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La plimbare, prin padure, Andronic este surprins invocand un sarpe.
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1937
18 people are currently reading
607 people want to read
About the author
Mircea Eliade
558 books2,699 followersRomanian-born historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, professor at the University of Chicago, and one of the pre-eminent interpreters of world religion in the last century. Eliade was an intensely prolific author of fiction and non-fiction alike, publishing over 1,300 pieces over 60 years. He earned international fame with LE MYTHE DE L'ÉTERNAL RETOUR (1949, The Myth of the Eternal Return), an interpretation of religious symbols and imagery. Eliade was much interested in the world of the unconscious. The central theme in his novels was erotic love.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 44 reviews
September 24, 2021
"Tu șarpe balaur,
Cu solză de aur,
Cu nouă limbi împungătoare,
Cu nouă cozi izbătoare,
Să te duci la ea,
Unde-o vei afla...
Şi tu să n-o lași
Până ce ea,
Mândra mea,
Cu mine s-a întâlni
Şi îmi va vorbi."
Cu solză de aur,
Cu nouă limbi împungătoare,
Cu nouă cozi izbătoare,
Să te duci la ea,
Unde-o vei afla...
Şi tu să n-o lași
Până ce ea,
Mândra mea,
Cu mine s-a întâlni
Şi îmi va vorbi."
September 10, 2016
Amazing writer, mind-blowing book, nothing surprising for Eliade's fantastic prose! However, the book is distinguished by how the myths and the symbols are introduced and, also, the transition from the profane world to the sacred one.. I would recommend this to anyone, especially to those who are interested in myths and symbols. Easy to read and deep in its composition.
February 1, 2017
"Tu nu stii ce inseamna sa fii om, e atat de bine..."
September 3, 2016
" Ce-am făcut oare tot timpul ăsta ? Când am crescut atât, fără să ştiu, fără să-mi spună nimeni?..."
April 29, 2021
Not enough stars for this masterpiece.
June 4, 2022
"Simțea câteodată o zgârietură fierbinte pe trup, dar nicio durere nu se putea asemăna cu răsuflarea nouă, delirantă pe care o cunoștea acum viața ei."
June 9, 2025
fever dream, but it's actually a dream in a dream of many people who dream
August 30, 2020
"Fara sa fi stiut, fara sa fi vrut, izbutisem sa «arat» in Sarpele ceea ce voi dezvolta mai tarziu in lucrarile mele de filosofia si istoria religiilor, si anume ca, aparent, «sacrul» nu se deosebeste de «profan», ca «fantasticul» se camufleaza in «real», ca Lumea este ceea ce se arata a fi si totodata un cifru"
July 14, 2022
M-am întors din întâmplare la Eliade, iar povestioara asta m-a purtat super rapid în magie. Are acea aură de fantastic descrisă foarte precis în cuvinte alese...
October 27, 2012
Contrast intre realitate si miracol,profan si sacru,banalitate si mit.Finalul romanului m-a fascinat .......un final de dragoste edenica cu o deschidere spre celelalte realitati ale vietii.Fantezie,romantism,banal,dragoste.......si mister!
November 4, 2015
It blows your mind!
July 26, 2017
Exact ca în cazul Domnișoarei Cristina, Șarpele mi s-a părut o carte enigmatică. E imposibil să nu stai puțin pe gânduri după ce o termini de citit, mai ales că sfârșitul nu e unul tipic.
April 8, 2021
A great example of Eliade’s prose where you can observe the passage from profane to sacred.
I don’t even know where to begin with this one – there are so many symbols it makes it impossible to shortly explain the complexity of this novel. In my own opinion, this is a novel of erotic awakening. The narration follows Solomon family, in their attempt to marry their daughter, Dorina. After a short party held at their home in Fierbinti, they decide to visit Caldarusani monastery and spend the night there. But, on the way there they meet Andronic and here is where the linear time moves into the territory of cyclical time and sometimes even timelessness.
Once they reach the monastery, Andronic comes with a game idea that gradually transforms into a frantic rite of passage trial, deep in the dark of the forest. Here, he gives the participants the chance to turn into reality the desires normally repressed, everything happening in the middle of a most complicit environment. Once the games are over, the action moves back to the monastery and here, Andronic starts his magical act – the summoning of the snake.
The snake appears here as a symbol of primordial unity, the endless cycle of time and the mythical return to origins. The way Andronic places everybody, in order to help his magical ritual that summons the snake, is a perfect example of cyclical time – twelve people arranged in a circle, with Andronic in the middle. Andronic is a piece of sacred space, a hierophany manifesting inside the profane.
The last part of the novel comes as a result of Dorina passing Andronic’s trials, gaining thus access to a mysterious island in the middle of the monastery’s lake – an axis mundi, where the Heavens connect with the Earth. She gets to the island, takes off her clothes, leaving behind any sign of her profane existence, and here they both recreate the exemplary model of the primordial couple. Or it could be a recreation of the myth of the androgyne – two beings becoming one. **** stars
I don’t even know where to begin with this one – there are so many symbols it makes it impossible to shortly explain the complexity of this novel. In my own opinion, this is a novel of erotic awakening. The narration follows Solomon family, in their attempt to marry their daughter, Dorina. After a short party held at their home in Fierbinti, they decide to visit Caldarusani monastery and spend the night there. But, on the way there they meet Andronic and here is where the linear time moves into the territory of cyclical time and sometimes even timelessness.
Once they reach the monastery, Andronic comes with a game idea that gradually transforms into a frantic rite of passage trial, deep in the dark of the forest. Here, he gives the participants the chance to turn into reality the desires normally repressed, everything happening in the middle of a most complicit environment. Once the games are over, the action moves back to the monastery and here, Andronic starts his magical act – the summoning of the snake.
The snake appears here as a symbol of primordial unity, the endless cycle of time and the mythical return to origins. The way Andronic places everybody, in order to help his magical ritual that summons the snake, is a perfect example of cyclical time – twelve people arranged in a circle, with Andronic in the middle. Andronic is a piece of sacred space, a hierophany manifesting inside the profane.
The last part of the novel comes as a result of Dorina passing Andronic’s trials, gaining thus access to a mysterious island in the middle of the monastery’s lake – an axis mundi, where the Heavens connect with the Earth. She gets to the island, takes off her clothes, leaving behind any sign of her profane existence, and here they both recreate the exemplary model of the primordial couple. Or it could be a recreation of the myth of the androgyne – two beings becoming one. **** stars
May 28, 2024
#2024 #62
Se pare că a trecut prea mult timp de când am citit Eliade. Probabil că i-am pierdut gustul. Citind “Șarpele” trebuie să recunosc că aveam așteptări mari. Toată intriga creată în jurul lui Andronic mi-a trezit curiozitatea. Am citit cu sufletul la gură pentru a ajnge la deznodământ. Însă, acesta a fost unul destul de plictisitor și fad. Desigur am citit să văd ce zice critica literară și am înțeles că este vorba despre o bogată simbolistică, însă îmi păstrez părerea potrivit căreia deznodământul nu este unul care să mă cucerească.
“Șarpele” de Mircea Eliade
Se pare că a trecut prea mult timp de când am citit Eliade. Probabil că i-am pierdut gustul. Citind “Șarpele” trebuie să recunosc că aveam așteptări mari. Toată intriga creată în jurul lui Andronic mi-a trezit curiozitatea. Am citit cu sufletul la gură pentru a ajnge la deznodământ. Însă, acesta a fost unul destul de plictisitor și fad. Desigur am citit să văd ce zice critica literară și am înțeles că este vorba despre o bogată simbolistică, însă îmi păstrez părerea potrivit căreia deznodământul nu este unul care să mă cucerească.
“Șarpele” de Mircea Eliade
July 14, 2022
O nuvela fantastica care te vrăjește de la primele pagini. A venit la momentul potrivit.
M-a dus cu gândul la stilul Agathei Christie, misterul predominând la fiecare pagină.
O recomand in orice după amiaza, când aveți nevoie de relaxare.
M-a dus cu gândul la stilul Agathei Christie, misterul predominând la fiecare pagină.
O recomand in orice după amiaza, când aveți nevoie de relaxare.
December 17, 2020
Quite a mysterious book.
I didn't understood all of it, but it was an easy read.
I didn't understood all of it, but it was an easy read.
April 19, 2020
Mircea Eliade este scriitorul meu de suflet. Eram în liceu când l-am descoperit si de atunci îl port în suflet ca o icoană sfântă. Șarpele, ce voluptate! Ultimul capitol este ca un poem în proză.
June 18, 2022
Two years after Miss Christina: An Erotic Vampire Novella provoked a scandal when it was published in Bucharest, Mircea Eliade, the leading light of Romania’s interwar generation, followed it up with Şarpele (The Serpent), in which the erotic and fantastic elements, though still present, are somewhat subdued.
The story concerns what the author, in his memoirs, describes as “banal characters who go on an outing to a monastery park and become involved involuntarily, almost without realising it, in a series of strange happenings that eventually bewitch and transfigure them. The ‘fantastic’ is disclosed gradually, imperceptibly, and in a sense ‘naturally,’ because nothing extraordinary occurs, no supernatural element intervenes to abolish the world in which my characters have been born and have lived up to that time.”
On the way to the monastery the group meets a mysterious, (apparently) young man called Andronicus, who turns out to be a bit of a ‘charmer,’ in both senses; who announces the presence of a snake in the monastery grounds and, by doing so, unleashes something less banal in their characters. Andronicus is both the snake and the snake-charmer who exorcises it; but it is only a young woman called Dorina who senses something of the Eternal Return which, from archaic times, has transformed profane existence; and who follows him to an island amidst a lake, where she is initiated into a new perception of reality…
The novel was written at great haste in 1937, when Eliade was thirty years old and in a hurry to define the contours of his oeuvre, as he puts it in his memoirs. This he would do over the next fifty years, establishing himself after WWII as the leading historian of religions in France and America; but he would always see his literary work as another and equally important means of revealing the sacred hidden in the profane: “It is as if the everyday world camouflages a secret dimension which, once man knows it, reveals to him simultaneously the profound significance of the Cosmos and his authentic mode of being: a mode of perfect, beatific spontaneity, but which is neither the irresponsibility of animal existence nor angelic beatitude.
“Unconsciously and unintentionally, I succeeded in ‘showing’ in Şarpele something I was to develop later in my works of philosophy and history of religions: namely, that the ‘sacred’ apparently is not different from the ‘profane,’ that the ‘fantastic’ is camouflaged in the ‘real,’ that the world is what it shows itself to be, and is at the same time a cipher.”
Having read the novel in the French translation by Claude Levenson, I look forward to someone producing the first English translation of this and other of Eliade’s early ‘magical realist’ books – for, as Andronicus and Dorina might agree, without magic, the world is not enough.
There is more on Eliade, literature and religious symbolism in my Goodreads blog: 'Myth Dancing (Incorporating the Twenty Third Letter)'
The story concerns what the author, in his memoirs, describes as “banal characters who go on an outing to a monastery park and become involved involuntarily, almost without realising it, in a series of strange happenings that eventually bewitch and transfigure them. The ‘fantastic’ is disclosed gradually, imperceptibly, and in a sense ‘naturally,’ because nothing extraordinary occurs, no supernatural element intervenes to abolish the world in which my characters have been born and have lived up to that time.”
On the way to the monastery the group meets a mysterious, (apparently) young man called Andronicus, who turns out to be a bit of a ‘charmer,’ in both senses; who announces the presence of a snake in the monastery grounds and, by doing so, unleashes something less banal in their characters. Andronicus is both the snake and the snake-charmer who exorcises it; but it is only a young woman called Dorina who senses something of the Eternal Return which, from archaic times, has transformed profane existence; and who follows him to an island amidst a lake, where she is initiated into a new perception of reality…
The novel was written at great haste in 1937, when Eliade was thirty years old and in a hurry to define the contours of his oeuvre, as he puts it in his memoirs. This he would do over the next fifty years, establishing himself after WWII as the leading historian of religions in France and America; but he would always see his literary work as another and equally important means of revealing the sacred hidden in the profane: “It is as if the everyday world camouflages a secret dimension which, once man knows it, reveals to him simultaneously the profound significance of the Cosmos and his authentic mode of being: a mode of perfect, beatific spontaneity, but which is neither the irresponsibility of animal existence nor angelic beatitude.
“Unconsciously and unintentionally, I succeeded in ‘showing’ in Şarpele something I was to develop later in my works of philosophy and history of religions: namely, that the ‘sacred’ apparently is not different from the ‘profane,’ that the ‘fantastic’ is camouflaged in the ‘real,’ that the world is what it shows itself to be, and is at the same time a cipher.”
Having read the novel in the French translation by Claude Levenson, I look forward to someone producing the first English translation of this and other of Eliade’s early ‘magical realist’ books – for, as Andronicus and Dorina might agree, without magic, the world is not enough.
There is more on Eliade, literature and religious symbolism in my Goodreads blog: 'Myth Dancing (Incorporating the Twenty Third Letter)'
February 21, 2019
"Dacă-mi pare rău că nu m-am înscris şi la Filozofie, vorbi Vladimir, este tocmai din cauza problemelor acestora ale sufletului. La noi, la Istorie, nu se rezolvă nimic..."
"- Vezi, eu mă pricep mai puţin în păreri personale, glumi Dorina."
"― De ce ţi-e frică? o întrebă mirat Andronic.
― De moarte, şopti Dorina.
― Sunt şi acolo oameni, zâmbi Andronic. Pretutindeni sunt oameni..."
"- Vezi, eu mă pricep mai puţin în păreri personale, glumi Dorina."
"― De ce ţi-e frică? o întrebă mirat Andronic.
― De moarte, şopti Dorina.
― Sunt şi acolo oameni, zâmbi Andronic. Pretutindeni sunt oameni..."
April 28, 2012
A novel filled with erotical references and symbols, even if it doesn't look like it at first sight. I found some scenes ambiguous in their potential meaning, but overall, it was nice to read something different.
June 7, 2020
Un cadru simplu și cotidian se schimbă după lasarea serii, după miezul nopții lumea prinde un alt sens, parcă vrajită. Deși la început puțin surprinzătoare, către sfârșit , Eliade colorează cadrul cu o descriere superbă. Un alt roman “țiplă” scris de Mircea Eliade.
August 25, 2013
recunosc ca ma prind mai greu de simbolismele lui mircea, poat pentru ca nu am fost destul de prins de unele pasaje ca sa inteleg aluziile erotice
December 30, 2023
Just a whole fever dream. Eliade reuseste sa te plimbe intre sacru si profan mai bine decat orice alt scriitor(mai ales prin utilizarea unor simboluri care practic sunt punctele cardinale ale povestii). Mi-am adus aminte de ce era preferatul meu in liceu.
June 17, 2025
sunt convinsă ca mircea eliade scrie cărți doar când este sub influența alcoolului sau a substanțelor interzise
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September 18, 2020I started this book because my literature teacher recommended it - she said that when she was a teenager, the sexual tension, the characters' fear after hypnosis, the dark atmosphere that surrounded the woods and the deadly lake, together they all built up the excitement in her chest, so much so that she jumped out of her bed out of fear when her Father knocked on the door and entered.
I wasn't so impressed.
In my view, the action was horribly awkward for the characters, and the main one, a mysterious man, who seduces all the ladies - be them young or old, single or married - seemed too unrealistic, posh and pretentious a guy to induce me the state of fear and/or tremulous anxiety.
The psychological side of the narration was, again, excessively fiction and from a male point of view to be at all relevant for a real psychological portrait.
I, personally, do not recommend it, but "de gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum."
I wasn't so impressed.
In my view, the action was horribly awkward for the characters, and the main one, a mysterious man, who seduces all the ladies - be them young or old, single or married - seemed too unrealistic, posh and pretentious a guy to induce me the state of fear and/or tremulous anxiety.
The psychological side of the narration was, again, excessively fiction and from a male point of view to be at all relevant for a real psychological portrait.
I, personally, do not recommend it, but "de gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum."
December 4, 2022
Dorina et quelques-uns de ses amis vont s'amuser dans la forêt, ils organisent une petite fête. En chemin il rencontre Andronic un étrange personnage possédant un grand pouvoir de séduction, qu'ils veulent bien dépanner et qui se met à faire la fête avec eux. Ensemble ils font plusieurs jeux, dont un où tous se cachent. Une nouvelle fantastique d'Eliade, sa spécialité, autour d'Andronic, personnage fascinant par excellence qui, à travers le jeu, initie les autres au pouvoir de la nature. La première que j'ai lue est aussi ma préférée.
August 5, 2016
intriguing.
August 25, 2019
Masterpiece🖤🖤🖤
December 21, 2019
Mi-a plăcut mai mult prima jumate, înainte să înceapă partea fantastică...
September 19, 2023
mai nou îmi place numele de Andronic
Displaying 1 - 30 of 44 reviews