Mircea Eliade
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Eliade's literary works belong to the fantastic and autobiographical genres. The best known are the novels ''Maitreyi'' ('La Nuit Bengali' or 'Bengal Nights', 1933), ''Noaptea de Sânziene'' ('The Forbidden Forest', 1955), ''Isabel și apele diavolului'' ('Isabel and the Devil's Waters'), and ''Romanul Adolescentului Miop'' ('Novel of the Nearsighted Adolescent', 1989); the novellas ''Domnișoara Christina'' ('Miss Christina', 1936) and ''Tinerețe fără tinerețe'' ('Youth Without Youth', 1976); and the short stories ''Secretul doctorului Honigberger'' ('The Secret of Dr. Honigberger', 1940) and ''La Țigănci'' ('With the Gypsy Girls', 1963).
Early in his life, Eliade was a journalist and essayist, a disciple of Romanian philosopher and journalist Nae Ionescu, and a member of the literary society ''Criterion''. In the 1940s, he served as cultural attaché of the Kingdom of Romania to the United Kingdom and Portugal. Several times during the late 1930s, Eliade publicly expressed his support for the Iron Guard, a Romanian Christian fascist organization. His involvement with fascism at the time, as well as his other far-right connections, came under frequent criticism after World War II.
Noted for his vast erudition, Eliade had fluent command of five languages (Romanian, French, German, Italian, and English) and a reading knowledge of three others (Hebrew, Persian, and Sanskrit). In 1990 he was elected a posthumous member of the Romanian Academy. Provided by Wikipedia