Viaţa intelectuală şi artistică în primul deceniu al regimulu... by Cristian Vasile

The book consists of five chapters that read almost like separate archival excursions bound together by the coincidence of time and place, without much attempt at connecting dots. Vasile is not the first to study it, and he engages with some of his precursors, even if his stance vis-à-vis other scholars’ findings is often less than clear. These zigs and zags suggest that 1965-74 is a key decade to research. Yet two years earlier, Ceauşescu had abruptly decreed abortions (Romanians’ main means of birth control) to be illegal and just three years later, Ceauşescu’s official visits to China and North Korea preceded his July Theses speech in 1971, which reemphasized the importance of communist ideology for culture and education. The year 1968 became the high watermark of Ceauşescu’s domestic popularity, as he declined to join the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring experiment in liberal communism. In the mid-1960s, Romanian writers and artists exhaled during a kind of thaw.

It was in 1974 that Nicolae Ceauşescu was proclaimed president of the Romanian Socialist Republic while still leading the RCP.įrom 1965 on, Ceauşescu continued the course of relative independence from Soviet domination begun by his predecessor Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. It focuses on the decade in which cultural policies of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) went from “the apparent abandonment of socialist realism” to the beginnings of a discernible cult of personality and a re-ideologization of culture (p. Viaţa intelectuală şi artistică în primul deceniu al regimului Ceauşescu 1965–1974 (Intellectual and artistic life in the first decade of the Ceauşescu regime, 1965–1974) is the third volume in a series authored by Cristian Vasile on Romanian culture under communism. Chris Davis (Lone Star College - Kingwood)

Reviewed by Irina Livezeanu (University of Pittsburgh)Ĭommissioned by R. Viaţa intelectuală şi artistică în primul deceniu al regimului Ceauşescu 1965-1974.

Viaţa intelectuală şi artistică în primul deceniu al regimulu... by Cristian Vasile