Mircea Eliade's Dual Vocation

Mircea Eliade – a Romanian-born historian of religions, phenomenologist of religion; author of novels, novellas, and short stories – was one of the most influential scholars of religion of the 20th century and one of the world’s foremost interpreters of religious symbolism and myth. In the 1930s he became an influential literary figure in Romania, especially after publication of his hugely successful novel Maitreyi (1933; Bengal Nights). During World War II, Eliade served as cultural attaché with the Royal Legation of Romania in London (1940) and in Lisbon (1941–45). An extremely prolific writer, Eliade spoke of his “dual vocation” as a fiction writer and scholar. He viewed his literary and scholarly concerns as autonomous but complementary

It is on this night that Ștefan and Ileana amalgamate in love and in death, that is, in eternity. The night of Sânziene, thus, becomes their sacred time and the forest their sacred place where love is exceptional and infinite. The span of the twelve years is also full of symbolism crystallizing the perfect (cosmic) cycle that brought closure to our hero who was constantly haunted by the mysteries of his destiny. The novel is impregnated with philosophical themes, myths, symbols and motifs tackled in a hallucinating manner, in an almost atemporal narration, meant not to confuse the reader, but rather to free him or her from the limitations of time which is only linear and irreversible. Eliade himself mentions in an interview “In my novels, I always try to camouflage the fantastic into the everyday life. In this novel […] I wanted, therefore, to camouflage a certain symbolic significance of the human condition. […] I think that the trans-historic is always camouflaged into the historic and the extraordinary in the

He will experience a moment lasting an eternity…”

"[…E]verything depends on Time. If you don 't resolve this problem now while you 're young, life will catch you and crush you inside, and one day you 'll realize you 're old and the day after that you 'll find yourself on your deathbed and by that time it 's too late to try anything else. You must search for this now, while you 're young. This is a problem for youth…"

The problem of Time is not bothering Ștefan alone, all the other characters are concerned with it too; in fact the difference in understanding time is what brings these people together and forms their relationships, creating a sort of a map of characters, assigning them to two dimensions of time – Historical and Sacred. Historical time is the profane, every-day time, full of disasters and terrors; the time that devours people and their youth, transforming them, through death, into history; in this category fall Ioana, Vădastra or Biriş, the former in fact