FROM DON JUANS TO CRAI: MARGINAL ARISTOCRACY AND THE LITERARY REPRESENTATION OF BUCHAREST IN RADU IONESCU’S DON JUANII DIN BUCUREȘTI AND MATEIU CARAGIALE’S CRAII DE CURTEA-VECHE
FROM DON JUANS TO CRAI: MARGINAL ARISTOCRACY AND THE LITERARY REPRESENTATION OF BUCHAREST IN RADU IONESCU’S DON JUANII DIN BUCUREȘTI AND MATEIU CARAGIALE’S CRAII DE CURTEA-VECHE

Summary/Abstract: This article provides a comparative reading of Radu Ionescu’s “Don Juanii din București” and Mateiu Caragiale’s “Craii de Curtea-Veche”, focusing on the literary construction of Bucharest as an urban space of masculine sociability and symbolic distinction. Although the two novels belong to different aesthetic regimes—late nineteenth-century realism in Ionescu’s case and early twentieth-century decadent modernism in Caragiale’s—their narratives converge in the depiction of a marginal elite defined not by institutional power, but by stylistic refinement, seduction, and performative exceptionality. The transition from the Don Juan figure to the “crai” is interpreted as a broader cultural shift from urban modernity and social mobility toward a poetics of decline, memory, and aestheticized decadence. The analysis ultimately argues that Radu Ionescu’s novel anticipates key elements of Matein urban mythology, contributing to a genealogy of literary representations of Bucharest in Romanian modernity..

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