The paradox of the fortunate fall: censorship and poetry in communist Romania

Literary Review, Summer, 2002 by Adam J. Sorkin

John Milton may at first seem a strange starting point for discussion of the effects of state censorship on poetry during the four decades of communist dictatorship in Romania, some three centuries later than Restoration England and a continent east. One could do worse in considering censorship than citing the author of the landmark plea "for the liberty of unlicensed printing" known as Areopagitica (716). Yet it is not for this reason that I have chosen to start with Milton but because of the famous passage in Book XII of Paradise Lost, when the Archangel Michael, before expelling Adam and Eve from Eden, promises that the result of the Fall will be something better for man in a future time:

   ... then the Earth
   Shall all be Paradise, far happier place
   Than this of Eden, and far happier days. (XII. 463-65)

Adam, reassured by Michael's prophetic revelations, replies:

   O goodness infinite, goodness immense!
   That all this good of evil shall produce,
   And evil turn to good; more wonderful
   Than that which by creation first brought forth
   Light out of darkness! full of doubt I stand,
   Whether I should repent me now of sin
   By mee done and occasion'd, or rejoice
   Much more, that much more good thereof shall
   spring.... (XII. 469-76)

This is the paradox of the fortunate fall: that what on the surface is irremediable catastrophe should lead to good.

It strikes me that the concept of a fortunate fall is the best description of the major sustaining myth among Romanian poets during the communist period, especially during the quarter century before the December 22, 1989, overthrow of Nicolae Ceausescu. His increasingly repressive regime had become, to use Norman Manea's description, "the most cruel and dark dictatorship" (Manea 4). Poets in Romania who wrote during these times of oppression frequently testified about the direct and indirect influences of censorship even at the very core of their work, more or less determining literary strategy and coloring purpose, content, and theme. Their belief in the ironic, covert benefit of censorship is not just desperate wishful thinking, making a virtue of what was black necessity. Rather, in the form of a belated declaration of a kind of hidden, inward independence, it is an interpretation of the secret to the high quality of Romanian poetry in its seemingly impossible response to the ideological constraints of the party-state. To many writers in the Socialist Republic, the fall into censorship occasioned a fruitful disobedience in which the poet, deprived by state policy of the paradise of free speech in the world about, believed he or she is compensated with (as Michael soon says to Adam before they wake Eve from her dreams) "a paradise within," to some poets perhaps "happier far" (XII. 587). (1)

First, some background is needed. The history of Romanian censorship is a varied one. Commenting in Parnassus, Nina Cassian likens its alternating phases, which she calls "strangulations" and "relaxations," to the recurrent broad and constricted shapes of the Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi's well-known monument, the "Infinite Column" (58). The first ten years after the 1948 Communist takeover were a period of severe Stalinist control of the arts, when an imposed socialist realist ("proletcult") ideal kept writing in uniform, captive to the party line. Then came a mild post-1956 thaw subsequent to Khrushchev's revelations and the beginning of Russian de-Stalinization--or, as Cassian describes the effect for poetry, a renewal of personal themes about which writers joked to one another, "They set love free" (71). Even greater liberalization began after the Russian occupation ended and just before Ceausescu acceded to power; the strategic easing of state oversight continued during the early years of his rule, roughly 1964 to 1971, a period Romanians characterize as that of a lyrical renascence in poetry. Relative freedom of expression fostered a vibrant outpouring of new and old poetic modes, including the rehabilitation of major pre-war voices and the belated (re)discovery of twentieth-century modernism. But after this, constriction again: historians tend to cite Ceausescu's fateful 1971 visit to China and, especially, North Korea as a turning point. During this trip Ceausescu saw a model of social engineering and a personality cult that in tandem led him to adopt policies that blighted Romania's future. The mini-cultural revolution occasioned by his "July theses" of that year "launched an offensive against culture's autonomy (Verdery 113). (2) After 1971, and particularly after official, acknowledged censorship was purportedly dismantled in the late 1970s, restrictions tightened--though never to the degree that writers had to resort to samizdat publication. Rather, oral literary circles played a similar role to unofficial dissemination of literature in the dire 1980s when young writers found it nearly impossible to publish.

It is well known that censors learn to see an enemy in every word, let alone in every unfettered idea. Even if categories such as subversive opinions are left aside, a list of some of the terms at times forbidden suggests both the serious impediment that censorship caused writers and likewise an absurd and arbitrary side. Among words proscribed at various historical moments that writers have noted to me are "red," "balcony," "meat," "cold," "ghost," "cross." Norman Manea cites others in his essay, "Censor's Report," among them "food lines," "informer," "cold," "dark," "dictator," "coffee," "breasts," "homosexual," and "God" (70). In a number of conversations, poet Daniela Crasnaru--who worked as an editor in a publishing house until quitting when the censorship became intense in the late 1980s--has mentioned "tyranny," "democracy, "freedom," as well as both "angel" and "church," but she added, with no small touch of sarcasm, "devils" was OK.