Abstract:
The Romanian writer Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu, settled in France, published in 1949 one of his outstanding works, a best-selling novel, "The 25th Hour". It depicts the plight of a naive Romanian young farmhand, Johann Moritz, under German, Soviet and American occupation of Central Europe. This work is representative of what is called a novel-within-a-novel. One of the characters, Traian Koruga, is deeply unsettled because of what he sees as the machinism and inhumanity of the "Western technical society". He is writing a novel, also entitled The 25th Hour, about Johann Moritz and the ordeal awaiting mankind.
