The “Russian Other” played a constitutive role in the shaping of modern Romanian nationalism. The peculiarities of the emerging Romanian national narrative derived as much from the shifting attitudes toward “Otherness” as from the perceived features of the collective “Others.” The importance of this analytical framework can be linked to the overlapping “symbolic geographies” of the ideal “homeland” constantly imagined (and re-imagined) by the Romanian intellectuals of the last two centuries. During the early period of nation-building (before 1914) the fusion of intellectual and political activities in the case of a large part of the Romanian elites lent additional immediacy to such mental constructs. It appears that further research along these lines, even if past its prime in Western scholarship, would still be welcome in the Romanian context.