Eliade et l’exemplarité de Kierkegaard dans Gaudeamus

Abstract

"Eliade and the Exemplarity of Kierkegaard in Gaudeamus. Eliade's relationship with Kierkegaard began in his youth and has been the subject of serious studies. Those studies analyzed and interpreted passages, which were few in number, in which an explicit reference to the Danish thinker appeared in the scholarly production of the Romanian writer in both his Memoirs and Journals. Kierkegaard's underground influence on Eliade's literary work remained to be studied. In our article, we were interested in the strongly autobiographical novel, written in 1928, Gaudeamus, in which alongside an explicit reference to the Danish thinker, were important elements (in terms of structure, characters, thematic, symbolism, etc.) of the aesthetic writings of Kierkegaard that Eliade had discovered shortly before, notably The Seducer’s Diary and In vino veritas. Our interest focused on the reiteration in both the Kierkegaardian and Eliadian works of the myths of Pygmalion and the Eternal Feminine. It thus appeared to us that it was not only, at times of great existential choices, as he himself asserts, that the example of Kierkegaard was decisive, for Eliade, but also on the literary level. Keywords: Mircea Eliade, Gaudeamus, Kierkegaard, The Seducer’s Diary, Pygmalion "