This volume was published in 1919. Excerpt from a Reviewer - 4 STARS Reviewer: stbalbach - - January 12, 2011 Subject: The Lucky Mill Slavici wrote many novels and short stories, but his best known, outside of Romania, is The Lucky Mill (1881), adapted to film in 1957 as "The Mill of Good Luck". It appears to be the only major work of his that has been translated into English, in 1919. Like many of his stories, The Lucky Mill is about peasant life in remote mountainous regions of Transylvania, where the modern rule of law conflicts with ancient customs. "Big Men", or Chieftains, who manage roaming pig herds in the woods, rule over the local peasants with impunity, stealing and murdering. They are immune from the law, which exists for the benefit of the powerful (whom the Chieftains work for), while the peasants live by ancient codes of honor. It's the kind of story any poor person living today in Iraq or Afghanistan or Chechnya would immediately connect with, but is probably remote to modern readers living in a society governed securely by law. The story is effective at conveying the feeling of oppressive fear in ones own home, of being trapped and forced into a degrading situation and unable to do anything about it, with no one but yourself to protect your interests. ...................................................................................... Excerpt from the Foreword: With the advent of national independence, Roumanian literature began to attain an originality which distinguishes it among Europe's other litera- tures. This is primarily due to the renaissance of everything Roumanian during the last twenty-five years. The writers freed themselves from the tradition, which had taught them to imitate for- eign authors; and they began now to seek inspi- ration in the fertile and rich soil of their own country. It is only too natural that poetry should find its stimulus in the folklore, and prose in the fairy-mystical tale of the people. The greatest part of modern Roumanian liter- ature deals with the stupendous problem that con- fronts Roumania to-day: the struggle between old and new Roumania, between its oriental and its occidental elements. Carried further, this is the conflict between sound patriarchalism and the bra- vado-culture of the overmodernized city-dweller. A native of Transylvania, loan Slavici is of that Roumanian stock which has most stubbornly kept to its Roman origin. On the other hand, being cut off by the Carpathians from a close intercourse with the Balkans, Transylvania has been forced least to yield its national characteristics to the Greek-Slav influence which constitutes the oriental element in the people of the kingdom of Rouma- nia. Also their contact with the Germanic peoples has displaced the Greek Catholic religion by the Roman Catholic and Protestant. The Roumanians of Transylvania are more genuinely sensitive, their horizon wider, and their natures more plastic to foreign influences. The Transylvanian element is surely the richest and most fertile. Here the people are more primi- tive in their feelings and their ideals. It is the life of this peasantry that Slavici introduces In Roumanian literature, that is sweeping like a new breeze over the literature of a people infected with the germs of an Ill-digested philosophy.