Co-founded by writers Tristan Tzara and Ion Vinea, together with visual artist Marcel Janco, while they were all high school students, the journal was a late representative of international Symbolism and the Romanian Symbolist movement.

Despite going through just four issues, Simbolul helped the transition toward avant-garde currents in Romanian literature and art, by publishing anti-establishment satirical pieces, and by popularizing modernist trends such as Fauvism and Cubism.

Its successors on the local literary scene were Vinea's moderate magazines Chemarea and Contimporanul, while Tzara and Janco evolved to a more radical stance, taking part in founding the avant-garde trend known as Dada.

Around 1907, soon after the violent quelling of the peasants' revolt, left-wing authors such as Tudor Arghezi, Gala Galaction, Vasile Demetrius and N. D. Cocea began issuing a series of magazines which, in addition to following a radical political line, accommodated a modernist style.

[1] Another important factor in the evolution from Symbolism to radical modernism between 1895 and 1920 was the literary and artistic circle formed around controversial politician and author Alexandru Bogdan-Pitești, which grouped together many of Simbolul 's contributors.

[14] The pieces are: Pe râul vieții ("On the River of Life", included in the inaugural issue), Cântec ("Song"), Poveste ("Story") and Dans de fée ("Fairy Dance").

[13] They include the first issue's Cetate moartă ("Dead Citadel", with the subtitle "After Albert Samain") and Sonet ("Sonnet"), as well as the English-titled Lewdness, dedicated to an unnamed prostitute, and Mare ("Sea").

[17] Maniu also contributed a series of humorous prose poems, which was later published in his volume Figurile de ceară ("The Wax Figures"); they include the Cântec pentru întuneric ("Song for When It's Dark"), which is a parody of Symbolist leader Alexandru Macedonski's Noapte de mai ("May Night", part of the Nights cycle), replacing its Parnassian metaphors with a seemingly nonsensical imagery, and Minciune trăite ("Experienced Lies"), which literary critic Leon Baconsky praises for its "complete liberty of [word] association and metaphoric combinations".

[18] Sandqvist writes that, although influenced by Symbolism, Maniu was by then experimenting with "absurdism", something he believes is characteristic for both Figurile de ceară and the Simbolul story Mirela (in which the male protagonist, the failed writer Brutus, blames all women for his lack of success and is driven to suicide inside a damp room kept warm by his trousers).

[19] Vinea's Saint Sava colleague Poldi Chapier, a future journalist, lawyer and promoter of Marcel Janco's art, regularly contributed poetry, considered "rather colorless" by Cernat.

According to American art historian S. A. Mansbach, the "enthusiasm" displayed by Simbolul's young editors "must have been enormously persuasive", since "their magazine included contributions by some of Romania's most established symbolist poets, writers, and artists.

[13] Minulescu, whose work was by then concentrated on romanza-like poems, contributed the first printed version of his Romanța unui rege asiatic ("An Asian King's Romanza"), and his wife Claudia Millian published two poems—Ție, obsesia mea ("To You, My Obsession") and Filozofie banală ("Banal Philosophy").

[17] In his Protopopii familiei mele ("My Family's Protopopes"), a piece of avant-garde writing, Isac made reference to this rumor and dismissed it, while ridiculing the entire ethnic nationalist camp.

[32] Sandqvist notes: "With its unconventional prose and its new, subversive poetic images and metaphors, the journal was inspired by the antibourgeois and in many respects bohemian symbolism, while at the same time it contained absurd elements almost totally unfamiliar to the symbolist approach.

There, together with Hugo Ball and other Western Europeans, they staged experimental shows at the Cabaret Voltaire, and later took part in founding the anti-establishment, anti-art and radical avant-garde current known as Dada, of which Tzara became an international promoter.

[31] Contrarily, the aging Tristan Tzara felt insecure about the quality of his literary contributions to his poems, and, in a letter to his Romanian editor and Surrealist writer Sașa Pană, asked for them not to be republished as a volume.