Once in an interview, if I’m not mistaken, in an interview with director Alexander Solomon, which was included in his film. War is on the wave path, Monica Lovinescu said that the only tool she had at her disposal in the fight against communism throughout her life was a microphone. Radio station microphone Free Europe. Which, in turn, was nothing but a radio station. No more, no less. But it was not just any. It was a real radio station, a media tool from which, for almost fifty years, tens and hundreds of millions of people who became victims of the totalitarian night were addressed by their compatriots in their language, people who had something to say.

Free Europe in Romanian it was a real phenomenon. It was an extraordinary audience, it was the most listened to service in the entire complex Free Europe – Freedom, based in Munich. But if the radio enjoyed enormous popularity, a popularity that made the communist leadership in Bucharest cringe, and Nicolae Ceausescu personally, relatively few Romanians knew that in addition to the broadcasting section, the station also had a research institute. The main task of the relevant institute is to prepare reports from various fields, written in English, intended for the Western public – government officials, diplomats, researchers, journalists, students who are interested in events in Romania. Few employees of this institute appeared directly in TV series – with the exception of Carmen Pompey (Anka Kroitoru), Volodymyr Sokor, Dan Ionescu, Michael Shafir, Crisula Stefanescu. And, of course, Anneli Ute Gabani, the last certain period even headed the Romanian department. Some papers written by them and their colleagues were sent directly to the post office. However, of course they served to inform and document the section editors Schedule and were often cited as such.

book Ceausescu and writers –Political and literary analysis in real time thanks to Annely Ute Gabanyi, a huge volume of more than 600 pages, first published in 2013 by the “Alexandru Ioan Kousa” University Press in Iasi and republished in 2023 by letter. Kronos and supported by IICMER means, like the previous volume, Cult of Ceausescu (Editura Polirom, Iași, 2003), restoration of a certain part of this archive. As proof of her dignity.

In the preface, Ms. Gabani expresses her personal dissatisfaction, which, in my opinion, cannot be justified, born of the fact that immediately after 1989, what the author calls “the ahistorical vision of the cultural politics of those times, a vision that led to somewhat a simplified, leveling, Manichean understanding of the facts of the communist period in Romania.” The undersigned also wishes that through his research he will find out “the barriers faced by artists in the very different periods of the communist era in Romania, as well as with the help of which real writers resisted the political dictates…”.

I think that the articles collected between the covers of the book, apart from some small, ultimately unimportant information errors, are probably inevitable due to the fact that the author had to recognize the dynamics of facts and events not directly, through on-the-spot observations. , but primarily through a careful reading of the Romanian press and reading between the lines, the press, as we well know, is intensively censored (by the way, even in the book we find several valuable studies on the tortuous evolution of censorship in Romania, the studies are grouped in a separate sequence) prove , that Anneli Ute Gabani fulfilled her wish.

However, they, the articles, also show that the name chosen for it is insufficient. Yes, it is true, Mrs. Gabani was and is a careful, refined and qualified observer of the post-war Romanian literary life. The book contains a really interesting, insightful analysis of some literary works of great influence (I mean mainly delirium and at The most beloved among earthlings Marin Preda), the value of which is assessed both from an aesthetic point of view and from the point of view of courage, morality and overcoming the ideological thresholds that their authors allow. In fact, however, the book also has the merit of providing us with fascinating and applied diagrams of the sinusoids of the cultural policy of the communist regime, alternating, sometimes deceptively, between real or only simulated liberalization and a return to the strictest dogma. and cazon control, the police that the Romanian communists wanted to impose on literature, art, historiography, the movement of ideas in Romania.

In addition to the sinusoid of cultural policy, in addition to deciphering the relationship between culture and politics, between political events and the strengthening or weakening of ideological control over literature and art, over the press, over cinematography, Ceausescu and writers – Political and literary analysis in real time tends to highlight the sine wave of individual behavior, impressive but also disappointing transitions from one camp to another by writers such as Adrian Peunescu (the book contains some very good analyzes of the phenomenon represented by Cenacl Flame headed by the poet in question), Nikita Stanescu, D. R. Popescu. Regarding the latter, I would like to draw attention to Anneli Ute Gabani’s careful commentary on the 1981 Writers’ Conference, the surprises surrounding the Council elections, how writers faced the desire dictation leaders of the Communist Party, hoped for the election of the head of the authors’ guild. Royal hunters, but also the disappointments that followed. Disappointment, what – who knows? – perhaps it was even impossible to avoid what the 80s meant, the satanic decadeas Mircea Zacha urged him magazine or. Decades of great attacks on thinking, on the human being and spirit, of undeniable resistance, as well as great compromises.

I would like to note one more important assignment of the scope of Ms. Gabani’s research. A property that follows precisely from the rejection of simplistic settings. We used to say that the years 1965-1971 were years of unexpected and great liberalization. That liberalization would be abruptly stopped, p Theses from July, the product of the plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the PKR on July 6-9, 1971. That the relevant theses, reinforced at the plenary meeting in the autumn of the same year, would be inspired by the Sino-Korean model, which fascinated Nicolae Ceausescu during his visit to Asia in June 1971. Anneli Ute Gabani does not deny the importance of that moment. It even emphasizes the imprint of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the cultural policy imposed by Nicolae Ceausescu after the above-mentioned visit. But he sees the first preparatory signs turning the page since 1968.

The year 1968, with all its complexity of facts, is strongly felt in Romania. General de Gaulle visited here when he succeeded in the Paris-Nanterre uprising, foreword by the famous French. It was a visit that marked a new success for Ceausescu in his foreign policy, a policy that he was able to use very cleverly in favor of his own image as an atypical leader, not subject to Moscow, which makes him a special figure compared to other leaders of socialist countries. In 1968, after the removal of Aleksandar Dragić from the public scene and the interested rehabilitation of Lucretsiu Petrashkan, the young PKR leader virtually won the power struggle he had focused on for the first three years of his rule. Years of true liberalization. – read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro.