Romanian writing by young authors was particularly butchered.
blocking certain ideas from the reader
After the imposition of the Soviet political model in the countries of Eastern Europe, State imposed censorship marked tight control especially in the first decade of communist power. In the People’s Republic of Romania, as in the other soviet satellite-states, censorship was performed with the intention of blocking certain ideas from the reader, ideas supposed undesirable by a government which feared that its venture to create the new man in a new type of society could be disturbed by disparate forms of dissidence.1
Censorship was widespread, and virtually every theatrical performance, television show, film, and book to be published had to pass strict ideological control. The purpose of the censorship apparatus was to subordinate all spheres of Romanian culture, including literature, history, art, and philosophy, to communist ideology. All facets of Romanian culture were reinterpreted according to the regime’s ideology, and any other interpretations were banned as forms of “bourgeois decadence.” 2
The July Theses, a name commonly given to a speech delivered by Nicolae Ceaușescu (General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party) July 6, 1971, ("Proposed measures for the improvement of political-ideological activity, of the Marxist–Leninist education of Party members, of all working people"). Republic of Romania, launched a Neo-Stalinist offensive against cultural autonomy.3
In the 1980s, the communist political system was characterised by a progressive sclerosis. Nicolae Ceausescu had gone completely insane in a progressive, paroxysmal accumulation of authoritarianism.4
At the Council of Socialist Culture and Education new writing by young authors was particularly butchered. The publishing house would send the book (which was included in the annual plan) to the Council of Culture year, where from the book would returned censored. The book editor would then call the author and suggest him/ her to give up certain passages or reformulate certain phrases or paragraphs.5
The strictness of Romanian censorship extended to deprecating Romanian authors living abroad, literature published abroad that presented Romania in an unfavorable light, everything related to the Romanian monarchy that was forced into exile in 1947, and all things touching on Romania’s history during the monarchy. A special censorship department was established, following the Soviet Glavlit model, and it operated, under a variety of names, between 1946 and 1991, when it was finally dismantled. Within this context, every published document, be it a newspaper article or a book, had to pass the censor’s approval. Periodically, the censorship department used to publish lists of books to be removed from library collections. Certain lists were quite extensive, amounting to some 8,000 banned books ). Oftentimes, the banned books were physically destroyed; in some libraries, however, “purged” books were simply set aside.6
In a series of interviews with prominent Romanian literary figures and a select presentation of their writings. Lidia Vianu asks how, under communism, did Romanian writers cope with constant ideological shifts and, in turn, respond to the censorship that so often accompanied such changes?" 7
The cultural milieu in which Nostalgia8 was written, in the most oppressive years of Ceaușescu’s regime is discussed by Mircea Cărtărescu, Magda Cârneci and Matei Vișniec in the video below.
IONICA, Daniel. The Role of Communist Censorship in Altering Romanian Identity. Case Study: Preserving the Imposed Ideology by Controlling the Past. Annals of the University of Bucharest - Philosophy Series, [S.l.], v. 67, n. 1, p. 89-111, July 2018.
ANGHELESCU, HERMINA G. B., and ELENA CHIABURU. 2015. “Regime Change in Romania: A Quarter-Century Impact on Libraries.” Library Trends 63 (4): 809–43.
Tismaneanu, Vladimir. Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism. 2003.
Bodiu, Andrei. 2010. “Communist Censorship and Romanian Poetry of the 1980s.” Caietele Echinox 19: 269–72.
Ibid.
Ibid., ANGHELESCU, HERMINA G. B., and ELENA CHIABURU.
Vianu, Lidia. Censorship in Romania. Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998.
Mircea Cărtărescu, Nostalgia, full edition of Visul, Humanitas, 1993. Nostalgia, translated by Julian Semilian (New Directions, 2005); with introduction by Andrei Codrescu,
This is fascinating information about Romania, a country I know very little about. Thanks for posting about this and letting us see the youtube video.