Specchi paralleli: Mircea Eliade, diplomatico in Portogallo. Identità e nazionalismo culturale
In parallel mirrors: Mircea Eliade, diplomat in Portugal. On identity and cultural nationalism

Summary/Abstract: Published in 2016, 30 years after the death of Mircea Eliade, the "Portuguese Diary", the only one uncensored by the author himself, has enjoyed the attention of specialists and a small circle of readers of his work, but unfortunately not of a commensurate editorial campaign. The diary is an unmistakable testimony to Eliade's clear, prescient vision of the danger of Bolshevism and the total destruction of the values of Romanian modernity. In parallel with the diary, it is absolutely necessary today to reconsider his writings from that period, in order to understand in context both the cultural nationalism that characterised him and his cultural and diplomatic contribution, the role and nature of the historical studies he freely undertook at that time. I propose an integrated reading of Eliade's Portuguese texts and his diary in relation to the studies that accompanied the critical edition of the latter. I will seek to demonstrate that Eliade constructs a complex textual system (diary, studies, articles), a cathedral that allows him to be both inside worlds/mirrors as well as outside them. Eliade translates himself from one textual medium to another with the same total commitment. Eliade offers us a unique case in Romanian cultural diplomacy, in the midst of the World War, constructing a historical device of the identity of the nation in whose service he is in Lisbon, of the "Latins of the East", and another, of the country towards which he makes the most profound gesture of respect: that of writing an extremely well-documented, but also philosophical, history to be transferred to the neo-Romanic (Romanian) culture at the opposite end of Europe. A Europe on fire.

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