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I'm once again enjoying Radio Romania International.
Radio Romania is hosting Mircea Eliade week, a cultural program celebrating 100 years since the birth of one of the greatest Romanian figures of contemporary culture.
One of the most renowned specialists in the comparative history of religions, a reputed prose writer, essayist and philosopher, Mircea Eliade was profoundly marked by his Romanian origins. He used to define the state of being Romanian as, quote “living, expressing and capitalizing on this world among worlds”, unquote.
He was born 100 years ago in Bucharest and went through many experiences and several stages of learning before writing, in 1949, his monumental Treaty of the History of Religions. At the age of 21 he graduated from the Faculty of Letters to study Sanskrit and Yoga with professor Dasgupta. He got his Ph.D. degree with a dissertation on this topic and then discovered Giovanni Papini in Italy, who became a literary model for him. In Bucharest he published novels, short stories and essays which earned him recognition as one of the best writers of the generation of young reformers of Romanian culture in the 1930s.
A great critic of communism, after the war Eliade exiled himself to Paris. From 1957 until and 1986 when he died, he lived in Chicago, where he was the head of the History of Religions chair at Chicago University, a position that was to be occupied after his death , by another famous Romnian – Ioan Petru Culianu Eliade ‘s masterpiece was the History of Religions Beliefs and Ideas, for which the French government awarded him the Legion D’ Honneur and the French Academy offered him the Bordin Award, making him a unique figure in Romanian culture. Besides over 40 scientific studies, translated into 16 languages, Eliade also wrote 20 novels, including Maitreyi, Wedding in Heaven and Miss Christina, written in or translated from Romanian, “the language I dream in”, as Eliade used to say.
In both his literary and scientific work Eliade was deeply Romanian, confirming one of the basic characteristics of the Romanian literary Diaspora, which also included Eugen Ionescu and Emil Cioran. He was Romanian but also a European, as in a paper published in 1953 he prophetically defined Romania’s role within a United Europe and the vitality of a people that survived through culture: “In the space that was home to Zamolxis, Orpheus and the mystery of Miorita or the Ewe Lamb and Mason Manole, where the archaic Christianity, Rome and Greece expanded, this is where spiritual Europe took shape, and there, where death can still be celebrated as a wedding, the springs of spirituality are still intact”.
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