Taking the Dionis experience as evidence that Ruben is right, Dan asks to be transported into an ideal universe, and is told by his master that such a place exists "in your immortal soul".

No longer held back by the laws of physics, he rearranges the celestial sphere and the lunar landscape for Maria's pleasure, building her a heavenly abode, serviced by the angels and decorated with blue flowers; in this arrangement, Earth itself is a contemptible atom, consumed by hatred and war.

[1][10] According to literary historian Alexandru Piru, such reactions were merely myopic: "The Junimists [...] did not notice that, at heart, with his use of fairy tale settings, Eminescu depicted the fate of the genius artist whom a hostile environment has condemned to a chimerical, deplorable, life.

[15] The same was claimed by the poet's nephew, Gheorghe Eminescu, who noted that Panu could not have been present at that meeting, and that his account is a "literary forgery, which is attributable to either bad faith or poor memory".

[19] Reviewing Junimea's reaction, the same Lovinescu also noted that Poor Dionis carried with it a culture shock, exposing Romania to "Eminescu's hurricane of genius, bringing in all the elements of German sentimentality, filtered through a singular, personal, temperament.

[18] Somewhat different accounts are provided by scholars George Călinescu and Eugen Simion: the poem "Mirodonis", adapted from earlier Romanian folklore, seems to them a direct precursor of the Dionis narrative, especially when it comes to the poetic landscape.

[27] Philologist Alexandru Al. Philippide supposes that some "subtle philosophical undertones" might still exist in the account, but "when it comes to the artistic achievement, the fairy tale most definitely enjoys primacy.

"[29] Constantin Noica took the work's ambitions more seriously, noting Eminescu's subtlety in rendering concepts that were new to Romanian philosophy, in particular his attempt to coin the term nefinire for "infinite divisibility".

Poor Dionis, he writes, is merely "a fantasy novella à la Théophile Gautier", and, for all of Eminescu's intertextual clues, the reification of Kantian concepts cannot function.

[37] Various historiographers note that the concept of dreamed world precedes the German school by several generations, finding its literary expression in Calderón de la Barca's 1635 allegory, before arriving at Gautier.

[38] Eminescu's own perception of spacetime, as apparent in the story and in some poems (La steaua, for instance), has intrigued Romanian students of physics, particularly after they became aware of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

[42] Philologist Anca Voicu also writes that the Gnostic source, a borrowing from the "fall of Sophia" myth (with some echoes from the Book of Proverbs and other orthodox writs), is Poor Dionis's very "narrative matter".

She believes that, beyond adopting Kantian and Schopenhauerian discourse, Poor Dionis incorporates echoes from Vedanta philosophy and the Upanishads (known to have been read in translation by young Eminescu), even though, she asserts, the text does not follow such ideas to the letter.

[48] The reincarnation imagery and Eminescu's underlying belief in "the perishable outer layer of man and his undying soul" are also explored in the short story Avatarii faraonului Tlà, which invoked themes from Ancient Egyptian religion.

Among the Eminescu scholars, Perpessicius, Philippide, Simion and Ciopraga see a special connection between Dionis and Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the "Blue Flower" minstrel of Novalis' prose.

[60] If I were an artful thinker, I would not eschew derision; In a set of public lectures for ideals I'd boldly fight, And I'd show the gen'rous youngsters, the young ladies gay and bright That this world is merely dreamland and a cat's fantastic vision.

[61] In Cugetările, Eminescu introduces the derisive neologisms a heiniza, "to Heinefy", and motănime, "cat swarm", which alternate and contrast with words from the deeper layers of the Romanian lexis.

[62] Like some German theorists of the day, Eminescu was convinced that "gen'rous youngsters" everywhere had made it their mission to destroy civilization, referring to them as "idiots" with "rotten bodies";[63] as noted by scholar Ioana Pârvulescu, Dionis is ostensibly a poet by vocation, capable of putting together accomplished verse on a dare.

[12] The Cugetările addendum, Simion believes, explains that Poor Dionis should not be read as a passive and contemplative scenario: "The image of the world as the insipid dream of a tomcat seems a daring minimization of philosophical concepts, curiously so in a spirit such as Eminescu's, that is so very attracted to speculative matters.

Historian of ideas Ana-Stanca Tăbărași suggests that Spitzweg's declining Biedermeier atmosphere was localized by Eminescu, treated with ironic detachment, and completed by intertextual allusions to another German motif: Komm, süßer Tod, for Cugetările's conclusive "come, oh, sleep or come, oh death".

The story never reveals whether Dionis or Dan is the actual protagonist—according to Pârvulescu, the solution is "so very simple that everyone misses it by a long shot: the 'real' hero of these episodes is the poet, no matter what pseudonym he uses, and his dream [...] is the poem".

Eminescian poet Alexandru Vlahuță notes that he imagined Eminescu to be a sort of sleepwalking Dionis, and that, to his surprise, his idol was rather "a stout and round-faced, aging, man, short-haired and dressed like any other".

[76] Among the early reviewers, G. D. Pencioiu took a radical socially deterministic stand, proposing that Poor Dionis and its Schopenhauerian content were the product of frustration with, and withdrawal from, "bourgeois society".

Iorga believed that the work was not only generically autobiographical, but also an actual record of Eminescu's various cultural immersions, including his destitute career as a prompter in Bucharest and Giurgiu, his enduring affection for Iași,[78] and his scholarly interest in magic.

[80] More generally, Sanielevici described Poor Dionis as a record of youth, "with its illusions, its sweet sorrow, its mirage of love eternal and fairy-tale life"; "readers will feel [...] like they co-wrote [it]".

"[82] The episode where Dionis-Dan reshapes his universe also strikes a personal note: Dumitrescu-Bușulenga sees here a "last echo" of Eminescu's youthful belief in his own creative powers, crowning his idealization of the Romantic artist as a Luciferic monster.

"[87] Such uchronic indifference has political implications: at the core, Poor Dionis is one of several texts by Eminescu where medievalism takes the center stage, highlighting his conservative vision of history.

Although the work had been censured by their mentor, Nae Ionescu, Trăirists revived the Dionisian misunderstood hero; early study cases include Constantin Fântâneru's Interior (1932).

[107] Originally impressed by Poor Dionis, Ionescu's disciple, Mircea Eliade, also introduced references to the story in his 1936 novel, Domnișoara Christina,[108] and borrowed themes from it in the novella "Nights at Serampore".

[114] Under the Romanian communist regime, Poor Dionis and Cugetările were standards of the state curriculum, with the accent falling on the plight of misunderstood geniuses living in squalor.