Born: Bucharest, Romania 9 March 1907. Education: Spiru Haret Lyceum, Bucharest, 1917-25; studied philosophy, University of Bucharest, 1925-28, doctorate in philosophy, 1933; studied Indian philosophy, Calcutta, 1929-31. Military Service: Artillery regiment, 1932. Family: Married 1) Nina Mare§, 1934 (died 1944); 2) Christinel Cotrescu, 1950. Career: Lecturer, University of Bucharest, 1933-39; cultural attache, Romanian legation, London, 1940-41; cultural counselor, Romanian legation, Lisbon, Spain, 1941-45; lecturer, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, 1946-48; lecturer, Sorbonne, Paris, 1948-56; fellow, Bollingen Foundation, 1951-55; visiting professor, 1956-57, and professor, 1957-86, of the history of religions, University of Chicago. Awards: Numerous honorary doctorates, including Yale, 1966, Oberlin, 1972, and the Sorbonne, 1976. Member: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1966; Royal Academy of Belgium, 1975; corresponding member, Austrian Academy of Sciences, 1973. Died: Chicago, Illinois, 22 April 1986.
Publications
Fiction
Isabel §i apele diavolului. 1930.
Maitreyi. 1933; as Bengal Nights, 1993, translated by Catherine Spencer. Intoarcerea din rai. 1934.
Lumina ce se stinge. 1934.
Huliganii. 2 vols. 1935.
Domni^oara Christina. 1936.
§arpele. 1937.
Nunta in cer. 1939.
Secretul doctorului Honigberger and Nopti la Serampore. 1940; as Two Tales of the Occult, translated by W. A. Coates, 1970.
Pe strada Mantuleasa. 1968.
La tiganci §i altepovestiri. 1969.
Noaptea de Sanziene. 2 vols, 1971; as The Forbidden Forest, translated by M. L. Ricketts and M. P. Stevenson, 1978. Tales of the Sacred and Supernatural. 1981.
Mystic Stories: The Sacred and the Profane, translated by Ana Cartianu. 1992.
Nonfiction India. 1934.
Alchimia Asiatica. 1935.
Yoga: Essai sur les origines de la mystique indienne. 1936.
Cosmologie §i alchimie babiloniana. 1937.
Metallurgy, Magic, and Alchemy. 1938.
Mitul reintegrarii. 1942.
Comentarii la legenda Megterului Manole. 1943.
Traite d’histoire des religions. 1949; as Patterns in Comparative Religion, translated by R. Sheed, 1958.
Le Mythe de l’eternel retour. 1949; as The Myth of the Eternal Return, translated by W. R. Trask, 1954.
Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaiques de l’extase. 1951; as Shamanism. Archaic Techniques of Extasy, translated by W. R. Trask, 1964.
Images et symboles. Essai sur le symbolisme magico-religieux. 1952; as Images and Symbols, translated by P. Mairet, 1961.
Le Yoga: Immortalite et liberte. 1954; as Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, translated by W. R. Trask, 1958.
Forgerons et alchimistes. 1956; as The Forge and the Crucible, translated by S. Corrin, 1962.
Das Heilige und das Profane. 1957; translated from the French manuscript by E. Grassi; as The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, translated by W. R. Trask, 1959.
Mythes, reves et mysteres. 1957; as Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, translated by P. Mairet, 1960.
Naissances mystiques: Essai sur quelques types d’initiation. 1959; as Birth and Rebirth: The Religious Meaning of Initiation in Human Culture, translated by W. R. Trask, 1958.
Mephistopheles et l’Androgyne. 1962; as Mephistopheles and the Androgyne, translated by J. M. Cohen, 1965.
Patanjali et le Yoga. 1962; as Patanjali and Yoga, translated by C. L. Markmann, 1969.
Aspects du mythe. 1963; as Myth and Reality, translated by W. R. Trask, 1963.
The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion. 1969.
De Zalmoxis a Gengis Khan. 1970; as Zalmoxis: The Vanishing God, translated by W. R. Trask, 1972.
Australian Religions: An Introduction. 1973.
Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions: Essays in Comparative Religions. 1976.
Histoire des croyances et des idees religieuses. 3 vols. 1976-83; as A History of Religious Ideas, 3 vols., translated by W. R. Trask, A. Hiltebeitel, and D. Apostolos-Cappadona, 1978-85.
The Eliade Guide to World Religions, with Ioan P. Couliano and Hillary S. Wiesner. 1991.
Biblioteca Maharajului. 1991.
Erotica mistica in Bengal. 1994.
Misterele §i initierea orientala: Scrieri din tinerete. (1926), 1998.
Essays
Soliloquii. 1932.
Oceanografie. 1934.
Fragmentarium. 1939.
Insula lui Euthanasius. 1943.
Symbolism, the Sacred, and the Arts, edited by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona. 1985.
Other
§antier. 1935.
Amintiri. I (1907-28). 1966.
Fragments d’un journal. 1973; as No Souvenirs: Journal, 1957-1969, translated by F. H. Johnson, Jr., 1977.
L’Epreuve du labyrinthe: Entretiens avec Claude-Henri Rocquet. 1978; as Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet, translated by D. Coltman, 1982.
Autobiography, translated by Mac Linscott Ricketts, 2 vols., 1981-88. Journal I (1949-1955), II (1957-1969), III (1970-1978), IV (1979-1985). 1989-90.
L’histoire des religions a-t-elle un sens?: correspondance, 1926-1959,edited by Natale Spineto. 1994.
Editor, Zalmoxis. 1938-42.
Editor, From Pimitives to Zen: A Thematic Sourcebook of the History of Religions. 1967.
Critical Studies:
Religion on Trial: Mircea Eliade and His Critics by Guilford Dudley III, 1977; Mircea Eliade, in Cahiers de l’Herne, no. 33, edited by Constantine Tacou, 1978; Hermeneutica lui Mircea Eliade by Adrian Marino, 1980; Waiting for the Dawn: Mircea Eliade in Perspective, edited by David Carrasco and Jane Swanberg, 1985, 1991; Mircea Eliade: The Romanian Roots, 1907-1945 by Mac Linscott Ricketts, 2 vols., 1988; The Theology and Philosophy of Eliade: A Search for the Centre by Carl Olson, 1992; Mircea Eliade’s Vision for a New Humanism by David Cave, 1993; Mircea Eliade, spirit al amplitudinii by Eugen Simion, 1995; Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of Religion by Bryan S. Rennie, 1996; Changing Religious Worlds: The Meaning and End of Mircea Eliade, edited by Bryan Rennie, 2000; Dosarul Eliade, 5 vols., by Mircea Handoca, 1998-2001.
Mircea Eliade pursued two careers throughout his life, that of the scholar and that of the creative writer. He first achieved fame in his native Romania as a novelist in the decade before the outbreak of World War II. It was a time when he was deepening his knowledge of Indian religions and myths and publishing the first of a remarkable series of works on these subjects. After he left Romania he gained an international reputation as an exegete of religions and myths, initially in France, from 1945 to 1956, and then in the United States, from 1956 to 1986. He ranged widely in his chosen field from the occult beliefs of the ancient Dacians to the mythologies of India and the supernatural in Australian aboriginal religions. His work was pioneering, and he contributed enormously to the advancement of the humanistic sciences. Scholarship now came first, and fiction was a secondary preoccupation, though he wrote several of his prose masterpieces during these later years.
Eliade himself perceived no barrier between science and fiction. For him, the one illuminated the other. His main concern was to grasp the human spirit and to chart the human destiny, tasks, he was convinced, that could best be accomplished if culture were taken as a whole and not separated into compartments. Not surprisingly, then, certain themes are common to both his scholarly research and his literary creativity. His studies of Indian civilization in India between 1929 and 1931 exerted an enormous enduring influence on him as a scholar, a teacher, and a novelist. He was struck especially by the contrast between India, a civilization that had preserved a mysterious link to the world of myth and the spirit, and the West, a civilization in thrall to rationalism and technology. Thus Maitreyi (Bengal Nights) is both a love story between a European man and an Indian woman and a philosophical novel on the impermeability of civilizations, while Noaptea de Sanziene (The Forbidden Forest), his other masterpiece of fiction, combines the real and the fantastic and draws on his investigations of myth and his skill at delineating character.
In contrast to his scholarly works, Eliade’s fiction is little known outside Romania. But in Romania, ever since the appearance of his first important novels in the early 1930s, his literary work has aroused lively criticism and discussion. His admirers and even some of his detractors recognize his innovations of theme and character as powerful stimulants in the development of the Romanian novel. He took the Romanian novel out of its traditional modes, endowing it with another kind of conflict. His heroes were no longer the young men from the countryside who struggled to adapt to urban life or or the small town intellectuals who were overwhelmed by the inertia of provincial life. Rather, they thought differently about the world, and they perceived their own destiny differently from that of their fathers as traditional values crumbled and nothing filled the void.
Eliade was intent on ”renewing” the Romanian novel by introducing new subject matter and ”authentic” characters. He championed the novel of ideas and strong characters who experienced ideas and had their own view of the world and a consciousness of their place in it. He changed the emphasis in the novel from the sentimental drama to the drama of cognition. Perhaps this is why he gave young men, rather than old men and women, a privileged place in his novels; he thought them better able to endure the curse of existence. As for form, he was conservative. Although he was reading Gide, Huxley, Joyce, and others who were experimenting with form, he insisted that the novel preserve traditional structures. He thought that the ”novel should be a novel,” that the author should let his characters be themselves and refrain from analyzing them or even commenting upon them.
Eliade’s novels fall into several stylistic categories. The first consisted of his ”Indian” novels, notably Bengal Nights, which gained recognition for him in Romania as a significant writer. Based on his own experiences in Calcutta, Bengal Nights recounts his love for a charming and puzzling young Indian woman. But love is also a mode of cognition; through it he discovers the Indian spirit and experiences a revelation of his own soul. In Huliganii [The Hooligans] he tried a formula new to Romanian literature—the existentialist revolt. He thus moved from the autobiographical novel to the novel of observation and the creation of character types. It is realistic, as he turns to Romanian society and the younger generation, frenetic, confused, and certain that it was descending into tragedy. In this novel of ideas Eliade has captured the spirit of a society that is slowly disintegrating, where the hooligans test various philosophies of existence but are united in their abandonment of the moral values their parents defended. The solutions he proposed—revolt, a philosophy of despair, the experience of the tragic—were unusual for readers of the time.
Eliade was a master of the fantastic tale, and Domni^oara Christina [Miss Christina] was the first modern fantastic novel in Romanian literature. It tells of a woman, dead at a young age, who returns as a ghost in the dreams of persons staying at her sister’s house through her will, not theirs. Eliade, drawing upon Romanian folklore, is intrigued by the ways in which the fantastic manifests itself in normal people and how they cope with the chaos it causes.
The Forbidden Forest, which Eliade composed between 1949 and 1954 and which many critics regard as his masterpiece, combines in one vast fresco the major themes of his fiction. It is a novel of manners, a political novel, and an erotic novel that portrays Romanian society in the fateful years between 1936 and 1948. But it is, above all, an intellectual novel and a mystic novel. It is about young men who are desperate to escape from history and time and who seek to live in some other dimension and in accordance with other rules.
In his fiction no less than in his explorations of religions and myths, Eliade was moved by the urge to pose fundamental questions about existence. Novels served him as tools to sound the inner life of man in search of the eternal.
