ROMANIAN PASSENGERS LOOKING OUT OF THE TRAIN WINDOW. AN ATTEMPT OF CULTURAL HISTORY (1830-1930). REVIEW

Abstract

The book is a cultural and social research on the train journey written by the historian Radu Mârza, “a passionate traveller” (Mârza, 2020, p. 9), who documented himself carefully and passionately in relation to the topic of the landscape viewed by travellers of Romanian origin who travelled by train during the first century of railway history (1830-1930). The author not only likes to travel, but also to write about the others’ travels revealing that, during his book readings, he discovered “that behind a simple account of a train journey there is a whole world, made up of little landscape and from many people, caught in a complicated – and fascinating – network of social and cultural relationships. This is how things look from and on the train” (Mârza, 2020, p. 189; my translation). In order to restore the atmosphere of those times, but also to stimulate our appetite for reading, Radu Mârza reproduces within the volume, in extenso, various quotations from the studied period sources – the travel writings as the documentary foundation of this book (memorial works, correspondence, reports published in the press, travel books).