A schoolboy’s diary of literary ambition and self-scrutiny
A Schoolboy’s Novel of Himself
Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent is the English title of Romanul adolescentului miop, a novel by Mircea Eliade. It draws closely on Eliade’s own high-school years and was written while he was the same age as its central character. Eliade believed it was the first novel about adolescence to have been written by an adolescent.
Its protagonist is a precocious, short-sighted teenager in Bucharest in the early twentieth century: a poor student, a voracious reader, and a boy drawn to science and history who sometimes stays up all night with books. He takes admired cultural figures as models, trying to imitate both their lives and their works. At seventeen he decides to write a novel to prove to his teachers that he is not as mediocre as his classmates, and to show that he is prepared to give up everything for literature. The project is recorded in a series of notebooks—the diary of the title—but the outcome is not literary triumph: he fails three subjects and has to repeat the school year. The book is thus autobiographical fiction, at once a school story and a portrait of a budding writer.
The Diary That Wants to Be a Novel
The novel’s form is deliberately unstable. Its protagonist is writing a book called The Novel of the Short-Sighted Adolescent, and the reader is given the notebooks in which that project takes shape. The diary is therefore both a record of daily life and a work of art in the making; Eliade keeps the two categories in play. The book opens with the boy resolving to begin the novel and to record the life he knows, and it repeatedly turns back on its own composition. At one point he describes the result as a collection of comments, notes, and sketches for a novel rather than a conventional novel—an accurate description of the book’s episodic texture. Some stretches read like a genuine diary; others are shaped as self-contained episodes with more polish than a real adolescent’s journal would have. The English edition makes the ambiguity visible on its cover, where the word Diary is crossed out and replaced with Novel. This self-referential quality—a novel about writing a novel, a diary that keeps stepping outside itself—is one of the work’s distinctive pleasures.
Reading, Rivalry, and the Comedy of Self-Pity
The daily matter of the book is school life in Bucharest: teachers, classmates, academic competition, amorous rivalries, and the first stirrings of sexual experience. Around this social world Eliade builds a portrait of an adolescent who is by turns grandiose, self-pitying, shy, and comic. The boy’s reading is central to his sense of himself. He takes admired writers and thinkers as models, measures his own life against theirs, and treats literature as a vocation that justifies both his exhaustion and his frustration with school routine. His diary is a place for private thoughts, for self-justification, and for a kind of revenge on those who misunderstand him. The humor often comes from the gap between his lofty self-image and the mundane failures that keep interrupting it—exam procrastination, embarrassment around girls, the ordinary humiliations of classroom life. Yet because Eliade was the same age as his diarist, the book is not simply an older author laughing at a child’s delusions. The self-dramatization is ludicrous, but it is also knowing and playful.
Self-Knowledge and the Early Eliadean Themes
The novel’s most distinctive claim on the reader is not its plot but its sustained act of self-scrutiny. Sorin Alexandrescu has argued that Eliade’s adolescent novel differs from many others in the genre because it does not merely narrate events that reveal a young man’s uncertainty. Instead, it makes self-questioning itself the subject: the diarist is constantly analyzing himself and trying to solve the puzzle of his own identity. This is why the book can be read as an early map of Eliade’s later preoccupations. Its pages bring together religion, self-knowledge, erotic sensibility, artistic creation, and otherness—concerns that would stay with him for the rest of his career. Bryan Rennie has similarly noted that the novel says a great deal about the development of Eliade’s views on writing, politics, and religion, and that its imaginative writing can help readers understand the experience of a religious seeker and scholar. In this sense the book is both a comic school story and a serious early document of a mind learning to examine itself.
Critical Reception and the English-Language Edition
English-language reviewers treated the novel as a surprisingly accomplished and very funny adolescent journal. Nicholas Lezard, writing in The Guardian, described it as a playful, ludicrous, and very good teen journal, and placed it in the lineage of comic adolescent diaries: he imagined an Adrian Mole from 1920s Romania, more literate, more ridiculous, more histrionic, and yet more self-aware. He also found it plausible as the work of a seventeen-year-old, even while suspecting that it was almost too good to be true. Eileen Battersby in The Irish Times saw a similar figure—an earlier, more bookish Adrian Mole, with a philosophical streak, less knowing than Holden Caulfield but more likable and believable. Rennie, reviewing the English translation, noted that its old grammar-school idiom gives the book a faintly unreal, school-story atmosphere that enlivens its intellectual content. The novel has also been described as an early twentieth-century counterpart to The Catcher in the Rye, and as an intimate view of the developing writer and religious thinker behind Eliade’s later scholarly work. Rennie’s emphasis falls on what the book reveals about Eliade as a future scholar, not merely as a teenage diarist.
Mircea Eliade began writing the novel in 1921 under the title Jurnalul unui om sucit. In 1923 it had taken the name Romanul unui om sucit, and the final version was written in 1925 as Romanul adolescentului miop. The Complete Review lists it as first published in serialized form in 1925 and published as a book in 1989. A Google Books description states that it remained unpublished until it was found in an attic in Bucharest after Eliade’s death in 1986; it was published in Romanian in 1989. An English translation by Christopher Moncrieff was published in 2016 by Istros Books in the UK. One library catalog record describes the English edition as a revised translation by Moncrieff with reference to an original translation by Christopher Bartholomew, and gives its length as 191 pages.
The Diarist’s Playful Self-Edit
Nicholas Lezard notes a specific comic formulation in the book: the diarist says he will kill himself if he does not pass his exams, using the phrase “from the heights of despair,” which the review identifies as a standard formula in Romanian newspaper reports of suicides. Lezard also gives an example of the diarist’s editorial play: he declines to write that he does not know his neighbours because none of them have a daughter, and decides instead to say that he despises them.
Translation and the Next Book
Eileen Battersby observed that Moncrieff had also worked on the French translation published in 1992, and she described his English as wry and plain, with a hint of an edgy, quasi-confiding quality. The novel was followed by Gaudeamus, written in 1928 and based on Eliade’s university time; it was published in English for the first time in April 2018 by Istros Books, translated by Christopher Bartholomew.
Eliade’s Later Profile
Mircea Eliade was born on 13 March [O.S. 28 February] 1907 and died on April 22, 1986. The source describes him as a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago, and as one of the most influential scholars of religion of the 20th century and an interpreter of religious experience. It credits him with establishing paradigms in religious studies and with the influential theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time. Biographical notes add that he studied at the University of Bucharest and, from 1928 to 1932, at the University of Calcutta with Surendranath Dasgupta; he took his doctorate in 1933 with a dissertation on yoga, taught at the University of Bucharest and, after the war, at the Sorbonne in Paris, and from 1957 was professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago. The same notes describe him as a writer of fiction known and appreciated especially in Western Europe, where several of his novels and short-story volumes appeared in French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, and mention Two Tales of the Occult, Nights of Serampore, and The Secret of Dr. Honigberger as works combining mythology, fantasy, and autobiography and evoking the mythical geography and time of India.
