cercetări de istorie literară și folclor ("Literary Theory and Folklore Studies and Research"), from 1952 to 1965. He was reinvited to his post at the Faculty of Letters only in 1961; in the meantime, he produced numerous writings on wide-ranging subjects, from the aesthetic of folk tales to the history of Spanish literature. Research, criticism, writings Călinescu was the author of several fundamental texts of Romanian literary history (Viața lui Mihai Eminescu, Opera lui Mihai Eminescu, and Viața lui Ion Creangă among others). After 1945, he published significant writings on world literature (including Impresii asupra literaturii spaniole, and Scriitori străini.) His study Estetica basmului, devoted to the poetics of Romanian folk tales, underlined the range of his interests. From 1932 to 1962, he published monographs, in separate volumes, on such writers as Eminescu, fabulist Ion Creangă, realist novelist Nicolae Filimon, and poet Grigore Alexandrescu, fictionalized biographies, scholarly studies, and essays. He continued presiding over numerous academic and radio conferences and writing thousands of critical reviews until his death in 1965. Novelist, poet and dramatist Călinescu produced heavily descriptive realist novels in the mode of Honoré de Balzac, often with obvious polemical undertones lurking beneath their apparently objective style. The novel he considered his best, Enigma Otiliei, narrates an unhappy love story; Cartea nunții is a disquisition on marriage; and Bietul Ioanide and Scrinul negru present the problems of intellectuals, all against the backdrop of interwar and immediate postwar Romania. Călinescu also wrote poems (Lauda lucrurilor) and plays (Șun, mit mongol) while continuing to practice journalism, although Cronicile mizantropului abruptly became Cronicile optimistului after the Communists seized power in 1947. Civic and political activity under Communism An intellectual with liberal-left ideas who nonetheless proved flexible enough to write praises of the King under Carol's dictatorship, Călinescu outwardly adhered to the new Communist ideology after 1947, likely noting the practical advantages of such a shift in loyalties. He made numerous research trips to the Soviet Union (Kiev, Moscova, Leningrad appeared in 1949) and the People's Republic of China (Am fost în China nouă, in 1953), publishing his impressions in these two volumes. From 1948 to 1953 Călinescu was mistrusted and marginalized, despite being named to the Academy of the Romanian People's Republic in 1949; even after destalinization began in the Soviet Union in 1953, the Romanian establishment continued to favor the "wooden-tongued," socialist realist models the Soviets had begun to abandon. Călinescu's