„Ca o flacără întunecată”. Mircea Eliade şi Ioan Petru Culianu: noi completări documentare
“Like a dark flame”. Mircea Eliade and Ioan Petru Culianu: new documentary contributions

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses 29 new letters of Ioan Petru Culianu to Mircea Eliade from the years 1972–1982. They were found in the ‘Mircea Eliade Papers’ at the University of Chicago Library, in one of the boxes with manuscripts damaged in the fire that devastated Eliade’s office in December 1985. The letters required a painful transcription and a careful reconstruction of the text from the parts burned by fire or washed by water. They are published here (addenda II), along with other previously unpublished materials: three autograph dedications to Eliade from the years 1979–1981 (addenda III), four autograph dedications by Eliade to Culianu from the years 1975–1981 (addenda IV), three curricula vitae et studiorum from the years 1973–1976 (addenda V), and the foreword to the second version (1975) of Culianu’s autobio¬graphic novel Râul Selenei (addendum VI). Some of them come from the ‘I.P. Culianu Papers’ and from the personal archive of Ugo Bianchi. Corroborated with the data provided by the previously published letters as well as by other sources, these materials allow us to propose a chronology of Culianu’s correspondence with Eliade (addendum I). The chronology shows about 220 letters of Culianu (against 70 of Eliade), out of which only 70 are known so far. The newly discovered letters provide additional information regarding Culianu’s studies, his early projects to specialise in Indian religions and to go to India, his unpublished literary and scientific manuscripts, the elaboration of his published works, etc., as well as formerly unknown particulars of his life and relationship with Eliade. The article examines specifically the evolution of Culianu’s work on Eliade, from the book begun in 1974 and published in 1978 to his later efforts towards clarifying Eliade’s prewar Romanian political past.

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