Cheating the Censor: Romanian Writers under Communism

Abstract

The Romanian Communist Party enjoyed considerable success in exploiting literature for its own ends. This article asks why those writers who challenged censorship were few in number, and why, even in the final year of Nicolae Ceau?escu’s rule, the chorus of protest was weak. Most Romanian writers failed to oppose censorship, and were deeply marked by it even when they believed that they were ‘cheating’ the censor. In some ways self-censorship proved to be more damaging to creativity than overt repression. The exceptions nevertheless comprise an important category, deserving examination and recognition. The fall of Communism in Romania has allowed a discussion of these themes to be more fully informed and to this end English translations of open letters from a number of writers are appended. Some of these were passed to the author for dissemination in 1989.     

The Ideologization of the Child: Zdeňka Bezděková and Marie Majerová

Abstract

This article traces the changes in two novels, Zdenňka Bezděková’s ?íkali mi Leni and Marie Majerová’s Bruno, made once the Communist-Party regime in Czechoslovakia was firmly established. For example, German paedophilia is changed to bullying in Bezděková and pre-war Czech political antisemitism deleted from Majerová. In both works Czech nationalist misoteutonism is changed into internationalist Communism. The author pays close attention to changes in language and style in both works. Though Majerová’s novel seems no longer to be read, Bezděková’s remains standard reading for adolescents, and in the twenty-fi rst century continues to be read with its somewhat rabble-rousing afterword by the novelist Karl Nový. The essay demonstrates how children can be made into things rather than people for the sake of a political ideology.     

Allegories of Absence: Richard Weiner and Karel Čapek

Abstract

Examining the relationship between two of the most significant Czech writers of the early twentieth century, Richard Weiner (1884–1937) and Karel ?apek (1890–1938), this article sets their divergent developmental paths into the context of broader issues within European Modernism as a whole. The re-emergence of ‘allegory’ as privileged aesthetic category — represented prominently by Walter Benjamin’s work in the 1920s — characterizes a cultural phenomenon that can be termed ‘melancholy Modernism’. Weiner and ?apek’s contrasting responses to this melancholy allegorical impulse trace a fundamental fault line within the philosophical and historical development of Modernism.