În arhiva lui: Eliade (I)

Abstract

The present series offers an anthology of excerpts from all types of Mircea Eliade’s writings, either unpublished or published as journals, reminiscences, memoirs, articles, essays, and shorter pieces, which may as a whole describe his own production and continual re/use of personal manuscripts. There is at present no systematic inquiry into the nature, form, quantity, and scope of his lost Bucharest archive. The rather large amount of Eliade Bucharest manuscripts sold through auctions since 2017 has already lethally interfered with the integrity of Eliade’s archive, as he bid farewell in August 1942 and the subsequent material owners offered after Eliade’s death no public catalogue or minimal listing of identified manuscripts, no indices, and almost no proper clues regarding its very size. Meanwhile, some manuscripts from this archive were sold directly by Eliade estates to public institutions in Romania (1986-1989) or sold directly to two public libraries in Bucharest by the sole material owner (and for his own personal benefit), in March-December 1989. Eliade’s published and especially unpublished manuscripts auctioned since 2017 are extraordinarily diverse, and only a part have been rescued by public institutions (17 manuscripts by the Library of the Romanian Academy in 2021, 67 manuscripts by the donors of the Institute for the History of Religions of the Romanian Academy in 2002, and several others at present under critical scrutiny, in 2023 and by the donors of the same Institute). All these manuscripts are only a fragment from the full archive Eliade left for good in Bucharest in 1942. Synoptic re-reading may thus help indeed improve our knowledge of that very archive, its content being a source of endless litigious intervention. The series complements ECCE | The Complete Critical Edition of Mircea Eliade’s Scholarly Works before 1945, under the aegis of the Institute for the History of Religions, as well as MEUM | Mircea Eliade’s Unpublished Manuscripts from Private Collections, published by Eugen Ciurtin and Andreea Apostu in Transilvania 51 [155] (2023), no. 1, pp. 1-22 (Critical edition), no. 2, pp. 1-16 (Concordances A-E), and no. 3, pp. 1-16, with forthcoming instalments in 2023.