The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter

A new translation of the only novel by lauded Romanian literary critic Matei Călinescu An NYRB Classics Original It was the late 1950s and the Communist regime of Romania was at its most punitively unforgiving when Matei Calinescu, who had just graduated from the University of Bucharest, conceived of Zacharias Lichter. I must create a myth, he jotted in his diary, and become its hero--that's my idea . . . A] Judeo-German metaphysician, descended as if from the XVIIIth century (or that's how he likes to think of himself) who talks] about responsibility, about a dialogue of purity with God, about perplexity facing the void. In the following years, Zacharias Lichter-- madman, fool, philosopher, and the weirdest of rebels without a cause--would come to life in Calinescu's fictional account of his life and opinions, a book written for his private amusement since he assumed the censors would never permit its publication. He was wrong about that, however. The censors were completely oblivious to the subversive humor and intent of his book, which became a cult classic.