Gheorghiu, Virgil The Petrodava House Translated from French by Gheorghiţă Ciocioi Published in 2010 Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu (1916-1992) was born at Războieni, Neamţ county. He studied philosophy and theology at the universities of Bucharest and Heidelberg. In the year 1940, he was awarded the Royal Poetry Prize, for his book Calligraphy on Snow. In 1942, he was appointed legation secretary of the Cultural Relations Department within Romania’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As he opposed the communist regime, he settled in France in the year 1948. His novel The 25th Hour established his reputation in the free world; however, the discovery of a work he had published during the war, supporting the reacquisition of Bessarabia, entailed a series of violent attacks in the Occidental press, which wrongly accused him of anti-semitism. He justified his stance in another novel – The Man Who Travelled By Himself – written after his stay in the South America. On May 23rd, 1963, C.V. Gheorghiu was ordained a priest of the Romanian Orthodox Church in Paris, and he was elevated to the rank of stavrophore in June 1966. His true calling was, however, the literary one. The 25th Hour, a novel published in the aftermath of the Second World War, is considered one of the best books of the 20th century, alongside Huxley’s Brave New World, Kafka’s The Trial or Orwell’s 1984; however The Petrodava House, written by the author in full literary maturity, is considered by recent critics as an unsurpassed achievement in its genre. The formula employed by C.V. Gheorghiu in The Petrodava House would be successfully used two decades later in The Name of the Rose, the novel of the semiotician Umberto Eco. Format: 13x20 cm; 296 p. ISBN: 978-973-136-225-0 «« back