„Anchetatorul fals serafic”, „torționarul robot” și „torționarul fanatic”‐ tripla proiecție a terorii în romanul exilului eliadesc

Abstract

In the aftermath of World War II, the Eastern European cultural space is dominated and controlled by the Stalinist ideology of the communist
regime. Postwar Romania is, consequently, profoundly traumatised by the repressive apparatus of this totalitarian regime, whose quintessence was the myth of Securitate – an occult, all‐powerful organisation manipulating the individual and collective consciousness.
Taking advantage of his condition as an exiled writer, Mircea Eliade publishes in 1955 the novel Noaptea de Sânziene (The Forbidden Forest), a
vast historical fresco of the interwar and postwar Romania, in which he infiltrates the character of the Securitate officer in a literaturised form,
through the image of “the robotic tormentor”, face to face with “the fanatic tormentor”, both doubled by the image of the “deceptively seraphic
investigator” who inquiries into the case of the failure defector, the philosophy teacher Petre Biriș.