Or this one, from an article called “Eulogy for Transilvania,” which appeared in Vremea on November 29, 1936:
From those who have suffered so much and been humbled for centuries by the Hungarians — after the Bulgarians the most imbecilic people ever to have existed — from these political leaders of heroic martyred Transylvania, we have expected a nationalist Romania, frenzied and chauvinistic, armed and vigorous, ruthless and vengeful.
Even more citations from Eliade’s writings of the 1930s can be adduced, about the “terrifying murders” of which the weak, corrupt, powerless, and still youthful Romanian democracy was guilty; about “the advance of the Slavic element from the Danubian and Bessarabian regions,” or the fact that “Jews have overrun the villages of Maramures and Bucovina, and have achieved an absolute majority in all the cities of Bessarabia.”
In sum, there are countless such pronouncements, some even more ridiculous and even more disgusting. Today these phrases sound absurd, infantile and aggressive, but we must not forget that such “irrationality” was made legitimate in its time by a summary and deviant “logic” that furnished instant “solutions” to longunresolved social conflicts. It is no coincidence that, in the confused and oppressive period before the war in Europe, when even long-established democracies were tottering, this kind of extremist impulse turned up in one form or another even among many intellectuals. Rebellious spirits, and those with a reactionary social vision, were especially vulnerable to this kind of messianic and simplistic solution. The unhappy spectacle of the fragile democracy in Romania, paralyzed by internal contradiction and by the complicated situation abroad, added to the dilemmas of a long and troubled national history, in which identity crises and easy identifications with a utopian and totalitarian ideal have together worked much harm.
Mircea Eliade was a writer and a scholar. That is why his “case” deserves our special attention. It is certainly true that the work of the writer and scholar exists in a separate domain from that of the militant reactionary journalist of the interwar period. Again, “Nazism is no more in Kant, in Fichte, in Hölderlin, or in Nietzsche (all of whom were thinkers solicited by Nazism) — it is, at the extreme, no more even in the musician Wagner — than the Gulag is in Hegel or in Marx. Or the Terror, with all simplicity, in Rousseau.” Eliade’s literary work is extensive and uneven. His scholarly work is written for specialists. To draw a connection between his scholarship and his “fascist” period, to cast an inquisitorial eye on “suspect” details in his many learned studies, would be to provide a perfect example of totalitarian methodology.
Indeed, during the period between the wars, the leftist Romanian press labeled some of Eliade’s novels “fascistic,” an example of just such abusive and fanatical simplification. (In his monograph, Ricketts ably rejects distortions of this kind.) Writing about the case of Paul de Man, Denis Donoghue recently observed that “it would answer injustice with injustice if one were to assert that Deconstruction is compromised by de Man’s wartime journalism. The current attempt to smear Deconstruction by denouncing de Man is sordid.” The same may be said of any attempt to smear Eliade’s scholarship with his politics.
Many literary critics in Romania and elsewhere have stressed, moreover, the humanist value of his literary work: the stimulating and mysterious ambiguity of his prose, his magical fantasy and enigmatically coded reality, the free play and the dreamy compassion of his writing. But this does not diminish the questions that must be raised. Quite the contrary, it aggravates them. Literature must meet primarily aesthetic criteria, not moral ones, just as scholarly work must meet scholarly standards. But journals, memoirs, autobiography: such strictly personal reckonings cannot avoid the ethical test.
The contrast between Eliade’s fiction and his fascist journalism is as pronounced as the contrast between Eliade the supporter of the fascist Iron Guard and Eliade the respected intellectual of later years, remembered by his friends in the cordial and cosmopolitan atmosphere of his American home, always hospitable and affable with colleagues and acquaintances of all races and faiths. No one could see (and perhaps Eliade himself managed to forget) the hovering ghost of another time, another personality.
And so the issue that the Journals avoid returns persistently to haunt them. Eliade’s “happy guilt” does not refer only to his remembered adoration for Nae Ionescu; in old age, after all, the nostalgia for youthful joys and passions often goes beyond acceptable limits. (Eliade’s friend, the Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian, was also in his youth an admirer of Ionescu, but he would probably have recalled his admiration differently in 1985.) It is harder, however, to excuse a passage like this one from the Autobiography:
I don’t know how Corneliu Codreanu will be judged by history. The fact is that four months after the phenomenal electoral success of the Legionary movement, its head found himself sentenced to ten years at hard labor, and five months after that he was executed — events that reconfirmed my belief that our generation did not have a political destiny.
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu was violently anti-Semitic and anti-democratic, and he committed odious murders. Yet Eliade appears to be uncertain, four decades after the war, in Chicago, how history will judge him. He is still fascinated by Codreanu’s electoral “success,” he fails to mention the murders committed by this “martyr,” and he does not hesitate to identify himself with that “generation” and even its political destiny. And the same treatment is accorded the Leader’s “lieutenants” the martyrs Ion Mo
ta and Vasile Marin, slain in January 1937 as volunteers for Franco in the Spanish Civil War (dramatically evoked by Eliade at the time and later recalled as “models” of sacrifice in the Legion’s view). It was really a case of retaining an outlook. Eliade’s conception of the best social and political solution for Romania seems to have remained constant. It was a traditional and conservative vision, “fundamentalist” in its orthodoxy (“I don’t believe in God, I believe in Jesus”), skeptical about democracy and modernity, tied to ethnicity and to the cultural values of the place.
V
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s recent call for a Slavophile Russian state comes at a time when the old conflict has reawakened in Eastern Europe between the “separatists” and the “integrationists,” between the supporters of independent states and the “Europeanists.” In Romania this dispute was tragically manipulated during the years between the wars. Now it is reappearing in a changed historical situation, pitting those who want integration into Europe against those who want to strengthen the national state and the national character.
The right is still no smarter, though, than the left; it learns neither from its own disasters nor from those of the other side. Nor are the intellectuals always capable of protecting their illusions, ideas, and aspirations from evil associations, notwithstanding their own grievous experience. In the 1970s, according to his friend Noica (as reported by Katherine Verdery of Johns Hopkins University), Eliade encouraged Professor Edgar Papu, from his distant American home, to launch a debate in Romania about “protochronism.” This debate was launched initially to emphasize the Romanian contribution to world culture, and more generally the role of small isolated cultures in stimulating important intellectual achievements. It gradually degenerated, however, into odious, ideological, “patriotic” pressure, similar to the pressure of Stalin’s requirement that the Soviet press discover new aspects of the “supremacy” of Soviet culture over Western culture. This debate occupied the Romanian cultural scene for some fifteen years, and led to one of the most sinister campaigns against the intelligentsia by the Ceau