摘要：The narrative fiction which openly claims to document the patriotic agenda of modernization is proper to both the writers and the literary language of national states. For the most part, it is cultural practice rather than aesthetic endeavour. Its ideology and discourse are underpinned by notions of alterity, clash of civilizations, marginality, etc. My case in point example is Radu Rosetti's early 20 th century writings, which fit the profile of deliberate as well as unintentionally humorous discrimination between east and west, Romanianism and otherness, etc. What is more, they signal a number of political and aesthetic values strikingly familiar to early 21 st century Romanians too. The collective quest they embarked on in the first decade of the century to gain (more than) admission to European Union rings the same bell. In Romanian mainstream public narratives Europe was, and sometimes still is, the utopia "symbolized by the names Rome, Jerusalem and Athens" (Todorov 2010: 169). These moments in our national time are part of a genealogy which goes even deeper. The work of Radu Rosetti summarizes some of the most influential (mis)conceptions about the Moldavian self, working hard to become Romanian. The representation of such popular views on nation-building amounts to ideology effectively at work in literature. The rhetoric consists in the emphasis laid on the fetish of progress used to critically asses the time-honoured beliefs, authority figures or traditions of previous generations. The purpose is to communicate that borders are never completely erased and admission comes at a price. The public language that tells this story relies on the same old definitions of the other, which only comes to prove that the usefulness of the terms Radu Rosetti employed has never diminished. Under scrutiny is the tried-and-tested strategy of promoting one's culture and ethnicity as a body of evidence the other needs to cope with under the threat of retribution. This na.ve trail of thought interprets the cultural memory of the multi-ethnic/racial, and even cosmopolitan, world Radu Rosseti's protagonists live in. The rather surprising point made is that, less than two hundred years ago or so, mostly the urban area of nowadays eastern Romania was something of a melting pot. His work names Greeks, Turks, Russians, Albanians, Jews,
关键词：Western-oriented discourse; ethnocentrism; threshold-identity; ; nation and modernization; Romanianism
