Between the Devil's Waters and the Fall into History or an Alternate Account of Mircea Eliade's Diopteries

The of the Nearsighted AdolescentRomanul adolescentului miop has been, in general, considered - especially since its integral publication in 1988 and 1989 - the primary key for understanding the personality of the young Eliade and its later development. Without minimalizing the autobiographical importance of the novel, the position it has enjoyed - having become even a didactic reference work - is due rather to an absence: to the absence of the journals of the nearsighted adolescent.This problem of Eliade's journals is not limited to his adolescent years. The first authentic journal, Jurnalul portughez [The Portugal Journal], was published only recently (2006). Fragments d'un journal (Paris 1973, 1981, 1991) -improperly entitled Jurnal in the Romanian edition (Humanitas, 1993) - represents, as the French title shows, a selection through which the author, become editor, filtered the authenticity of the immediate notations. The same thing happened with the Indian journal, transposed into an indirect novel (gantier, 1935), after it had already been used in several direct novels.About the post-Indian journals (1932-1940), it is believed, as Eliade himself has affirmed several times, that they were lost in the turbulent years of the Second World War. Sufficient motives exist to suspect that they could have been just quashed as inopportune for his post-war evolution, and that they will emerge someday in the distant future when the ideological passions of that epoch will have been completely extinguished.As for the pre-Indian journals (1920-1928), only selections have been published prior to the year 1925, when Eliade began his life as a university student. The possessor of the manuscripts, Mircea Handoca, published them first in several different reviews between 1987 and 199O1, and then, under the title Fragmente de Jurnal, as addenda to the first volume of Eliade's writings of youth, Cum am gasit piatra filozofala. Scrieri de tinerete, I. 1921-1925 (Humanitas, 1996) . They have fallen far short of stirring up an interest, however, comparable to those occasioned by the journal of maturity - a natural thing, one would say, given the age at which they were written.Nevertheless, age does not constitute a satisfactory explanation. In what follows, we will show that the reduced interest for the journals of adolescence is due more likely to their selective and fragmentary publication, that is, precisely to their lack of authenticity as journals.The Manuscript 5962Parts of these journals have been acquired by the Library of the Romanian Academy, thus making possible not only the verification of the text published, but also a new, integral edition. The notebooks and loose pages handed over by M. Handoca have been bound into a single volume of 134 leaves classified under the number Ms. Rom. 5962.It begins with two notebooks entitled generically Observatii de entomologie [Entomological observations], covering, in a non-uniform way, the period 27 December 1920 - October 1922 (pp. 1-26, 29-49). There follow then several pages chronologically anterior, which have not been included in the selection published by M. Handoca: Tabloul pietrilor aduse din Turghe§ [Description of rocks brought from Turghec], where he had vacationed in July 1921 (p. 57) and Journal de jour botanique, dating from the period 1 1 December 1920 - 5 March 1921 (pp. 58-62). Finally, the undated fragment, O plimbare in [A walk through the Mo§i fair], datable, however, to 9 May 1922 (pp. 63-66).The following two notebooks constitute personal journals of the pupil Mircea Eliade: Mon journal d'ecole (pp. 67-98) and Jurnalul tipilor din clasa, precum i intâmplarile mai de seama [The journal about the fellows from class, plus some more important happenings] (pp. 99-127), covering the period 24 September 1922 - 10 February 1923, and 24 February - April 1923, respectively. (In his selection, M. …