Mircea Eliade: Gaudeamus
on the characters, he staged the discussion as a conflict between different people, as a "theatre of ideas", using however real individuals, his friends at the time, isolated to a certain extent from the background, half-imaginary or half-real characters, who still belong to one original reality, known only to him, but not to the readers...
In a certain way, the unplanned publication of the novel after the author's death led to the text becoming non-transparent, but it is precisely this apparent lack of information that gives the text density meanings. Losing the quality of a (one hundred percent) autobiography, or a "novel with a key",
Gaudeamus acquires a more important aspect of quality, becoming a novel of an era, or a novel of a certain age from an era, historical in the first version, and ahistorical in the second...
In
Diary/Novel of a Myopic Adolescent Eliade introduces imaginary characters on the scene who were often ridiculed for their attitudes, quite ridiculous, but understandable considering for years. Here, in
Gaudeamus, the author's reality appears, which is intended to be something completely different, i.e. a portrait of a real, true generation, admittedly, a portrait constructed by the author himself. In both novels, the imaginary overlaps with the real, but the two never coincide. What the characters imagined in the first novel, each starting from their own obsessions, and concealing them, is now exposed by the narrator, to get rid of them and thus create a starting point for a portrait of a generation, which is real from a historical point of view. 2018