„Întotdeauna far într-o lume nihilistă”. Mircea Eliade şi Ioan Petru Culianu – completări documentare
‘Always a beacon light in a nihilistic world’. Mircea Eliade and Ioan Petru Culianu – documentary contributions

Summary/Abstract: The main documentary evidence of the long relationship between Mircea Eliade and Ioan Petru Culianu lies in their journals and correspondence. However these have not yet been entirely published. This article throws new light on their relationship on the basis of the following inedited material published in the Addenda to the article: 1) references to Mircea Eliade in I.P. Culianu’s autobiographic novel Râul Selenei (finalised in 1976), which is based on his journal and recollections; 2) three new letters of Culianu to Eliade from 1976 and 1984; 3) thirteen autograph dedications to Eliade from the years 1976–1985; 4) seventeen letters of Culianu regarding the posterity of Mircea Eliade, dating from the years 1986–1991 (four of which are addressed to Christinel Eliade). The inedited material is preserved in Eliade’s archives of Chicago (now in the University of Chicago Library) and Paris (now in the Centre of Euroasiatic and Afroasiatic Studies, Bucharest). We have corroborated these data with other unpublished material: inedited notes from Eliade’s journal, his daily notebooks, letters from Culianu’s family to Christinel Eliade, and letters of I.P. Culianu from private archives. These new materials enable us to shed more light on Culianu’s biography and work and allow us to formulate some hypotheses on less-researched topics such as: the fate of his letters to Eliade absent from Mircea Eliade Papers (University of Chicago Library), his personal philosophy during the Italian years (1972–1976), the suspicion of „anti-Semitism” cast on him by some fellow Romanians from Paris (1976), his conflict with the poet Horia Stamatu (1978), the initiative to found a “Mircea Eliade Association” (1984), the publishing of the fourth volume of Eliade’s History of Religious Ideas (1986–1991), etc.

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