Balcerowicz and Mejor 2000). Stefan Stasiak (1884–1962), a pupil and
colleague of Schayer, published in 1925 his study on the Âataka, which was
in fact his diplôme de l’EPHEwritten under the direction of Sylvain Lévi in
Paris (Stasiak 1919–1924), where he spent many years before being appointed
professor for philology and Indian history at the University Jan Kazimierz of
Lvov in 1929. In the 1940s, he returned to Warsaw and afterwards to London,
joining the Polish government in exile.
Eastern European concern with Persian and Indian religions, Buddhist, and
especially Tibetan studies continued in the next generations with the works
of Feodor [Theodore] Stcherbatsk[o]y (1866–1942); Nikolai D. Mironov
(1880–1936), one of the first competent scholars of Jainism; Evgheni [Eugene]
Obermiller (1901–1935) and George Nicolai Roerich (1902–1960). It cul-
minated in the work of the most important Eastern European scholar of
religion, Mircea Eliade (1907–1986). With the exception of some books such
as Poul Tuxen’s Danish Yoga(1911) or Jakob Wilhelm Hauer’s monographs
of the interwar period, and of minor books, such as J. F. C. Fuller (1925) and
Sigurd Lindquist (1935), and articles, such as Jean Filliozat (1931), the first,
French edition of Mircea Eliade’s Yoga(1936) was the best introduction to
the topic equally for Indologists and for historians and philosophers of religions.
As he himself wrote, ‘this essay is addressed less to Indologists than to those
with an interest in the history and philosophy of religions’ (1936: viii). Eliade’s
work is too well known to require detailed treatment here. One could argue,
however, that a careful examination of the genesis of his ideas as a comparatist
and a generalist historian of religions, taking into consideration his entire
Romanian production of the 1920s–1930s, still remains to be written (Ciurtin
2004: 363–440).Peripheral transfers and versatile boundariesJust as in the nineteenth century many Eastern European scholars worked as
emigrés in Paris, so in the twentieth century the domination of Communist
governments in Eastern Europe after World War II, and their general antipathy
to religion, meant that many prominent Eastern European scholars of religion
emigrated to the West, often to the United States. Unfortunately, we do not
have at our disposal works entirely devoted to the emigration of scholars from
Eastern Europe of the sort that are available on the emigration of scholars
from further west (Bentwick 1953; Fermi 1968).
Even more than World War II, the Cold War was responsible for Mircea
Eliade’s move to the West, a move which could equally be seen as a Western
response to the Communist atheistic regime (Moshe Idel, personal commun-
ication, February 2006). In the interwar period and afterward, Eliade
was admired, including by his master Pettazzoni and his friend Wikander, for
his incredible intellectual interests, his capacity for work, and as a comparatist60
EUGEN CIURTIN