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Journal I, 1945-1955
Journal I is a story of revewal—of the new life that began for Mircea Eliade in the fall of 1945 when he became an expatriate. Eliade came to Paris virtually empty-handed, following the death of his first wife and the Soviet takeover of Romania, which made him a persona non grata there. He had left half a lifetime in his parents, whom he never saw again; his library; unpublished and unfinished manuscripts, including the journal notebooks prior to 1940; an academic career; and Zalmoxis , the journal of religious studies he founded.
During the lean years in Paris Eliade lived and worked in small, cold rooms; prepared meals on a Primus stove; pawned his valuables; and asked friends for loans. Eventually he secured a research stipend from the Bollingen Foundation. His ten years in Paris were among his most productive; the books he wrote during this period brought him worldwide acclaim as a historian of religions. He records his first meetings with Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Gershom Scholem, Georges Bataille, André Breton, Raffaele Pettazzoni, and many other scholars and writers.
Eliade also continued to write literary works. Numerous entries describe his five-year struggle with his novel The Forbidden Forest . Spanning the twelve fateful years from 1936 to 1948, it expresses within a fictional framework the central themes of Eliade's work on religions. Writing the novel was a Herculean task in which Eliade summarized and memorialized his old Romanian life.
During the lean years in Paris Eliade lived and worked in small, cold rooms; prepared meals on a Primus stove; pawned his valuables; and asked friends for loans. Eventually he secured a research stipend from the Bollingen Foundation. His ten years in Paris were among his most productive; the books he wrote during this period brought him worldwide acclaim as a historian of religions. He records his first meetings with Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Gershom Scholem, Georges Bataille, André Breton, Raffaele Pettazzoni, and many other scholars and writers.
Eliade also continued to write literary works. Numerous entries describe his five-year struggle with his novel The Forbidden Forest . Spanning the twelve fateful years from 1936 to 1948, it expresses within a fictional framework the central themes of Eliade's work on religions. Writing the novel was a Herculean task in which Eliade summarized and memorialized his old Romanian life.
- GenresRomanian Literature
227 pages, Hardcover
First published August 24, 1990
4 people are currently reading
105 people want to read
About the author
Mircea Eliade
556 books2,697 followersRomanian-born historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, professor at the University of Chicago, and one of the pre-eminent interpreters of world religion in the last century. Eliade was an intensely prolific author of fiction and non-fiction alike, publishing over 1,300 pieces over 60 years. He earned international fame with LE MYTHE DE L'ÉTERNAL RETOUR (1949, The Myth of the Eternal Return), an interpretation of religious symbols and imagery. Eliade was much interested in the world of the unconscious. The central theme in his novels was erotic love.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 16, 2023
When, in 1940, Mircea Eliade left his native Romania to take up the post of cultural attaché in London and later Lisbon, he could not have known that he would only revisit his homeland once before finishing his life as an exile; or that the novels on which he hoped to build a reputation would be all but eclipsed by his ‘scientific’ work as a historian of religions; or that his intellectual flirtation with the Legion of the Archangel Michael, a nationalist movement for spiritual renewal which degenerated into the antisemitic Iron Guard in the late Thirties, would cast a shadow over his last days.
Given the controversy over his attraction to Fascism in this period, it is exasperating that his detailed journals from pre-WWII Romania were lost during the war, although the author may not have wished them all to be published. The journal of his time in Portugal is published separately; this first volume of his journals, translated from the Romanian into English, begins with his arrival in Paris in 1945 and takes us through the ten years he spent in France, establishing his international reputation as a scholar while neglecting his literary Muse: “These past years in which I have written so little fiction have diminished and impoverished me. But the fear that any novel or novella I might write would remain in file folders for many years to come paralyzes me. It seems so useless to spend my time on a ‘work’ that no one will ever read...”
He admits to inoculating his soul “with the poisonous passion for erudition.” While working on his now classic study of shamanism, he experiences a “terrible melancholy, loneliness, and the flavour of futility”; caught up in the enchantment of Midsummer’s Eve, he expects “something to happen to me, something to be revealed to me.” A few days later, travelling on a bus through poppy-studded meadows, he feels as if he is back in his native country: “Once more I realize how much my work and erudition defend me from my longing for the soil and the air from which I have been separated.” But he is conscious that he is destined to achieve a work that no one else can do and for which he must sacrifice his freedom; he has left so much of himself behind that he is now “only a fragment.”
An important breakthrough occurs when he is invited to lecture at Eranos, multi-disciplinary conferences which had been held since 1933 at the lakeside estate of Olga Frobe-Kapteyn, a Theosophist who had come under the influence of Carl Jung, the founder of the school of analytical psychology. In addition to Jung himself, Eliade would meet there with seminal figures in the twentieth-century exploration of ‘religion after religion,’ of whom he gives fascinating snapshots: Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Kabbalah (“A very pleasant face, with large ears that stand out from his head. He speaks broken English with a delightful accent”); the anthropologist Paul Radin (“The face of a shopkeeper, with an enormous paunch and a jolly disposition. He laughs all the time.”); the Hungarian classicist Carl Kerényi (“I suspect him of seeking to ‘publicize’ himself”) with whom he would later fall out; the scholar of Islam, Louis Massignon (“Terribly voluble!”).
Eliade himself would join the roster of regular speakers at Eranos, despite experiencing “the initiatory terror” of cancer: “How unready I am to pass beyond! A feeling of guilt: almost nothing of that which I had to do have I done. The ‘messages’ which only now am I prepared to transmit...” Fortunately, much time remained, as the subsequent volumes of his journal reveal...
There is more on Eliade and religious symbolism in my Goodreads blog: Myth Dancing (Incorporating the Twenty Third Letter). A series of posts on Eliade begins here: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
Given the controversy over his attraction to Fascism in this period, it is exasperating that his detailed journals from pre-WWII Romania were lost during the war, although the author may not have wished them all to be published. The journal of his time in Portugal is published separately; this first volume of his journals, translated from the Romanian into English, begins with his arrival in Paris in 1945 and takes us through the ten years he spent in France, establishing his international reputation as a scholar while neglecting his literary Muse: “These past years in which I have written so little fiction have diminished and impoverished me. But the fear that any novel or novella I might write would remain in file folders for many years to come paralyzes me. It seems so useless to spend my time on a ‘work’ that no one will ever read...”
He admits to inoculating his soul “with the poisonous passion for erudition.” While working on his now classic study of shamanism, he experiences a “terrible melancholy, loneliness, and the flavour of futility”; caught up in the enchantment of Midsummer’s Eve, he expects “something to happen to me, something to be revealed to me.” A few days later, travelling on a bus through poppy-studded meadows, he feels as if he is back in his native country: “Once more I realize how much my work and erudition defend me from my longing for the soil and the air from which I have been separated.” But he is conscious that he is destined to achieve a work that no one else can do and for which he must sacrifice his freedom; he has left so much of himself behind that he is now “only a fragment.”
An important breakthrough occurs when he is invited to lecture at Eranos, multi-disciplinary conferences which had been held since 1933 at the lakeside estate of Olga Frobe-Kapteyn, a Theosophist who had come under the influence of Carl Jung, the founder of the school of analytical psychology. In addition to Jung himself, Eliade would meet there with seminal figures in the twentieth-century exploration of ‘religion after religion,’ of whom he gives fascinating snapshots: Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Kabbalah (“A very pleasant face, with large ears that stand out from his head. He speaks broken English with a delightful accent”); the anthropologist Paul Radin (“The face of a shopkeeper, with an enormous paunch and a jolly disposition. He laughs all the time.”); the Hungarian classicist Carl Kerényi (“I suspect him of seeking to ‘publicize’ himself”) with whom he would later fall out; the scholar of Islam, Louis Massignon (“Terribly voluble!”).
Eliade himself would join the roster of regular speakers at Eranos, despite experiencing “the initiatory terror” of cancer: “How unready I am to pass beyond! A feeling of guilt: almost nothing of that which I had to do have I done. The ‘messages’ which only now am I prepared to transmit...” Fortunately, much time remained, as the subsequent volumes of his journal reveal...
There is more on Eliade and religious symbolism in my Goodreads blog: Myth Dancing (Incorporating the Twenty Third Letter). A series of posts on Eliade begins here: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
Want to read
April 19, 2009am looking for any reviews before taking up the journal series. have kind of thought reading it for a few years.
October 21, 2025
I'll have to come back and review this book in more detail but I found parts of it incredibly insightful into the processes, doubts, triumphs, beauties, and self-criticisms of a person wholly devoted to filling their life with creation. Overall, a very inspirational journal that has provided me with comfort and companionship each time I sporadically opened it over the course of the last three months of my life.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews