol as a "refined and daring thinker",[59] while his Viața Românească partner Ralea called him "charming and irritating".

He attributed such traits to Zarifopol's familiarity with "two sophistic races", Greeks and Jews,[55] his claim in turn criticized by Ralea[62] and philosopher Mircea Florian[63] for its racialist undertones.

[65] In 1941, Nicolae Bagdasar identified in Zarifopol "a vastly cultured critic, of a rare subtlety and fine irony", lamenting that his work "remains scattered in so many magazines".

[66] However, as argued by colleague Pompiliu Constantinescu, this improvidence was a fundamental trait and shortcoming of Zarifopol's literary contribution: his was a "newspaperman's critique" of "spontaneous impression, quick analysis, and incomplete assessment, meaning that he could never embrace a creator in all their complexity.

[67] Lovinescu assessed that Zarifopol's criticism "lingers in the paradox", always placing itself "at the antipodes of common sense": denying merit to prestigious figures such as Renan or Maupassant, but praising Ion Minulescu as an outstanding novelist.

[68] Similarly, Sevastos notes that Zarifopol was "wavery" when it came to the hierarchies of Romanian literature, being mistaken about not just Minulescu, but also Ion Vinea and Pamfil Șeicaru, whom he regarded as great humorists.

[72] According to Ralea, Zarifopol should be read as a Romanian counterpart of anti-populist "lone travelers", from Barbey d'Aurevilly and Edgar Allan Poe to Hanns Heinz Ewers, often applauding causes that were "at odds with the establishment".

[73] Thus, responding to the established literary canons, Zarifopol fashioned himself an alternative one, comprising Caragiale, Minulescu, Proust and Cocteau, but also Joseph Delteil, Henri de Régnier, Adrian Maniu, Păstorel Teodoreanu,[74] and Dragoș Protopopescu.

[78] Călinescu was especially critical of Zarifopol literal and "negativist" reading of Alexandru Vlahuță's Din prag, which ridiculed the poet's presentment of death eternal.

[68] This is one of several essays containing Zarifopol's Junimea-like satire of inauthentic mofturi ("trifles" or "coquetries", a term echoing Caragiale), including wholesale borrowings of foreign customs that respond to bourgeois tastes.

[93] As Ralea notes, Zarifopol's anti-ideological critique, continuing the work of Caragiale, was specifically deriding philosophers and philosophies that were the height of fashion: mystical, Bergsonian, Japonist;[94] other such hobbyhorses were Nietzscheism[93] and psychoanalysis.

[55] Yet, Zarifopol was not entirely anti-middle class: he believed his type of "cold lucidity" was primarily an in-built antidote to the decay of the "colossal civilization" that was liberal society.

"[96] Himself a conservative, Zarifopol expressed his nostalgia for old-regime social differentiation and division of labor, against "the political type", and for the nuclear family of patriarchy, against the "neutralization" of fathers in modern society.

Zarifopol contended that intellectuals were an illusory social class (no economic interest bound together "a lawyer with a novelist"), but still collectively responsible for the failures of a society such as Romania's.

[93] In 2014, posthumously reviewing Zarifiopol's anticommunist notes, scholar Vladimir Tismăneanu described him as a diagnostician of "totalitarian reflexes", displaying "urbanity, civility, moderation and firmness".

Prolonging his antihumanist tendencies,[99] he expressed in private his reserves for the "deplorable" literature of "the oppressed", including Jews, social climbers, and especially women; according to Nastasă, he was an antifeminist, and perhaps also a misogynist.

[100] In 1932, writer Barbu Brezianu suggested that Zarifopol was on the "far-right" of Romanian literature, in the "grand conservative party" of D. Nanu, Cincinat Pavelescu, Mihail Sadoveanu, and Al. T.