Author: Amory Stern

749 words

The following is editor and publisher Amory Stern‘s Introduction to his collection of previously untranslated essays by the Romanian writer Mihai Eminescu, Old Icons, New Icons. The book is available in both Kindle and paperback editions.

Of peasant ancestry on his father’s side and boasting aristocratic (boyar) maternal roots, the Romanian poet, prose writer, and editorialist Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889) had not put his modest inherited wealth to waste. Educated in the German language since childhood, Eminescu was culturally — if not always geopolitically — an enthusiastic Germanophile. (more…)

3,696 words

Today’s dominant ruling order, stretching over most of the world, can only be rejected in its entirety. This is only possible, though, with a lucid insight into how it gained the awesome power it wields today. Such an endeavor should begin with a clarification of how the globally entrenched power in question, and its accompanying ideological ethos, came to such a prominent position in the last century. (more…)

4,994 words

Of peasant ancestry on his father’s side and boasting aristocratic (boyar) maternal roots, the Romanian poet, prose writer, and editorialist Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889) had not put his modest inherited wealth to waste. Educated in the German language since childhood, Eminescu was culturally — if not always geopolitically — an enthusiastic Germanophile. (more…)

Michael the Brave, savior of Europe?

2,446 words

The history of Romania as a concrete country is generally assumed to have started with the Romanian, or Danubian, principalities, similarly to how the history of Russia as a concrete country starts with Muscovy. Both of these histories are of late medieval origin, having come into being in the wake of the Mongol invasions of Europe. In both comparable cases, however, the concrete starting point is not the same as the ethnologically related spiritual precursor from which the original states derived their patronage. In the case of Russia, the spiritual precursor was the Kievan Rus’, which was situated in present-day Ukraine. (more…)

1,190 words

When Alexandru C. Cuza was born in Iași, Moldavia in 1857, Romania was not yet a unified country fully freed from Ottoman vassalage. Turkish rule had not been as direct or oppressive here as in the lower Balkans, but it left the young state and ancient nation with a host of social problems. Cuza was a child when Wallachia and Moldavia were united in 1866 (more…)