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abstract:Caught between three great Empires, the Romanian Principalities found an opportunity starting in 1770 to draw from the Western written tradition new ways to create and develop an enlightened culture. This openness toward the West manifested itself mainly through secular translations, causing a dramatic shift in the cultural and political life of the Romanian Principalities. Rooted in postcolonial studies and cultural anthropology, this study provides an overview of the translation process and products of historical texts from German into Romanian (1770–1830) using translations as examples of cultural transfer and of the actor–network interaction.

During the mid‐1920s Bucharest became home to the Vilna Troupe, an ensemble formed in Vilnius in 1915 and famed for its groundbreaking Yiddish‐language productions that toured all over the world. Its collaborations with the Romanian artist M. H. Maxy are the subject of this essay, which demonstrates the experimental nature of several productions that took place in Bucharest during this period. New research material from sources on both sides of the Atlantic makes it possible to reconstruct the outputs of this richly innovative partnership to a much greater extent than before, demonstrating that the vitality of avant‐garde theatre in Bucharest has been heretofore underestimated by scholars, its existence obscured by the ephemerality of the performative and by its unwieldy transnational trajectory. An earlier version of this essay won the Graduate Student Essay Prize offered in 2018 by the Society for Romanian Studies.

The Revista Ştiinţifică “Vasile Adamachi”(1910–1948) had aimed since its first edition to disseminate the newest achievements of science to the interested general public with the explicit intention of building national consciousness and solidarity that would forward Romania’s natural powers through science. Even though the editors of the journal had complained constantly that their efforts to promote the national scientific movement were making slow progress, they maintained their openness toward the international state of research by publishing notes and reviews of the main scientific developments worldwide. Caught between those two ideals (that of a Romanian science and of keeping up with the international scientific scene), the journal reflects the struggles, the difficulties, but also the successes of the individual researchers, acting as a two-way communication channel between science producers and consumers. It provides us with a valuable insight into the Self versus Other perception in a time when contact between the Romanian and Western European cultures was beginning to consciously evolve from mere imitation of a dominant power to the incorporation of fragmented foreign categories. It is a perfect example of ‘patchwork’, in which the native and foreign elements coexisted in a continuous process of redefining and reshaping the newly formed national identity.

The article previews the exhibition Fashion Forward at the Gallery for Russian Arts and Design (GRAD) in London, England from July 1 to October 17, 2015 which will also feature the works of Russian designer Ludmila Mayakovskaya.