 With "1916", Aderca was focusing more closely on the social impact of war.A wide fresco of Romania's heavy losses to the Central Powers, and of the human drama they unfold, the book was praised by Lovinescu as an accurate portrayal of the 1914 to 1920 interval, and seen by Cubleșan as compatible with other Romanian depictions of World War I moral conflicts—in works by Camil Petrescu, Cezar Petrescu, Liviu Rebreanu or George Cornea.Aderca's novel, he notes, is an inverted take on the identity struggle depicted in Rebreanu's "Forest of the Hanged", where an ethnic Romanian intellectual reevaluates his allegiance to Austria–Hungary.