Eros and initiation paths in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Finnish, Hungarian and Francophone writers in comparison

This work focuses on the relationship between eros and initiation-transformative paths in the first three decades of the twentieth century, in the context of Finnish, Hungarian and Francophone literatures. The analysis concentrates on three novels by the Finnish writer Aino Kallas, ten short stories by the Hungarian psychiatrist and writer Géza Csáth, two novels by the Belgian writer Franz Hellens and one novel by the French writer Pierre Mac Orlan. The central question of this research concerns the relationship between eros and metamorphosis: the aim is to understand the weight and the relevance of the eros in the transformative paths of the human beings. The first part focuses on the eros in its relation to the movement and offers a model of the movements of the protagonists’ initiation and transformation paths. The second part concentrates on the spaces crossed by the protagonists in their paths and highlights those elements which contribute to give the spatial context an initiation meaning. These two parts lead to a third one, which studies the element of metamorphosis in its closest relationships with eros. This last examination makes it possible to reflect on the outcomes of the paths of transformation - completes or incompletes - bringing out salient aspects of the human beings. The texts, considered according to a necessary interdisciplinary perspective, lead to the identification of psychological correspondences with the physical paths reconstructed in the previous parts. It is possible to conclude that eros, an ambivalent force and a real motor of metamorphosis, leads the human persons to act dialectically, in particular when called to face emerging conditions of integration and disintegration.