MIRCEA ELIADE’S LITERARY TOPOGRAPHIES OF BUCHAREST
MIRCEA ELIADE’S LITERARY TOPOGRAPHIES OF BUCHAREST

Summary/Abstract: This study looks into Mircea Eliade’s literary topography of Bucharest, the city of the writer’s birth and of his imagination. Starting from the centrality of Bucharest and its “ inexhaustible mythology”, the reading journey through the city of Eliade’s heart takes its readers to a metropolis boiling with new ideas and theories, but also sinking into an anguished sense of futility and despair. However, this is just one of the several “plateaus” (in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms) of Eliade’s chart, which connects” rhizomatically” with the sacred plateaus of a “de-terriorialized” and mythically “re-territorialized” city. Under the sign of the labyrinth and the archetypal figure of Ulysses as the eternal wanderer, Eliade explored a space which lies in connection with the whole world of his youth but also with an ancestral world in its most essential and enduring aspects. His first novel Romanul adolescentului miop / The novel of the Short-sighted Adolescent, his city novels Întoarcerea din rai / Return from Heaven, Huliganii / The Hooligans and his fantastic novellas set in the sacred triangle of Mântuleasa, Popa Soare and Pache Protopopescu streets chart a literary map where a Bucharest of the young artist’s mind, a Bucharest scarred by World War I and a transhistorical Bucharest meet on a Möbius strip.

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