A scholar-writer’s own account of his formation, from Bucharest through India to exile in the West
A Life Told in Two Volumes
Mircea Eliade’s Autobiography is a first-person memoir, translated from the Romanian by Mac Linscott Ricketts and published in two volumes, each carrying its own subtitle. The first, Journey East, Journey West, spans the years 1907 to 1937, from the author’s birth to his early maturity as a writer and scholar. The second, Exile’s Odyssey, takes the narrative from 1937 to 1960, following him out of Romania and through the successive stations of a displaced academic career. Eliade (1907–1986) was a Romanian historian of religions, fiction writer, and professor at the University of Chicago, and the memoir is his own retrospective account of how that double vocation — scholarship and literature — took shape.
A Literary Prodigy in Interwar Bucharest
The first volume is, in essence, the record of an unusually precocious young man’s self-education. Reviewing the work in Religious Studies Review, Seymour Cain described it as a remarkably candid report of a “Renaissance talent” developing across an extraordinarily wide range of activity: daily and periodical journalism, realistic and fantastic fiction, general nonfiction, and eventually distinguished work in the history of religions. The same account traces the author’s path from a mischievous street urchin and literary prodigy, through his early love affairs, into the intellectual ferment of pre-war Romanian cultural life. What the book documents, then, is not a single career line but the parallel growth of a journalist, a storyteller, and a scholar out of the same youthful energy.
The Indian Sojourn and the Return Home
Central to the first volume is the period Eliade spent in India, which Cain calls a decisive and traumatic sojourn. The book itself preserves this chapter of his life in a photograph printed facing the title page, showing the author in 1930 at the Calcutta home of Surendranath Dasgupta, with whom he studied between 1928 and 1932. The years the volume covers also include his doctoral work on yoga, completed in 1933, and his subsequent teaching in Bucharest. Journey East, Journey West thus ends where its subtitle suggests — with an Eastern apprenticeship completed and a return to Romanian intellectual life on the eve of the war.
Exile’s Odyssey: Departure, Lisbon, Paris, America
The second volume picks up the story in 1937 and follows it through two decades of displacement. Its chapter sequence — continuing the numbering begun in the first volume — traces a recognizable itinerary: a chapter titled “The Great Departure,” followed by one on Lisbon, then Paris, then a chapter named for Christinel, and later ones on the tide beginning to turn, on discovering America, and, finally, on being “indispensable to the security of the United States.” Read as a whole, Exile’s Odyssey is the record of a European intellectual uprooted by war and politics and gradually reconstituted as an American academic, with the Portuguese and French years serving as the intermediate stages of that transit.
Candid Self-Scrutiny as Intellectual History
What distinguishes the book within Eliade’s output is its frankness. Cain’s review singles out the “apparently amazingly candid” quality of the self-portrait, which does not omit the author’s love affairs or the less dignified passages of his youth. Because the narrative is written by a scholar who is also a novelist, it functions simultaneously as personal confession and as a primary document for the intellectual history of interwar Romania and of the mid-century emigration. Rather than presenting a finished thinker explaining his conclusions, the Autobiography shows the accumulation of reading, travel, journalism, and fiction out of which those conclusions were eventually built.
The second volume’s contents also list chapters titled “Destiny Shows Its Teeth” and “Detained by Destiny” before “The Great Departure,” and a chapter titled “The Forbidden Forest” between “The Tide Begins to Turn” and “I Begin to Discover America.”
Opening Line and a Gaudeamus Judgment
The Open Library description records the opening line as “I WAS born in Bucharest on March 9, 1907.” The source on Eliade’s novel Gaudeamus also cites the Autobiography for his 1932–33 rereading of that manuscript: he found it “both lyrical and frenzied, too pretentious, timidly indiscreet, and quite lacking in grandeur.” The same source adds that he never again tried to have it published or to have any contact with it.
Edition and Author Notes
The source records that the English translation was originally published in 1981 by Harper & Row, and that the University of Chicago Press edition of Volume 1 appeared in 1990 with ix + 335 pages, illustrations, and bibliographic references. Volume 2 was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1988 and has 224 pages. A publisher’s author note adds that Eliade taught at the Sorbonne in Paris after the war and from 1957 was professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago; it also describes him as a writer of fiction known and appreciated especially in Western Europe, where several novels and volumes of short stories appeared in French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese.
