Beginning from the 1910s, when Pandrea was training as a cadet at Dealu Monastery, he was intimately acquainted with the power structures and ideologies of the Romanian Kingdom; it was also here that he first met the anti-liberal ideologue Nae Ionescu, who became the object of his fascination, and, for a while, an intellectual mentor.

Pandrea had by then embarked on a prestigious career as a legal scholar and sociologist, which allowed him to travel in Europe; during his time in Weimar Germany, he studied Neohegelianism, embraced atheism and dialectical materialism, and explored psychoanalysis.

He provoked the communists, including his brother in law, by seeking fair treatment for prosecuted fascists and Peasantists; he also drafted plans for Romania's "Helvetization" and integration with a larger Balkan Federation, both of which contrasted with the Soviet Union's regional agenda.

[11] Like Vladimirescu, he reserved particular scorn for the Phanariote element in Romanian society, and extended his attacks on other immigrant groups from the Balkans—he openly declared his hostility toward Aromanians, seeing them as brazen exploiters of the more subservient locals.

[37] During his university years, Marcu bonded with the future historian Mihail Polihroniade, in whose home on Lucaci Street he met various young intellectuals of various political hues, including Nicolae Carandino, Mircea Eliade, Petru Comarnescu, Barbu Brezianu, Vasile Marin, Ioan Victor Vojen, and Toma Vlădescu.

[41] Pandrea, who amazed his peers with his "multilateral" expertise and his fluent speaking of four languages,[42] had his first political involvement as a leftist: in 1924, he publicly supported French communist Henri Barbusse, who was conferencing in Bucharest, and was beaten up during a standoff with the National-Christian Defense League.

[56] Berdyayev and Maritain were identified as distinct influences in a 2004 overview by critic Dan C. Mihăilescu, who also found echoes from Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Klages, Oswald Spengler, and the Russian Slavophiles (Aleksey Khomyakov, Konstantin Aksakov, Ivan Kireyevsky).

[62] Young Pandrea eventually came across dialectical materialism, which resulted in "his moral and social nonconformism [being] set up on a different basis";[8] he now believed that the existential void, which became an "obsessive" theme in his writings, could only be tackled through "labor and the trinity of art–science–skill.

"[27] Pandrea was also a foreign correspondent for the Romanian daily, Adevărul, with reportage pieces which warned about the Nazis' steady rise to power,[5] depicting Nazism itself as an "ideological expression of the petty bourgeoisie, as engineered by the great capitalists".

[55] These pieces were collected into the 1933 brochure Germania hitleristă ("Hitlerian Germany")—described by literary historian Mircea Moisa as "the first book in European political literature to outline a most serious warning about fascism's criminal potential.

[45] Writer Ilie Purcaru, who met and befriended Pandrea in the 1960s, reports that his personal style of arguing, including at the bar, involved "suffocating the opponent" with a barrage of facts and factoids, reflecting a "feverish mindset".

This activity, which (as Ornea reports) was casually forgotten by his biographers, saw him covering works by Ralea, Felix Aderca, Sergiu Dan, Camil Petrescu, Victor Ion Popa, Mihail Sadoveanu, and Ilya Ehrenburg.

[29][45][31] In June of that year, alongside Popa, Dem I. Dobrescu, Henri H. Stahl and Traian Brăileanu, he accompanied Dimitrie Gusti of the Royal Foundations on an official tour of Romanați—including to the model village of Dioști.

[135] Though he had kept company with high-ranking figures such as Mihai Antonescu,[136] Siguranța agents again kept track of his activities as one of the "publicly notorious communist elements", observing his "close links" with another political suspect, the journalist Ion Vinea.

"[56] Pandrea claimed that in early 1941, using funds extorted from a "tanner out of Calafat", he established the Meridian group, formally led by Alexandru Balaci, Mihnea Gheorghiu, and Tiberiu Iliescu, and disguising itself as a "literary society".

[160] The book garnered instant praise from the Democratic Peasants' Party, which had aligned itself with the PCR; as observed by the PNȚ press, the promotional material included Pandrea's biography, but omitted all mention of his 1938 defection to the PNC.

"[19] Agents of the newly established Securitate soon became aware that Pandrea was serving alongside men convicted for their Iron Guard affiliation, again including Gyr, and that he was finding a common ground with them—agreeing to help them mount a "subversive activity against the people's democratic regime.

[184] Pandrea describes in some detail the living conditions, noting that, after months and years of malnutrition, the entire prison population struggled with vitamin deficiency, periodontal disease, and oliguria, and fed itself on linden leaves to prevent additional damage.

In his private records, he alleged that the Orthodox hierarchy and the communist state were equally interested in persecuting the nuns: the bishops, encouraged by rival mystics such as Scrima and Sandu Tudor, became alarmed by heterodox practices tolerated at Vladimirești (including lactarianism, excessive Marian devotions, and public acts of confession), while the regime wished to contain the spread of popular piety.

[215] Aware that he was again bonding with Guardist inmates over creating a catch-all "Movement of Resistance", the Securitate placed him under constant surveillance, starting in February 1961; his file recorded his name as "Marcu Petre Pandrea".

[220] In late 1962, he and Stăniloae heard confessions from an Iron-Guard bookkeeper, Petre Țocu, who exposed the Guard's secret business dealings with Carol II's camarilla, including Ion Gigurtu and Ernest Urdăreanu.

A rival inmate, Gheorghe Andreica, opined that he was encouraged by the Securitate to write down his "paltry stuff" for "one more spoonful of barley in his flask", though his verdict is disputed by historian Silviu B. Moldovan (who rather sees Pandrea as a sincere anti-fascist, if indeed one "usable by the communist regime").

[45] The Securitate reopened its file on Pandrea after his repeated attempts to publish a Brâncuși monograph somewhere in the Western Bloc, since he had sought to obtain backing from intellectually prestigious exiles such as Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran.

[64][235] In the new political climate of 1965–1966, Pandrea was trying but failing to convince the central magazines of Bucharest to republish some of his interwar articles, and also raised negative attention in Securitate ranks by asking Editura Militară to help him recover his stolen manuscripts.

[237] Purcaru reports on Pandrea's presence at Ramuri's informal salon in Craiova, where he entertained his colleagues with opinions on a wide range of subjects—variously including Milarepa, Schopenhauer's aesthetics, and the folk ballad Miorița.

"[239] Much of the text dwells on Brâncuși's supposed intellectual debt to Romanian folklore, and to modern literary figures such as Mihai Eminescu, but also comprises musings about his uniqueness on the world stage, his ultimate universality.

This may perhaps be explained through his own intellectual fixation: he simply could not believe that the system could even operate from decisions taken by illiterate men, by marginal figures propelled at the very tip of a pyramid through a historic accident, namely Romania's occupation by the Red Army.

[251] In late 1968, Ceaușescu and the PCR's permanent presidium issued a resolution that posthumously rehabilitated "Marcu Petre Pandrea", noting that the testimonies against him had been collected from unreliable witnesses, including members of the Iron Guard, and that some of them had since recanted.

"[45] In his 1981 piece, Ornea asserted that, in posterity, his friend still elicited suspicions: like many of their interwar predecessors, the "distinguished critics" of that age still refused to see Pandrea as a genuine leftist, and "examine [his essays] mostly through the image he projected before and during 1928.

[9] The scientific and literary communities repeatedly highlighted the memoirs' importance, though some controversy surrounded Nadia's decision to include texts that her father had apparently not intended for publishing (in particular his subdued accounts of re-education).