The article published by The Literary Encyclopedia traces the history and symbolism of the Spân, or Beardless Man, a character found in folktales, humorous stories, and beliefs circulated throughout South-Eastern Europe. Beginning with the word’s movement across the Balkan languages and with traditional representations of the beardless male figure, the study describes the Spân as a liminal being: seductive, ambiguous, difficult to classify, and endowed above all with the power of speech.
In Doina Ruști’s interpretation, the Beardless Man is more than an embodiment of cunning. He belongs to crossroads, roads, and plains scorched by the summer heat, where he appears as an illusion capable of changing a traveller’s fate. “The Beardless Men are the gods of deception,” the novelist writes, defining them as figures poised between enchantment and fraud, between seduction, rhetoric, and the gratuitous desire to lead others astray. At the end of the study, the Beardless Man becomes “the phantom of summer roads,” an archetype of instability and Balkan temptation.
The analysis draws on folkloric and lexicographical sources, including the tales collected in the nineteenth century by B. P. Hasdeu, while also recalling characters from Ruști’s novels. Tuică, from The Phanariot Manuscript, is one such figure, while Năltărog from Homeric and numerous characters from Doina Ruști’s urban legends can also be seen as related to this archetype.
The publication of the study in an international literary encyclopedia reaffirms Doina Ruști’s authority in the fields of literary Balkanism, folklore, and the cultural imagination of South-Eastern Europe. These theoretical interests are also organically embedded in her fiction, where traditional beliefs are transformed into personal mythologies, characters, and original narrative mechanisms.
Literary criticism has consistently noted this dimension of her work. Studies devoted to Doina Ruști’s novels describe a world in which Romanian mythology, Balkan culture, history, and magic converge. One may think of the botanical myths in Homeric or of the magical recipes that become the very machinery of the fantastic in Mâța Vinerii / The Book of Perilous Dishes. In The Phanariot Manuscript, eighteenth-century Bucharest is recreated through a combination of documentary detail, sensuality, language, and fabulation.
These directions can also be explored on the pages devoted to the Phanariot Trilogy, in which Phanariot Bucharest acquires the coherence of an entire literary universe, as well as in the presentation of the fabulous Lipscani district, a central space of trade, love, curses, and urban legends in Doina Ruști’s fiction. This connection is all the more relevant since the novelist has announced a new novel set on Lipscani Street.
The article in The Literary Encyclopedia presents a prototype that points towards the particular form of the fabulous found in The Phanariot Manuscript. Although Balkanism is connected here with the world of slavery, Wallachian boyars, travellers, merchants, and adventurers arriving from across the Ottoman Empire, its symbolic density and hallucinatory characters are related to the archetype of the mythical Beardless Man.
The same connection between historical evidence, tradition, and invention also underlies the Urban Legends project, devoted to the mythology of Bucharest. The stories begin with objects, places, manuscripts, and figures from the city’s lesser-known history, but transform them into original works of fiction, without claiming to reproduce archival documents or pre-existing folk legends.
Through the study of the Beardless Man, Doina Ruști’s academic research and fiction meet on common ground: the Balkans understood in their essence, as a territory of travelling myths, intermingled languages, seduction, and inexhaustible forms of storytelling.
The complete article is available in The Literary Encyclopedia:
Spânul — The Beardless/Hairless Man: A Balkan Folkloric Archetype
