Doina
Ruști

Of the 52 stories, one is more fascinating than the other. It's very hard to choose, each one has something that seduces you and makes you sympathize with the main character.

Suspicious, enigmatic, unexpected deaths occur again and again in these 52 stories, each one a curious tale reshaped with intelligence, humor, and a strong awareness of authorship, all in the spirit of our century of storytelling. Most of the characters in The Libertine of Gorgani live under the sign of excess—of exaggeration. Above all in love, in sex, and in everything that means the pleasures of life, but also in theft, deceit, fraud, and the desire for enrichment.

“Impossible loves, written with her well-known talent, lift the curtain on a surprising world.”

“Only the author’s introspective eye and her literary talent can turn pieces of paper yellowed by time into vivid faces and garments, customs and amorous oddities from the Phanariot landscape of Bucharest.”

We are offered a meticulously documented Balkan fresco, oriental tales with fantastic accents, rich in humor and charm, starting from the idea of human excess—of the extra-ordinary—seen through the lens of a major writer. Old manuscripts are treated alchemically by Doina Ruști and become gold—that is, true literature.

The seduction of storytelling, the blend of the miraculous and the everyday, melancholic erudition and the voluptuousness of style, the pleasure of building the architecture of a fabulous imaginary world appear to be the most relevant features of Doina Ruști’s books.

An entire world comes back to life before the eyes of today’s reader: handsome and cynical men, aggressive and pedantic, disturbingly cruel—some punished or killed—voluptuous women of unusual charm, all within a universe of Balkan picturesque excess, corruption and sin, where sensations turn into commodities to be bought and sold. Merchants sell everything to everyone: jewelry, clothes, watches, food.

What unifies the book is masterfully guided storytelling and a realist-magical atmosphere of atrocious picturesque detail and misty fantasy, where colors and shapes intertwine—old garments, winding streets, ancient buildings, loves, jealousies and betrayals, pastel portraits from a dazzlingly diverse human gallery.

The book itself is a jewel, seductive in its graphic design, with lavish illustrations and refined printing. Like other books by Doina Ruști, it stands out through a passion for documentation, the play between fiction and reality, and the passions staged in the troubling geography of Phanariot Bucharest. A “spirit of an inaccessible world” permeates all the narratives with the charm of a dense, plastic, alluring and tender prose.

You will certainly be enchanted by her unique, poetic, and erudite style; moreover, you will fall irreversibly in love with the vitality of her words, which acquire the beauty and expressiveness of period paintings that immortalize a fabulous century, full of flavor and stories worth telling, through an unforgettable voice—at times comic, at times dramatic.

The volume begins with the adventurer suggested in the title, a libertine, and continues superbly.

Stories that can leave you speechless—true subjects for novels. Countless loves and betrayals, broken or fulfilled destinies, bustling fairs and dusty roads, divans ending in torture and punishment, all told with tenderness and delightful humor, and—surprisingly—often linked to the present day. Portraits of boyars, poets, courtesans and devout women, artists, merchants, coachmen and slaves—yes, an era when you could go to the market and buy a human being. Nothing more admirable has been written about the Phanariot age—leaving aside pure history books—than Doina Ruști’s works on this period.

I read the book with delight and felt I could trace its origin to a short text by Borges, Foucault, or Julio Cortázar. Why? Because the reading transcends ordinary thinking, abandons conventional frameworks, and places us in the realm of the Different and the Authentic. With every story I stepped into another space, discovering unconventional actions—proof that this book differs from many others.

At times I felt I could hold the narrative in my hands like a lyrical poem, discern its symbolic functions—yet one thing remained impossible: to complete it with my own fiction. Bewitched senses! Premonitions, revelations.

The charm lies in the force of communication, in the way Doina Ruști allows mystery to reveal itself. There is euphoria here, a resonance with the strange, the miraculous, the attraction of the unknown moment that keeps me awake and makes me return to reread entire pages. Her stories endure through passionate intensity, narrative flair, and exuberant imagination.

These are extremely refined psychological observations, beyond the clichés through which we are taught to view the world. The laws of attraction prove neither linear nor predictable—something from the hidden zones of the self seeks and finds what appeases emotional hunger in another being. Depravity, in fact, means surrendering to one’s inner demons—always hungry, and ever hungrier once you begin to feed them.

“The ‘depravities’ in Doina Ruști’s volume are hypnotic stories, told briskly and with a steady hand—textual realities built from the blend of documented fact and fiction, with the latter ultimately prevailing.”

The itinerary of “debauchery” is recorded in a cosmopolitan and archaic register: beggars, lost treasures, many other stylized stories wrapped harmoniously and elegantly, misty like a local legend, like a Dâmbovița myth. With vividly described garments and objects, with fatal women lost in mystical, enigmatic passions.

The language matches these tableaux—precious and priceless—confirming a novelist who is a stylist, an aesthete, and a creator of evocative scenes and atmosphere. Doina Ruști, a true “trademark.”

See also Critical Reception

and BIBLIOGRAPHY