REMEMBRANCE IN TIME - Index of

THE LITERARY CREATION AS AN
ENDURANCE FORM IN ROMANIA DURING
COMMUNISM - KNOWN CASES OF
CENSORSHIP (1966-1971)
Ion ZAINEA, Carmen UNGUR-BREHOI 1
Abstract: The censorship of the years 1966-1971 shows a number of materials (volums,
articles) that made references to the social realities, sometimes directly, other times
through allegory. According to the censors’ accounts, these presented or tried to present
a „distorted” image of reality, some failures, they amplify manifestations considered
„singular”, offering to them a general critic note, calumnious, putting unprincipled
relations, and negative practices on the credit of the social realities that generated them.
Some satirized different social conditions, while others talked about the limits of human
freedom, the freedom of creation of the artist, talked directly or only alludes to
phenomena of constrain, control, censorship, protested against the guidance of art and
literature, accentuated the lack of perspective, of the impossibility to claim the values, all
due to social causes.
The title of our study might seem, for some, ambitious, for others, probably not.
Depends on whose side you are regarding the optional answers to the question: Was the
literary creation an endurance form in Ceausescu’s Romania? We will try to answer
below, from the perspective of the censorship institution: The Press and Print General
Directorship/ The Press and Print Committee 2 .
In Romania during communism, the censorship had ideological basis, its aim being,
ultimately, the production of a literature that fits the ideological request and the will of
the Communist Party. Talking about the mission of the writers and that of the artists, in
his statement of The Work Deliberation with the Party’s Effective, regarding the field of
ideology and that of the political and cultural-instructional activity, in July 1971, Nicolae
Ceauşescu pointed out: “The ideological conception must be one and one alone: the
revolutionary ideology and conception of the working class... For that purpose, we sustain
the complete freedom of creation, for the total expression of imagination, but in the spirit
of our conception about life and the world” 3 .
1 Faculty of History, University of Oradea, Romania.
2 Institution born in 1949, near the Cabinet Council, and destroyed in 1977.
3 N. Ceausescu, Expunere la Consfătuirea de lucru cu activul de partid din domeniul ideologiei şi
al activităŃii politice şi cultural-educative, din iulie 1971, Ed.Politica, Bucuresti, 1971, p. 12.