Between the Devil’s Waters and the Fall into History or an Alternate Account of Mircea Eliade’s Diopteries
Between the Devil’s Waters and the Fall into History or an Alternate Account of Mircea Eliade’s Diopteries

Summary/Abstract: Mircea Eliade’s high school years and early intellectual formation have been reconstructed mainly from his Memoirs and from the Novel of the Nearsighted Adolescent. The journals of the “nearsighted adolescent” (1920-1925) are only partially published and known. Eliade himself never intended to publish them as such. They are however the most important source for that period. Researching their manuscripts preserved in the Library of the Romanian Academy and in “Mircea Eliade Archive” (custody of Mircea Handoca), we attempted to shed more light on some aspects of his early intellectual formation. Two aspects of it, ignored so far, requested special attention: eroticism and politics. We brought evidence of the interest manifested by high school students for anti-Semitism, socialism and anarchism, and discussed Eliade’s attitude towards these ideologies as well as his relationship with his Jewish classmates.

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