Domnişoara Christina în faţa oglinzii
„Miss Christina” in front of the mirror
The study is entirely focused on Mircea Eliade’s prose writing, Miss Christina (1936), classified by the literary critics either as a novel or as an extended novella. Nevertheless, the goal of the study is not an eidological one, it does not aim at solving the text’s nature (novel or novella); the main interest regards the nature of the fiction’s imaginare, largely indebted to both Gothic novels and short stories (such as those created by Anne Radcliffe, Charles Nodier and Edgar Allan Poe) and to the narratives of the Decadence, with all their over-elaborated, almost kitsch-like, morbid decorativeness. Analyzing the latter influences and sources, the author also examines the possible connections with the cultural atmosphere in the Bucharest of the la belle epoque, with its poets, painters and singers, as well as that in the interwar Bucharest, minutely identifying all the respectively possible traces imprinted in Eliade’s fiction.
Keywords: Mircea Eliade’s prose, Miss Christina, Decadence, la belle epoque, pre-war and inter-war Bucharest
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