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The Romanian Academy purchased 17 manuscripts and documents signed by Mircea Eliade, most of them belonging to the adolescence and youth years, starting with 1922, when the writer was only 15 years old, the Academy announced, in a press release sent to AGERPRES on Friday.
Among the works purchased are the study "Indian Humanism", the essay "Mysteries and Oriental Initiation", the translation of the work "The Devil's Temptation" by Giovanni Papini, manuscript notebooks such as "From a Scout's notebook" and "Memories from a retreat", as well as sketches, summaries or texts that formed the basis of several conferences held at Radio Bucharest between 1932 and 1938, agerpres.ro confirms.
At the same time, several letters were bought from his teacher Constantin Radulescu-Motru, from Constantin Noica and Surendranath Dasgupta and correspondence with journalist Horia Stanca from the years when Eliade worked as a cultural employee at the Romanian Royal Legation in Lisbon, the Romanian Academy specifies.
In 2019, Dr. Eugen Ciurtin, researcher at the Institute for the History of Religions of the Romanian Academy, supported by the director of the institute, Dr. Bogdan Tataru-Cazaban, and Professor Bogdan Cretu, director of the "A. Philippide" Institute of Romanian Philology - Iasi Branch of the Romanian Academy, was pointing out through a national petition, together with other intellectuals, the risk of wasting the rich documentary fund left in his family's custody by Mircea Eliade when he left Romania.
The manuscripts will be donated to the Romanian Academy Library, being due to complete the Mircea Eliade Fund from the Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books and to lay the foundations for the establishment of a public Mircea Eliade archive, at the disposal of his work's researchers.
