Adnkronos (Adnkronos) – Romanian Ghosts: Ten Extraordinary Biographies by Carolina Vincenti, the latest release from La Lepre Edizioni, will be available in all bookstores and stores on Wednesday, November 12, 2025. The book will also be presented at the Small and Medium-Sized Publishing Fair – Più Libri Più liberi 2025. Ten portraits of characters suspended between East and West are the ghosts that haunt this fascinating choral tale.
A double thread unites them: exile and an extraordinary destiny. Thus, Romania is evoked through the fragmented memory of the diaspora where, like a Russian doll, each story encompasses another. The author wanted to describe the Romania she had listened to and observed through the lens of the stories of those who had lost that country. She explored the lives of others to answer the question of who one is, where one comes from, what language one speaks in dreams, and it seemed easier to answer by telling the story of others. Because no one, more than an exile, questions their own identity. The comfort of memories becomes the thread to follow, and nostalgia lives in the details: a certain house or the scent of a tree, or even Eliade's Mantuleasa Street. Belonging is a balm that generates well-being, as those who set out into the world in search of an identity know well.
The Romanian exiles who inhabit this book are the figures of a kaleidoscope. Cioran, both a genius and a failed flâneur; Sergio Calibidache, an idolized musician but hostile to recording; Constantin Brancusi, a spearhead of the avant-garde who shunned self-disclosure; Paul Celan, a poet of sublime agony; Panait Istrati, a writer of enchanted tales, the "Gorky of the Balkans." With them, Mircea Eliade, the most illustrious historian of religions of the twentieth century—but also a captivating novelist and poet—and Ioan Petru Culianu, a profoundly learned Gnostic killed at the height of his academic glory by a mysterious assassin. Or, again, Marta
Bibescu, Proustian muse of the Belle Époque salons; Dimitri Cantemir, the visionary prince who observed Europe's rise and the Bosphorus crescent in decline at the end of the 17th century; and Elena Ghica, a formidable itinerant princess, archaeologist, botanist, writer, and pioneer of the liberal thought of cosmopolitan elites. Like a Russian doll, each story encloses another and contains the seeds of nostalgia for those who leave their own world to embark on a new life.