Gaudeamus. Mircea Eliade

      FOREWORD BY BRYAN RENNIE

      Gaudeamus igitur

      Iuvenes dum sumus.

      Post iucundam iuventutem

      Post molestam senectutem

      Nos habebit humus.

      Let us rejoice, then

      While we are young.

      After pleasant youth

      After distressing old age

      The earth will have us.

      Thus runs the commercium song or student anthem for which Mircea Eliade entitled his novel, Gaudeamus. Originating in the Middle Ages but given its familiar form in the late 18th century, this paean to seizing the day is belted out to this day at university gatherings around the world. Likewise concerned with ‘seizing the day’, Eliade’s Gaudeamus, written between February and March of 1928, is a coming-of-age novel based on his undergraduate years at the University of Bucharest (1925 to 1928). His earlier novel, Romanul adolescenului miop (Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent, Istros Books, 2016) had focused on the final years of his Liceu (Lycée) education and had been serialized in its entirety in the Bucharest periodicals Cuvântul, Viața Literară, and Universul Literar in the 1920s, but the manuscript of Gaudeamus had a different trajectory. Finished before Eliade’s departure for India in 1928, it remained among his papers in the family house on Strada Melodiei in Bucharest. Only three pages, described as an ‘excerpt’ from Gaudeamus, appeared in Viața literară in March of 1928. Eliade attempted without success to place the manuscript with the publisher, Cartea Românească, but the novel was to wait more than fifty years to appear in print. Eliade did revisit and reread it in 1932–33, when, according to his Autobiography, he found it ‘both lyrical and frenzied, too pretentious, timidly indiscreet, and quite lacking in grandeur’. He never again tried to have it published, nor, indeed to have any contact with it. The house was demolished in 1935 and the manuscript passed into the possession of his younger sister Cornelia (Corina) Alexandrescu. It was not until 1981 that a high school teacher and Eliade enthusiast, Mircea Handoca, along with the philosopher, essayist, and poet, Constantin Noica, were given access to Mme. Alexandrescu’s attic and recovered the manuscript. Together they assembled the first 2,500 typed pages of Eliade’s writings from 1921 up to 1928. Several chapters from Gaudeamus appeared in three issues of the journal Manuscriptum in 1983, three years before Eliade’s death, but the entire text of the novel did not appear until 1986 when it was published in Revista de istoire și teorie literară and then again as a single volume with Romanul adolescenului miop in 1989. Curiously, the three-page passage from Viața literară was absent from the final version of the manuscript. Thereafter Gaudeamus was translated into French in 1992 and Italian in 2012, and now appears for the first time in English.

The novel is, of course, a testimony to a vanished world – the Bucharest of the late 1920s, specifically the life of the university student of the time, but it is more than just that. Eliade’s principal biographer, Mac Linscott Ricketts, deems it a document of inestimable importance, ‘a precious testimony to one phase of Eliade’s personal spiritual itinerary’.1 It also can be read as evidence (positive or negative?) of Eliade’s literary status, of the development of his understanding of the history of religions, of his relation to anti-Semitism, and of his unfortunate sexism – and these four interdigitate intriguingly. Of course, as a novel it is difficult (but not always impossible) to know when we can recognize Eliade in the protagonist. Ricketts assesses the novel as ‘being (up to a certain point in the narrative) a candid and authentic account of the author’s actions and thoughts. At those points where it can be checked against other sources, it shows itself to be factual and reliable’.2 For example, Eliade’s Autobiography informs us that the principle female character, Nișka, is based on Eliade’s real-life friend, Rica Botez, the name of the character being taken from a friend of Rica’s. But, at the same time, some events were clearly fictionalized. This inseparable intertwining of fact and fiction is one of the primary characteristics of Eliade’s trăirist style in which he seeks to invoke an inescapable authenticity.

The critic, Eugen Simion, sees Gaudeamus as a notable novel for two other reasons. Firstly, it introduces the ‘young generation’ of 1920s Bucharest on a wide front, from sexuality to philosophy, and secondly, it attempts an innovative reinterpretation of the psychology of the couple: ‘The author’s thesis is that the post-war generation is destined to seek God and that the redeemed are but the insane, that is, those fleeing from sentimental and cerebral mediocrity, from the illusion of comfortable happiness’.3 As a Bildungs­roman, Gaudeamus shows the influence of authors whom we know Eliade to have read: André Gide, Giovanni Papini, Henrik Ibsen, and Jack London, but it does not follow them slavishly. Commenting on the Italian translation, the Historian of Religions, Giovanni Casadio, pointed out that Gaudeamus plays on three themes in three different registers. The first is the author’s relation to the bohemian world of students and professors, and it sounds a comic/realistic tone with tinges of farce. The second concerns Eliade’s relations with women and his intimate ‘romantic education’. This uses a romantic/idyllic mode with spikes of harsh realism. The third theme is Eliade’s dialogue with his own will and ego, couched in melodramatic mode; sometimes restrained, as in the novel’s almost elegiac opening: ‘The chestnut trees were wet after the rain, the boulevards were cold. Above me, only autumnal sky. … I felt hopes and desires swelling and anxiously stirring …’, sometimes emerging with astonishing arrogance, as in the final – ‘My soul is harsh, vast, serene. I sense the others left behind me, and before me, the glimmers of destiny’ – echoing the titanic pride of Hyperion in the closing of Eminescu’s Luceafărul.4

Eliade wrote Gaudeamus in two week-long bursts in February and March of 1928 while staying at a friend’s house in Clinceni about twenty-five kilometres outside of Bucharest. That same year he was working on the tezei de licență (the thesis required for his Bachelor’s degree), which he defended in October. His thesis was on ‘Renaissance Contributions to Philosophy’,

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