Ruritanian romance

Antal Szerb's Oliver VII (1943) features a monarch of a fictional Central European state who plots a coup against himself and then flees to Venice in order to experience the life of an ordinary person.

In the satire The Mouse That Roared (1955), the Duchy of Grand Fenwick attempts to avoid bankruptcy by declaring war on the United States as a ploy for gaining American aid.

[8] In the comic film The Great Race (1965), rally driver Professor Fate (played by Jack Lemmon) is the double of the Crown Prince of the tiny kingdom of Carpania.

[citation needed] (Ruthenia is a genuine geographic name, identifying an area of eastern Europe somewhat to the north of the Balkan Peninsula, in the Carpathian Mountains, but is not an independent country.)

The Grand Budapest Hotel, a 2014 comedy film written and directed by Wes Anderson, is set in the fictional nation of Zubrowka, a central European alpine state teetering on the outbreak of war.

[citation needed] Ursula K. Le Guin set a number of short stories and a novel in the fictitious Eastern European land of "Orsinia",[12] which has been identified as being simultaneously Ruritanian and naturalistic.

[14][15] The Student Prince, an operetta by Sigmund Romberg and Dorothy Donnelly, also adapted several times to film, has as its protagonist the heir apparent to the fictitious kingdom of Karlsberg who is sent away to the University of Heidelberg where he falls in love with a barmaid.