When Biblioteca pentru Toti, the most popular publishing house in Romania, printed 100,160 copies of Mateiu I. Caragiale's Craii de Curtea-veche (The Old Court Rakes, 1929) in 1974, the novelist's fame achieved a new dimension and the work became an instant classic. Caragiale, who had recorded in his Jurnal (Journal, published in Opere, 1936) with undisguised surprise that the book had sold 1,400 copies shortly after its publication in 1929, could not have dreamed such a success likely. Nor could he have envisioned the revival of public interest in his unusual life, which was dramatized in a series of recitals staged in sold-out performances at the Nottara Theater in Bucharest in the mid 1970s. The writer had, after all, spent most of his life in the shadow of his famous father, the dramatist Ion Luca Caragiale, and had struggled with self-doubt and agonizing feelings of inadequacy.

Mateiu Ioan Caragiale was born on 12 March 1885 in...