(The Gypsies) is a novella written by the Romanian philosopher, historian, and fiction writer Mircea Eliade. The story was first published in 1959 in a French translation, and the original Romanian version was published in 1960.
Mircea Eliade’s 1959 novella La Tiganci (The Hooligans/The Tigresses) serves as a fictional distillation of the author’s own scholarly theories regarding the "eternal return" and the nature of sacred time. Through the surreal final hours of the protagonist, Dr. Zărnoveanu, Eliade constructs a narrative labyrinth where the boundaries between the profane present and the mythic past dissolve. This paper explores how Eliade utilizes the motif of the 'tiganci' (a term denoting both a specific ethnic marginality and a mystic Otherness) to facilitate a failed initiation ritual. By analyzing the protagonist’s inability to transcend the "terror of history," this paper argues that the text functions as a tragedy of modernity—a modernity where the capacity to experience the sacred has been atrophied by rationalism. la tiganci mircea eliade pdf