Andrei Bodiu

”Transilvania” University, Braşov, Romania

andrei_bodiu@yahoo.com

 

 

Communist Censorship and Romanian Poetry of the 1980s

 

 

Abstract: The study deals with the issue of communist censorship as applied in the 1980s, especially to young postmodern writers. The example detailed in the current study refers to the conditions in which Mircea Cărtărescu’s volume, Poeme de amor, was published in 1983. A post-communist (unexcised) version of one of his poems is used for comparison with the two variants (censored and uncensored) with a view to observing the elements eliminated by the censorship. Generally speaking, the mechanisms of censorship prove to be complex and fluid (sometimes an ideological story was added to the rejection of a volume) and sometimes, a closer look reveals their flaws and oscillations (as it is obvious in the case of a poem signed Alexandru Muşina, which was censored twice, in two different manners).

Keywords: Romanian poetry; Communism; Censorship; The Generation of the 1980s; Mircea Cărtărescu.

 

 

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. The conference held in 1983 in Mangalia was the moment for the 1971 July Theses to be brought to the fore, confirming the irreversible decline of Romanian Communism. Among the measures applied to the writers, strengthening the July Theses, the Mangalia 1983 moment brought the materialisation of “Ceausescu’s desire to impose, among the preconditions of joining the Writers’ Union, the approval from one local party organization.”[1] Simultaneously, the conditions regarding publishing had also become more rigid. The target of these measures was all writers and books, but those starting a literary career or publishing a second book were particularly affected.

Remembering the period, Alexandru Muşina states that at the Council of Socialist Culture and Education new writing by young authors was particularly butchered. The censorship mechanism, as the poet remembers it, was working in the following manner: 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. The authors’ reply was very different along the ‘80s and deserves an extensive study, if not an entire book to consider how the writers chose to respond to censorship. I do not use the word “negotiation” because it was not in fact a negotiation, it was a game with clearly and definitely defined roles. This does not mean however that book editors were not in a delicate situation themselves.

The regime did not approve of writers’ nonconformist attitudes and that is why all those occupying positions in the system sought to keep things under control. It is useful in this respect to analyse fragments from Dorin Tudoran’s “Securitate” file as a person under surveillance, fragments recently published in „România literară”[2]. A large number of “Securitate” agents and aparatciks tried to persuade the poet to give up his dissent attitude on all sorts of pseudo-grounds. On the other hand, these attitudes had to be annihilated from the first moment. The Council of Socialist Culture and Education seemed, from this perspective, a ”bazaar”, an incarnation of communist baroque.

The mechanisms of censorship were not, at least in the opinion of some 1980s writers as perfect as they seemed to be. Alexandru Muşina received one of his poems in the volume Strada Castelului 104 marked up with the censor’s cuts and sent it back ignoring them. The second time, he received the poem with some different cuts than the first. They used, the poet suggests, different methods, in different situations and books.

Adopting J. Hillis Miller’s distinction (adapted to the context), one can say that the clerk at the Council of Socialist Culture and Education would perform a “political reading” of the literature he had to approve for publication. What I shall suggest in the following lines is that “political reading” meant a fluid complex of diverse and sometimes contradicting factors. The example I chose is one of the famous poetry volumes by Mircea Cărtărescu, Poeme de amor, printed in 1983 at Cartea Românească. Following the circumstances of the publication of the book, Tudor Jebeleanu remembers the moment when, together with Mircea Cărtărescu he went to the 13 Decembrie printing house to check on the volume. They found out that Poeme de amor had been rejected by a committee of printers working in that typography. It is obvious today that the attempt to block the publication of the book was an artifice generated by Ceauşescu himself. In the 1971 July Theses, Nicolae Ceauşescu makes reference to the printers’ vigilance, who should have for instance blocked Capote’s In Cold Blood or Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium-Eater. That vigilance awoke in 1983, when the printers read Cărtărescu’s poetry from beginning to the end and decided it should not be published. This was a typical manoeuvre for communism and the “Securitate”.

The question arises why Poeme de amor was not simply rejected, without this complicated artifice. There are various factors involved: one of them was the young poet’s increasing prestige. The fact that, as himself writes in Postmodernismul românesc[3], Cărtărescu’s poems had represented a top priority in the publication „Săptămâna”, the combative press organ of the „Securitate”, which had a pervert effect on the poet’s prestige, increasing it considerably. The very same poems, fiercely criticised by Eugen Barbu, were praised in free Europe. The pressure was also mounting from influential critics, such as Nicolae Manolescu, an open and determinate supporter of the poet, even since the period of the Monday Literary Circle (Cenaclul de luni). Using this as a premise, there was an interest in things being solved without Ceauşescu to notice. The biggest compromise reached was the transfer of the manuscript of Poeme de amor to Bacău and their printing at the local printing house, where the publishers had read many 1980s poets and were probably more lenient on the rebellious youth.

The “political reading” applied by the censors to Poeme de amor is a complex of ideological purism and care for public ethics. The politics is placed on the same level with eroticism and literature, censored as if they had represented an allusion (feared by the censors) to dictatorship. To illustrate the differences, I selected the famous poem O seară la Operă / A Night at the Opera, published in 1983[4] and the variant published in Plurivers, volume 1, în 2003[5]. The differences between the variants are noticeable in the third section, when the Woman makes her appearance. In the 1983 variant: „când brusc, în zidul de plumb, din spatele lui se desfăcu o fereastră/şi prin ea, cu un teribil de sexy glas/ se ivi o domnişoară de plexiglas / era fără îndoială cea mai frumoasă femeie din lume…”, has two lines less than the full version in 2003: „cînd brusc, în zidul de plumb din spatele lui se desfăcu o fereastră/ şi prin ea, cu teribil de sexy glas/ de ivi o donişoară de plexiglas/ o muieruşcă mirată/ cu o fascinantă ţâţă însângerată/ era fără îndoială cea mai frumoasă femeie din lume.”

If we are to get closer to the censor’s political reading, the reason for eliminating the two lines was not the presence of the word ţâţă (breast), although voices in the literary circles say the number of uses of this word was reduced to half, but the image of „fascinanta ţâţă însângerată” (fascinating bloody breast), which might have suggested that the poet was simply sexually obsessed. Even more obvious from the point of view of this exclusion is the situation of a line in the final dialogue between Maimuţoi and the Woman, who says (in the 1983 version): “oh, doamne, ce am făcut din viaţa mea…sînt tristă, dragule, vino, dragule, iată, camera s-a înunecat, blana ta luceşte/ciudat, am febră, simt cum mi se umflă la gît caratele…” and he answers : “mda…aş vrea să-ţi mulţumesc/ dar în graiul omenesc…” In Plurivers, the woman says „vino, dragule, iată camera s-a întunecat, blana ta luceşte ciudat, am/ febră, simt cum mi se umflă la gît caratele, / ah, vreau de-a-ndaratele…”

Censorship selection continued to operate further, so that in the next dialogue the answer is missing. Thus, in Poeme de amor, after the end of her line “dar eu nu sînt decît o biată/ femeie? Ce poate să facă o biată femeie?”, there is an intervention from then narrator “priveam cum îi lucesc ochii în blana albastră”. In Plurivers, the sequence is configured as following: the Woman’s answer is followed by a line from Maimuţoi, ”da, ce poţi tu decît să fii eteree / şi ce ştii tu decît să fîţîi din fund?”, and only after that the line of the narrator is included.

Writing in 2000 about O seară la Operă I was arguing, quoting the first edition, that the play between the Woman and Maimuţoi was “a pseudo-opera within a vaudeville, if not a confrontation in a puppet show.” In the larger context of the poem, a complex love poem, these strong accents add to the whole a dimension which is difficult to deduce after the action of censorship.

That political reading is a fluid complex of factors is easy to verify from the evolution of the parodic dialogue between Woman and Maimuţoi. It is well known that Cărtărescu writes in this dialogue a canonical history of Romanian love poetry. In the Duet, published in Poeme de amor, Mihai Eminescu is missing from the line of canonical Romanian poets. After the fragment with folklore inflexions, where an allusion to Alecsandri is made, the poet goes on to do a parody of Macedonski. In Plurivers, a parody of Eminescu’s lines is also identifiable (“o, varsă-n lutul meu pribeag/ substanţa nemuririi/ în ochi îţi scînteie cu drag/ un dor deasupra firii // şi dacă vezi mîhnirea mea/ şi fuga mea de semeni,/ revarsă tu lumina grea/ din ochi uimiţi şi gemeni.”) The fact that Eminescu was eliminated by the censor can be deduced from the dialogue between Woman and Maimuţoi, from the end of the Duet (“stai, ajunge, lasă-le-ncolo de poezii, că nu de vorbe proaste îmi arde mie…/- păi, nu mai era decît nichita…”).

It would not be impossible, although this is for now mere unsubstantiated theory, if writing the parody of Eminescu was not behind the revolt of the committee at the 13 Decembrie publishing house and later the price paid by the poet for seeing his book published by more post-modern fellow publishers from Bacău.

Beyond the fluid complexity of the “political reading” performed by the censor and which I tried to define and motivate here, another interesting thing would be for us to hear the testimonies of the writers, victims of the censorship in the 1980s and beyond. We would then have a basis for research, contradicting the idea that between Romanian writers and censorship there has been a sort of amiable understanding, which made literature pass easily from dictatorship to freedom.

 

Acest studiu este un fragment dintr-o cercetare mai amplă, pe care Andrei Bodiu o derulează în 2010 în cadrul grantului CNCSIS cod ID 760, cercetare finanţată prin contractul nr 863 / 19.01.2009 pentru proiectul de cercetare „Discursuri culturale şi forme de legitimare în literatura europeană a secolului XX”.

 

 

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