Tag #136009 - Interview #78511 (Vasile Grunea)

We started to study again the abstract literature and abstract art, the avant-gardism of the interwar period, because it was obvious that Romanians, such as Marcel Iancu or Ilaria Voronca, played an important role both in the French and the Swiss avant-garde. The one question that was a taboo throughout the Ceausescu era was religion, because it was a big problem for both Ceausescu and the ‘lady' [his wife, Elena Ceausescu]. So, fine arts, for example, couldn't deal with religious themes, nor could we publish anything on religion in the paper. They went so far that there were some words, for example ‘Sir' or ‘Madam', which could only be used in a pejorative sense. Besides, there were long lists, of course, with the names of those who couldn't publish, or whose writings, if they were already dead, couldn't be published in the paper. As to foreign writers and especially Romanian writers living in emigration, there was a time when their works were translated into Romanian and we could talk about them. But then if they happened to make a statement about the Romanian communist regime that wasn't positive enough, their names were put down on the list again and we couldn't publish them.