In “The Crowd: a Study of the Popular Mind” (1895), Gustave le Bon wrote: “It is only the uniformity of the environment that creates the apparent uniformity of characters. I have shown elsewhere that all mental constitutions contain possibilities of character which may be manifested in consequence of a sudden change of environment”. The present paper understands the concept of “literary space” not only as “setting” or “territory.” A three-dimensional reality cannot convincingly delineate the entire universe of a narrative. At the beginning of the 20th century, Albert Einstein introduced a new variable into the equation: time. Thus, “literary space” or, if we are to use le Bon`s terminology, “environment”, in our understanding, also encompasses the concept of time. Both novels that we analyse are set during the Second World War. However, regarding the proxemics, they diverge fundamentally. Mikhail Bakhtin speaks about chronotopes. A chronotope describes the literary configurations of time and space. The present paper aims at analysing the idea of the Balkanic space in the works of two important Romanian writers: Ion Luca Caragiale and Mateiu Caragiale.