page_title: Mircea Eliade
section_title: Criterion and Cuvântul
hierarchical_section_title: Mircea Eliade / Biography / Criterion and Cuvântul
caption_attribution_description: Română: Casa (Bulevardul Dacia, București) unde a trăit scriitorul Mircea Eliade între 1934-1940
context_page_description: Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential. One of his most influential contributions to religious studies was his theory of Eternal Return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but, at least to the minds of the religious, actually participate in them.
  His literary works belong to the fantastic and autobiographical genres. The best known are the novels Maitreyi, Noaptea de Sânziene, Isabel și apele diavolului and Romanul Adolescentului Miop, the novellas Domnișoara Christina and Tinerețe fără tinerețe, and the short stories Secretul doctorului Honigberger and La Țigănci.
  Early in his life, Eliade was a journalist and essayist, a disciple of Romanian far-right philosopher and journalist Nae Ionescu, and a member of the literary society Criterion.
context_section_description: After contributing various and generally polemical pieces in university magazines, Eliade came to the attention of journalist Pamfil Șeicaru, who invited him to collaborate on the nationalist paper Cuvântul, which was noted for its harsh tones. By then, Cuvântul was also hosting articles by Nae Ionescu.
  As one of the figures in the Criterion literary society (1933–1934), Eliade's initial encounter with the traditional far right was polemical: the group's conferences were stormed by members of A. C. Cuza's National-Christian Defense League, who objected to what they viewed as pacifism and addressed antisemitic insults to several speakers, including Sebastian; in 1933, he was among the signers of a manifesto opposing Nazi Germany's state-enforced racism.
  In 1934, at a time when Sebastian was publicly insulted by Nae Ionescu, who prefaced his book (De două mii de ani...) with thoughts on the "eternal damnation" of Jews, Mircea Eliade spoke out against this perspective, and commented that Ionescu's references to the verdict "Outside the Church there is no salvation" contradicted the notion of God's omnipotence. However, he contended that Ionescu's text was not evidence of antisemitism.
  In 1936, reflecting on the early history of the Romanian Kingdom and its Jewish community, he deplored the expulsion of Jewish scholars from Romania, making specific references to Moses Gaster, Heimann Hariton Tiktin and Lazăr Șăineanu. Eliade's views at the time focused on innovation—in the summer of 1933, he replied to an anti-modernist critique written by George Călinescu:
  All I wish for is a deep change, a complete transformation. But, for God's sake, in any direction other than spirituality.
  He and friends Emil Cioran and Constantin Noica were by then under the influence of Trăirism, a school of thought that was formed around the ideals expressed by Ionescu. A form of existentialism, Trăirism was also the synthesis of traditional and newer right-wing beliefs. Early on, a public polemic was sparked between Eliade and Camil Petrescu: the two eventually reconciled and later became good friends.
  Like Mihail Sebastian, who was himself becoming influenced by Ionescu, he maintained contacts with intellectuals from all sides of the political spectrum: their entourage included the right-wing Dan Botta and Mircea Vulcănescu, the non-political Petrescu and Ionel Jianu, and Belu Zilber, who was a member of the illegal Romanian Communist Party.
  The group also included Haig Acterian, Mihail Polihroniade, Petru Comarnescu, Marietta Sadova and Floria Capsali.
  He was also close to Marcel Avramescu, a former Surrealist writer whom he introduced to the works of René Guénon. A doctor in the Kabbalah and future Romanian Orthodox cleric, Avramescu joined Eliade in editing the short-lived esoteric magazine Memra (the only one of its kind in Romania).
  Among the intellectuals who attended his lectures were Mihai Şora (whom he deemed his favorite student), Eugen Schileru and Miron Constantinescu—known later as, respectively, a philosopher, an art critic, and a sociologist and political figure of the communist regime. Mariana Klein, who became Șora's wife, was one of Eliade's female students, and later authored works on his scholarship.
  Eliade later recounted that he had himself enlisted Zilber as a Cuvântul contributor, in order for him to provide a Marxist perspective on the issues discussed by the journal. Their relation soured in 1935, when the latter publicly accused Eliade of serving as an agent for the secret police, Siguranța Statului (Sebastian answered to the statement by alleging that Zilber was himself a secret agent, and the latter eventually retracted his claim).
caption: Eliade's home in Bucharest (1934–1940)
exif: {"Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon EOS 40D", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image DateTime": "2008:11:30 15:16:00", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "208", "GPS GPSVersionID": "[2, 2, 0, 0]", "Image GPSInfo": "8670", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "10560", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "10149", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/60", "EXIF FNumber": "71/10", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Manual", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "100", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2008:11:30 15:16:00", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2008:11:30 15:16:00", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "6", "EXIF ApertureValue": "45/8", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "17", "EXIF SubSecTime": "00", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "00", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "00", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "3888", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2592", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "8624", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "324000/73", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "2592000/583", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "2", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Manual Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard"}