Name: Bengal Nights
SKU: 1554675
Price: 26.63 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Mircea Eliade
ISBN: 9780226204192

Type

Physical Book

Author

Mircea Eliade

Translated by

Catherine Spencer

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Year

1995

Language

English

Pages

184

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

21.6x13.8x1.3 cm

Weight

0.26 kg.

ISBN

0226204197

ISBN13

9780226204192

Edition No.

0002

Synopsis "Bengal Nights "

Set in 1930s Calcutta, this is a roman à clef of remarkable intimacy. Originally published in Romanian in 1933, this semiautobiographical novel by the world renowned scholar Mircea Eliade details the passionate awakenings of Alain, an ambitious young French engineer flush with colonial pride and prejudice and full of a European fascination with the mysterious subcontinent. Offered the hospitality of a senior Indian colleague, Alain grasps at the chance to discover the authentic India firsthand. He soon finds himself enchanted by his host's daughter, the lovely and inscrutable Maitreyi, a precocious young poet and former student of Tagore. What follows is a charming, tentative flirtation that soon, against all the proprieties and precepts of Indian society, blossoms into a love affair both impossible and ultimately tragic. This erotic passion plays itself out in Alain's thoughts long after its bitter conclusion. In hindsight he sets down the story, quoting from the diaries of his disordered days, and trying to make sense of the sad affair. A vibrantly poetic love story, Bengal Nights is also a cruel account of the wreckage left in the wake of a young man's self discovery. At once horrifying and deeply moving, Eliade's story repeats the patterns of European engagement with India even as it exposes and condemns them. Invaluable for the insight it offers into Eliade's life and thought, it is a work of great intellectual and emotional power. Translated into French in 1950, Bengal Nights was an immediate critical success. The film, Les Nuits Bengali, appeared in 1987.

Mircea Eliade

(Author)

View Author's Page

Mircea Eliade (Bucharest 1907 – Chicago 1986) was a professor at the University of Bucharest, the École des Hautes Études in Paris, the Sorbonne University, and the University of Chicago, where he chaired the Department of History of Religions and taught for thirteen years

During a trip to Italy to finish his doctoral thesis on Renaissance Philosophy, Mircea Eliade came into contact with Hinduism and moved to India for four years to learn the Sanskrit language and Hindu culture and religion. Before settling in France, he spent five years in Lisbon, where he met Ortega y Gasset and came into contact with Spain and intellectuals of the time such as Menéndez Pidal and Eugeni D’Ors, whom he deeply admired

Over time, he became part of the Eranos Circle, a scientific and philosophical analysis organization whose goal was to explore the links between the thought of the East and the West

Mircea Eliade wrote more than 15 essays and three narrative works, and also engaged in journalism in Romania in the 1930s

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