Craii de Curtea-Veche
Mateiu Caragiale
Craii de Curtea-Veche
In the Bucharest of the years before the First World War, a young narrator drifts through the city's nights with two older companions, the proud and bitter Pașadia and the gentle, wandering Pantazi, led into its taverns, gambling dens and brothels by the vulgar Gore Pirgu. Theirs is a world of faded aristocracy and decay, told in some of the most ornate and musical prose in Romanian.
About the book
Craii de Curtea-Veche was serialised in the review Gândirea from 1926 and published as a book in 1929. Its title names its heroes after the old princely court of Bucharest: the crai are rakes and libertines, men of a dying world who spend their nights in the city's old quarters. The narrator, Pașadia and Pantazi share a cult of refinement, lineage and the past, set against Gore Pirgu, who embodies everything coarse and modern in the city they move through. Mateiu Caragiale's novel is less driven by plot than by atmosphere — confessions, nocturnal journeys and portraits of decline, in a style rich with archaic and Oriental vocabulary. Little read in its own time, it has come to be regarded as one of the masterpieces of Romanian literature. This edition is the original Romanian text.
Characters
The narrator — Narrator
A young man drawn into the nights of old Bucharest by two older companions he admires.
Pașadia Măgureanu — One of the crai
A proud, bitter aristocrat of great culture, who leads a double life of austere work by day and debauchery by night.
Pantazi — One of the crai
A gentle, melancholy wanderer descended from an old Greek family, the narrator's closest companion.
Gore Pirgu — Their guide
A coarse, cunning go-between who leads the three into the city's taverns, gambling dens and brothels.
Pena Corcodușa — Madwoman
A demented old woman of the streets whose wanderings haunt the novel.
Rașelica Nachmansohn — Young girl
A young girl from Bucharest's Jewish quarter whom Pirgu draws into their circle.
About the author
Mateiu Caragiale (1885–1936) was a Romanian writer and poet, the son of the playwright Ion Luca Caragiale. Fascinated all his life by aristocracy, heraldry and genealogy, he cultivated the manners of a nobleman he was not, and wrote little: a handful of sonnets, the novella Remember and the novel Craii de Curtea-Veche (1929). That one novel, with its decadent Bucharest and its elaborate, sonorous prose, made him one of the most admired stylists in Romanian literature.