Secrets, Lies, and Consequences
A Great Scholar's Hidden Past and his Protégé's Unsolved Murder
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
The tale of a legendary scholar, an unsolved murder, and the mysterious documents that may connect them
In early 1991, Ioan Culianu was on the precipice of a brilliant academic career. Culianu had fled his native Romania and established himself as a widely admired scholar at just forty-one years of age. He was teaching at the University of Chicago Divinity School where he was seen as the heir apparent to his mentor, Mircea Eliade, a fellow Romanian expatriate and the founding father of the field of religious studies, who had died a few years earlier.
But then Culianu began to receive threatening messages. As his fears grew, he asked a colleague to hold onto some papers for safekeeping. A week later, Culianu was in a Divinity School men's room when someone fired a bullet into the back of his head, killing him instantly. The case was never solved, though the prevailing theory is that Culianu was targeted by the Romanian secret police as a result of critical articles he wrote after the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
What was in those mysterious papers? And what connection might they have to Culianu's death? The papers eventually passed into the hands of Bruce Lincoln, and their story is at the heart of this book. The documents were English translations of articles that Eliade had written in the 1930s, some of which voiced Eliade's support for the Iron Guard, Romania's virulently anti-Semitic mystical fascist movement. Culianu had sought to publish some of these articles but encountered fierce resistance from Eliade's widow.
In this book, author Bruce Lincoln explores what the articles reveal about Eliade's past, his subsequent efforts to conceal that past, his complex relations with Culianu, and the possible motives for Culianu's shocking murder.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this tantalizing whodunit, Lincoln (Apples and Oranges), professor of the history of religion at the University of Chicago's Divinity School, plays Poirot after being entrusted with a mysterious packet of translations into English of articles by the influential University of Chicago religious historian Mircea Eliade. Written when Eliade living in his native Romania, the articles illuminate Eliade's involvement in Romania's "intellectual, cultural and political life" between WWI and WWII. The manuscript leads Lincoln into an investigation of the connection between Eliade, the militant right-wing group the Iron Guard, and an unsolved murder: the May 1991 slaying of Eliade's protégé Ioan Culianu, who was shot to death in the Divinity School's men's room. Noting that Eliade dodged accusations of antisemitism and Nazism that embroiled the University of Chicago campus in the 1970s because definitive proof was lacking, Lincoln reveals how, after Eliade's death in 1986, Culianu, troubled by his mentor's past, was determined to publish translations of damning articles by Eliade that he'd managed to uncover. Culianu passed his manuscript to a friend for safekeeping the week before his death (the one that eventually passed into Lincoln's hands), leading Lincoln to persuasively hypothesize that Culianu was killed by immigrant Iron Guard members living in Chicago intending to stop their publication. This thrilling saga sheds new light on a decades-old mystery.
