The son of playwright-aristocrat Dimitrie Rosetti-Max and nephew of Titu Maiorescu, he had a troubled and rebellious youth, split between Romania and Austria-Hungary; during these debut years, he kept company with senior literary figures such as Ion Luca Caragiale and Alexandru Vlahuță.

Graduating from the University of Bucharest at age 26, he was already a successful poet of neoromantic sensibilities, a published translator of plays and novels, and also famous for his unhappy marriage to the literary critic Elena Bacaloglu.

Although an artillery officer stationed in Chitila, Rosetti was mostly active during World War I as a patriotic orator and propagandist, later returning to his work at the Ilfov County bar association.

[11][17] As literary historian George Călinescu suggests, the parental split imposed a "rough life" on Radu, explaining why he, an aristocrat, maintained "quasi-proletarian" customs and sympathies.

[19] The same was noted by his younger friend Victor Eftimiu: "A boy of select birth, [Rosetti] did not linger in that scornful Olympus of his caste, but rather gave himself, spent himself, a troubadour and proletarian, wherever he found impetus, suffering, elation.

"[20] The poet confessed that the only exception he ever made to his personal standards of "earning my few distinctions with the sweat of my brow" was when he visited a rich relative, Nicolae de Rosetti, and humored his genealogical pride in exchange for gifts of cash.

[2][27] With no other means to support himself, he drifted into homelessness, and had to sleep in the editorial offices, on public benches in Cișmigiu Gardens, or in the waiting room at Gara de Nord.

[38] To 1898, Rosetti was one of the regulars at literary gatherings in Fialcovsky Coffeehouse (also attended by his father),[39] where he met Alexandru Macedonski, Mircea Demetriade, and actor Ion Livescu.

[44] With Săvescu and Vlahuță, Rosetti was a noted presence in V. A. Urechia's magazine, Biblioteca Familiei, which sought to reconcile Symbolism with the staples of socialist didactic art.

[46] His influence on the Symbolists did not refer just to his poetic standard, but also to his lifestyle: as Eftimiu recalls, he made his colleagues envious of his physical beauty and sentimental adventures.

In the 1898 O lecție ("A Lesson"), the wife of a plagiarist expresses her contempt by pursuing an adulterous affair and getting pregnant; Păcate ("Sins"), which appeared in 1901, unveils the love triangles that break apart a middle-class family.

"[18] By contrast, Drăgulănescu contrarily finds these to be the "most enduring part" of Rosetti's literary output, a "mixture of rigor and fantasy, of gossip, but also of pensive solitude".

[75] In April 1911, the Romanian Theatrical Society elected Rosetti on its first Steering Committee, alongside Ranetti, George Diamandy, A. de Herz, and Paul Gusty.

[80] Rosetti had a lengthy career as a defense lawyer, an experience that informed certain of his literary output, including memoirs such as Din sala pașilor pierduți ("From the Hall of Wasted Pacing", 1922).

[1][81] As both Călinescu and Eftimiu note, he was one of several Romanian orators inspired by the style and social-justice ideology of François Coppée[82] (whom Rosetti had met, and whom he "uncanningly resembled physically").

[2] Rosetti would often take no pay for his lawyer's services, or would charge his more destitute clients ad libitum ("whatever you can afford; if you can't spare anything, that's not a problem").

[84] Rosetti was featured in the first-ever issue of Banu and Locusteanu's Flacăra with a piece titled Revoltă ("Revolt"), described by Zaharia Stancu, the left-wing novelist and cultural promoter, as a political statement.

Unexpectedly, he was moved to a horse artillery unit, but was shielded from active service by General Alexandru Averescu, and only assigned to give patriotic speeches to his troops on the front line.

Sevastos refused to have Adevărul turned into a "shop window", prompting the angered poet to withdraw from the enterprise and switch to a rival newspaper, Universul.

[106] In March, alongside the forensic scientist Mina Minovici and the politician Grigore Trancu-Iași [ro], he founded Nirvana Society (later Cenușa, "The Ash"), which operated the Bucharest Crematorium.

[112] He followed up with definitive collections of his scattered prose and poetry: Poezii ("Poems", 1926), Eri ("Yesterday", 1931), Pagini alese ("Selected Pages", 1935), Vechituri ("Old Things", 1936), and Instantanee turistice ("A Tourist's Highlights", 1939).

[113] Of these, Vechituri drew notice with its adoring portrait of Queen Marie, seen by Rosetti as responsible for Romania's diplomatic victory at the end of the world war.

[69] In a 1935 interview with Mihail Sebastian of Rampa, Rosetti argued that Dada and Futurism were "here today, gone tomorrow", declaring that he only read works by his own generation colleagues.

Prior to the election of 1931, he represented Averescu in a civil lawsuit against journalist Bazil Gruia, who had referred to the general as an "assassin of the peasants", for his role in the 1907 revolt.

[124] Around that time, the fascist National Legionary State resumed the attacks on the "cremationist" movement: by 1941, Education Minister Traian Brăileanu was proposing to disestablish the Bucharest Crematorium, describing it as anti-Christian.

[125] In June 1941, under the new government formed by Ion Antonescu, Rosetti contributed to a Vremea special issue commemorating Nicolae Iorga, killed by the Iron Guard the previous year.

[2] It features chapters on the more picturesque figures who had crossed the author's path, for instance Macedonski, Claymoor, Nicolae Fleva, Alceu Urechia, and Alexandru Bogdan-Pitești.

Its literary reviewer Nicolae Roșu saw Rosetti as "despondent and washed-out, pining for a useless world", "superficial and gelatinous", his ink "drenched in mothballs".

"[131] The characters in the book, Roșu claimed, were tinged by "adultery and concubinage", their luxury made possible by "millions of peasant slaves, toiling in sorrow"; the work itself was "addressed to those few fossils to have survived the great social uplift.

In 1950, critic Paul Georgescu included Rosetti's Duioase on a list of obsolete works: "The bourgeoisie was reading and growing enthusiastic about books that no one today would even dare to open.