Literatura in cenzura - Društvo za primerjalno književnost - ZRC SAZU

Literature and Censorship: Who is Afraid of the Truth of Literature?was controlled directly by the top party officials and the secret police. Inthe 1960s control was loosened, and censorship came under the jurisdictionof normal state institutions. It became almost nonexistent on the eveof the Prague Spring in 1968. After ruthless suppression of the uprising,formal censorship was not renewed, but the time was ripe for extremelyharsh and efficient self-censorship (Čulik 98–99). Both cases demonstratequite clearly that the essential features of totalitarian censorship cannot befound at the formal, explicit level. On the contrary, the more the mechanismsappear to be softened, the harder are their effects.172Totalitarian censorship and literatureThe history of censorship shows that different kinds of works, varyingfrom the religious (e.g., the Koran, the Bible, and heretical or apocryphalwritings) and the philosophical to the scientific (e.g., Copernicus, Bruno,Galileo, and Darwin) and the literary, were subjected to censorship in differentsocieties. A survey of merely the physical destruction of books – andits best exemplar, public book burning 8 – seems to be an almost impossibletask. No less impressive would be a list of various prohibitive indexes, startingwith the Catholic Index librorum prohibitorum, which confined the horizonsof reception in the Occident for centuries. 9 Numerous masterpiecesin the canon of world literature have been censored or mutilated at sometime. Their authors have been prosecuted, or they have been placed onlists of prohibited literature, usually for moral or political reasons. 10 At firstglance, one could not say that censors would distinguish in principle betweenthe censorship of literary and non-literary materials. Nevertheless, literaryworks were obviously their most frequent and favourite target, in spite ofthe fact that literature (at least from the Pre-Romantic era) was developingan aura of artistic autonomy, and in spite of the fact that the theoretical discoursewas simultaneously producing various arguments about the specialstructure, function, and autonomous laws of art. One of the most importantarguments was the elaboration of complex oppositions between “reality”and “fiction”. The autonomous literary systems that developed in modernEurope actually created a unique space for the articulation of fundamentaldilemmas in society. Many examples show that engagement in literatureopened up new opportunities for creative expression of special insights thatoften conflicted with the prevailing ideologies and social norms.This special role of literature was even more visible in totalitarian societies,where dissident literature functioned as the scene of the most decisiveethical reflections. It was able to cope with censorship by using