Mircea Eliade, under the Terror of History (1941-1945)
Mircea Eliade, under the Terror of History (1941-1945)

Summary/Abstract: This study makes a radiography of the 1941-1945 period, which Mircea Eliade spend in Lisbon, as cultural counsellor, after having left Romania (as it proved later, for ever), in April 1940, under extremely tense historical and political circumstances. I examine not only the writings he published during this time span--books and essays circulated both in Portugal and Romania—but also the genesis of his editorial projects, which would configure the author's later literary works and those on the phenomenology of religion. I closely scrutinise the trajectory of Mircea Eliade, who took great pains to distance himself from Romanian issues (in the 1930s, they had made him align himself with the Iron Guard), in order to construct his career as an internationally acknowledged writer. In the main, the reading grid by means of which I investigate the evolution of the writer is provided by the journal that Eliade kept throughout "the Portuguese period"; it remained quasi-unknown for about half a century, until the Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, decided to print it, in 2006, under the title The Portuguese Journal.

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