Meetings with students are always beautiful — warm, alive, and impossible to forget.
A few days ago, I visited Colegiul Național Mihai Viteazul in Bucharest, a top-ranking high school located in the city center, on Protopopescu Boulevard, in an imposing building that seems to have stepped straight out of an interwar novel.
It wasn’t an ordinary encounter, but a vibrant discussion about my novel Platanos, held immediately after the students had finished reading it — filled with sharp, genuine questions.
I was amazed by their depth, most of them being tenth graders, and by the richness of their reading experiences: from Ionesco’s Rhinoceros to Camus’s The Plague, and to contemporary dystopias — everything connected naturally to the world of Platanos.
You can sense some of that atmosphere in this short video.
Many of the questions circled around the ending. That’s why I feel the need to repeat here what I told them: revolutions are irreversible, like any metamorphosis. Anamorphic acts never restore the original state — not after rebellion, nor after battle, not even after a mere act of insurgence. Once transformation begins, there’s no turning back to the world that was.
And then, one of the students asked: Why was the man born from the snows of a long-ago Christmas?
My brief answer: as a reply to les Neiges d’Antan.
I didn’t wish to sadden them, nor to prolong the tension of Platanos, but to end with Sisinel’s dream — the dreamer, the innocent, the savior of values, the pure soul.
In his dream, return is still possible.
That’s why I didn’t expand on the world of post-apocalyptic vegetal beings. Everything that happens in this novel belongs to Sisinel — to his hopes. Isn’t that what you all asked for?
For ten years, I’ve read letters from students across the country, and in all of them there lingered the same thought — nostalgic longing for better times, for the salvation of values.
Sisinel doesn’t represent harsh reality, but the naïve dream, the inviolable part of the human being.
We’ll never know if his dream belongs to everyone. The novel’s ending belongs exclusively to Sisinel — it’s meant for lovers of fairy tales.
Is it the ending for everyone?
We’ll never know. Reality is versatile, deceptive. I don’t believe in a universal vision, nor in a shared ending.
On the last page of Platanos, the story you are writing begins.
Doina Ruști, Platanos, Youngart, 2025
