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CULTURE AS A HAVEN DURING THE COMMUNIST REGIME

Ramona MUREŞAN, PhD Candidate, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca

Abstract:The cultural products of the communist regime must be observed in a close relation to the political circumstances of the period, since everything was governed by politics during those times. The special and unique link between culture and politics might be hard to understand from the contemporary perspectives even by an inhabitant of the former communist bloc, not to mention people who have never known a totalitarian regime. In these circumstances, culture became a haven, a getaway place from the hardship of life. And nowhere was this more obvious than in the communist prisons, where innocent people found refuge in praying, in poems and in sui generis conferences and lectures given by outstanding teachers, priests and scientists who were imprisoned for merely believing in their dreams and values. Learning poems by heart, teaching others and sharing cultural knowledge to their fellow sufferers, gave these people the strength to survive, mentally and physically, in a communist political prison. Politically detained persons in the Romanian communist regime found their balance in religious faith (Nicolae Steinhardt), in poems (Radu Gyr, Lena Constante) or in handcraft. Regardless of the cultural form they have resorted to, their testimonies are a valuable life lesson for those who now enjoy the freedom that they have so hardly fought for.

Keywords: communism, cultural haven, political imprisonment, freedom

When dealing with the cultural products of a totalitarian society, one must thoroughly observe the correlation between the cultural product in itself and the socio-political context within which it was created and, possibly published or released to the public. From this perspective, two possibilities emerge in so far as the artist’s attitude towards the regime was: on one hand, there is the submission and the moral compromise some were willing to make and, on the other hand, there is the bitterness and the revolt in preserving the moral verticality in some other creators. Undoubtedly, there were some who stood between the lines, but even this type of positioning is, in our opinion, a form of giving up. The insidious way in which the oppressive regime has been trying to control the cultural life influenced to a high degree the artistic movement during Communism. Making art, and especially literature, synonym to the communist propaganda, The Communist Party lead an assiduous campaign to ideologically alter the culture, thus maintaining a climate of axiological confusion through diversions, false news, mass ideological intoxication and constant panic. Given these conditions, the cultural creation functioned on a surviving mode and the cultural elite was defeated, either by gaining artists on the communists’ side, or by isolating them from the rest of society. The communist prisons have been filled with intellectuals, who were humiliated and tortured beyond imagination. The stories of those who have survived the communist hell are simply terrifying, and the Romanian post-revolutionary literature produced an avalanche of such confessions which round up the image of a cultural life during the communism. Studying these writings is a must, a sine-qua-non condition in contextual analysis of the cultural products from that period. A dictatorship generates profound changes at all levels of human existence. We do not only refer to the material deprivation, but also – and even more – to the mutations that such a

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SECTION: HISTORY LDMD I regime causes on the human spiritual life. The less spirituality it allows, the stronger the dictatorship is, as Eugen Barbu’s main character states in his novel Prinepele: “[…] I have corrupted them, I have taught them to steal[…]. What more could I do than forcing them to forget their mother tongue? […] All that was honest in this country now lies in prisons, rotting, or long perished.”1 Although it refers to another period in our country’s history, the above quote holds a universal truth: when language, culture and moral values are defeated, the dictator has reached his purpose. However, another issue occurs, which does not allow the communists to completely suppress the cultural life of the country. They are well aware of the fact that a nation’s culture is what defines the nation itself, with its traditions, its language and its beliefs. Beyond social and political data of an era, the nation is almost exclusively defined through its culture and, disregarding this reality would equal with political suicide. Therefore, following their instincts or the advice of personal counselors, dictators were able to assess the major impact that cultural leaders had on people. The intellectuality of a country is an opinion leader and this is why they have always been carefully supervised and, if possible, lured into the political structures. Despite the intensive campaign to politically dominate all spheres of life, there were still many outstanding figures who managed to remain unchanged and unchained in spirit, no matter how hard their body was hit. How they managed to do so, is yet another story, on which our paper focuses. The vast bibliography available on the topic of communist political imprisonment makes it easier but at some points, even more difficult to distinguish patterns or types of people imprisoned during the communist regime. Amongst the most valuable diarist writings, we recall those of Nicolae Steinhardt, Sergiu Al. George, Virgil Ierunca, Paul Goma, Ion Ioanid, Ioan Ploscaru, Nicolae Mărgineanu, Lena Constante and the list goes on, with names that are all and each of them synonym with courage, spiritual strength, powerful minds and moral landmarks. Their confessions state for posterity the regime they were submitted to, the torments of communist prisons, the censorship, the physical deprivations and the spiritual sufferings they were forced to endure. In the proper sense of the word, these people’s salvation was their ability to disregard the material aspects of reality and, at the same time, to perceive everything on a spiritual level, discovering the superior values of life: solidarity, empathy, compassion. In this regard, we consider Ioanid’s words as iconic: “And today, while free, whenever I meet a former prisoner who speaks about prison with warmth, I know immediately that he is one of us, who understood things the same way I did. One who knew that the prison is not the building, nor the guards or the treatment, but the prisoners. Those who disregarded the material things within which the regime tried to enclose us (bars, prison walls, hunger, cold, sufferings of all kind and even death). Those who were freer in prison than others outside.”2 Life within communist political prisons proved to be unbearable and, unfortunately, many died or chose the compromise to survive. Physical tortures reveal insane minds and extreme sadism. The torturers proved really creative in discovering means of torture, but even they knew that the most difficult to bare is the psychological torture. Therefore, they constantly pushed the limits of the prisoners, in an attempt to destroy their intellectual abilities and their

1 Eugen Barbu, Princepele, 43. (Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own) 2 Ion Ioanid, Închisoarea noastră cea de toate zilele, vol. 1, 87. 524

SECTION: HISTORY LDMD I spiritual strength. Vulnerable spots were addressed, such as family, religion and moral dignity. Nothing was sacred for these tortures. They mocked, as Virgil Ierunca reveals, the most important religious celebrations, forcing the prisoners to eat faeces instead of the Holy Sacrament, making them adore a phallic appearance instead of their God, or eat like pigs, in response to the Last Supper. It is difficult to imagine how could one stand such humiliations and preserve their sanity at the same time. After all, how much can one endure and where does the force to surpass these horrors come from? Nowadays, such images seem to be taken from a fictional book because they are so unreal. This perception is met even with young people from former communist countries. It is then, pointless to mention that for people who have never lived under a totalitarian regime, such scenes are quite unbelievable. Indeed, such horrors should have never happened, but they did happen and it is our duty to tell the next generation with what costs they got their freedom. And understanding how these people saved their souls and their sanity is a lesson to be learned, and hopefully never to be lived again. All the memoires depicting life in communist regime mention, alongside the terrors, also the ways in which people kept going on. Three were the solutions taken into consideration: the first one, stated in Soljenitan’s Gulag Archipelago, was embracing death, since nothing can be taken to a man that has given up everything. A second possibility was to become completely unadjusted to the system, so that one could not be blackmailed and the third option was an active opposition, based on the principle that the harder the system hits you, the more cheerful you become. As far as the attitude is concerned, the Romanian political prisoner vacillates, according to Adrian Marino, between heroism, partial obedience and complete servitude. However, we must draw attention to the fact that all these behaviour patterns converge, at times, within the same person. The law of survival in the communist prisons is adjusting to the new situation. The process begins with the distinction between the vital and the moral values of the prisoner. Given these coordinates, Tzvetan Todorov distinguishes a moral profile of the prisoner: prior to imprisonment, the moral values are well defined, but the first days’ shock causes their immersion. Later on, once the adjustment begins, the preservation instinct makes the prisoners reconsider their spiritual structure. Once the inner balance is re-established, the prisoner becomes less vulnerable and more aware of the fact that the real prison is not the walls, the bars, the guards, lice or rats, but the guilty conscience. Basically, the prison becomes an abstract concept, defined by the state in which you deny your beliefs, giving in to the oppressive forces. Hence, a paradox: men behind bars could be freer than those outside the prison walls. Regardless of the solution that was chosen, the intellectual found their way of surviving through culture and their haven was the knowledge that living inwardly and consuming your spiritual freedom beyond any limitation is what being free is all about. The aspect is subject to debate, depending on the way one understands the mere notion of freedom, which is highly relative, as Ioan Ploscaru, a former Catholic Bishop, points out: “We, the ones under a lock, were freer than the ones outside. We have never carried a portrait we didn’t want or called a slogan we didn’t believe in! Those outside, to save not their freedom, but their job, food and connections, have sometimes sacrificed their convictions, their opinions and ideal. What is then the big freedom? The real freedom?”3

3 Ioan Ploscaru, Lanţuri şi teroare, 119-120. 525

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The real freedom, we may infer from the Gulag literature is, in fact, rediscovering one’s self and relating to a different reality, that of the soul. In some cases, the need for freedom was nurtured by faith in God, a faith that grew stronger while in prison. The ascetic type of prisoner would fight and confess his faith with bare hands, displaying a Christian form of non-violence. It is the case of Nicolae Steinhardt who discovered God behind the communist bars. His experience is a revelation, an act of miraculous surviving through faith. The future monk from Rohia understood that the basic dilemma of the prisoner is that of mind over matter. He resorted to culture in a Christian way, discovering religious writings and teachings. For Steinhardt, religion was the safe place, the refuge from the communist horrors. The same held true for many other communist prisoners. A relevant example is that of Radu Gyr who found his haven in religion, as well as in poetry. Gyr is the most valuable, aesthetically speaking, poet who created behind bars. His poems were transmitted orally, from prisoner to prisoner, because the conditions would not allow for other modes of recording the verses. Most of his poems had a religious theme, so that for his fellow sufferers, they were a versified religious book. His act of creation was a matter of courage and a defiance of the regime and it made Radu Gyr vulnerable to the oppressors. The notions of good and evil became vague behind the prison walls, making it difficult to distinguish between those who suffered with you and those who sought a way out by betraying. However, the abyss of prison can be turned into an enlightening experience, a transfiguration of suffering through prayer. The process could be so intense that, in Nicolae Steinhardt’s case we may speak about a Christomorphosis. The experience is made obvious in Gyr’s poem Jesus in my cell, where the prisoner receives the soul lifting visit of Jesus, who unloads the prisoner’s burden, taking over his sufferings. Jesus is depicted wearing inmate’s clothes, with cuffs and chains on His hands. Upon waking up, the prisoner feels relieved and, though there is no evidence of Jesus’s presence in the cell, the smell of roses and the stigmata that appeared on the prisoner’s hands show that is was more than a dream. The prisoner feels comfort in his sufferings, knowing that God is by his side. Surely, the degrees of discovering and getting closer to God differ from one prisoner to another, depending on their spiritual strength and self-discipline, together with the embracement of a missionary attitude. Such is the case of bishops Ioan Ploscaru and Iuliu Hossu, or of the pastor Richard Wurmbrand who became real apostles of their times. Their mission in prisons served a double purpose; if, on one hand, they tried to bring to light and save the souls of other political prisoners, on the other hand they managed to spread cultural values in the prisons. There was no grater victory against the torturers than to display Christian understanding, kindness, a better education and higher morality than the torturers. Next to the religious solution, one may easily recognize literature as a haven for the politically detained people. Nicolae Mărgineanu, Ion Ioanid, Ioan Ploscaru or Lena Constante testify to the way in which culture, and especially poetry, represented a means of surviving and of maintaining the intellectual integrity and the spiritual wholeness. In communist prisons, at times, the cells metaphorically turned into university lecture rooms, the teachers sharing their knowledge with fellow sufferers. There are records of people who learned foreign languages in prison (Lena Constante learned English through a code of knocks in the walls), or even expand their general knowledge in various domains. Nicolae Mărgineanu narrates a story from Aiud prison when outstanding intellectuals were made to work in a furniture factory inside the prison. They failed to fulfill their tasks, but were able to teach each other poems by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Valery or Rilke. It was not out of boredom that such 526

SECTION: HISTORY LDMD I lectures occurred, but out of the feeling that being useful for others and using your brain, would help to preserve the mental sanity. Indeed, filling one’s mind and memory with cultural products, further reproducing them to others, thus spreading knowledge became synonym with fighting against the regime. It was a rather cultural fight, but nonetheless a very effective one. Memorising poems is an active exercise for the mind, a way to stay lucid, but also a way to keep oneself busy and pass the time (which could become one’s worst enemy if filled with negative thoughts). As previously mentioned, most of the “arrested” verses belong to Radu Gyr, but also to Nechifor Craininc, another poet imprisoned for his beliefs. The poetic imaginary of these creations is a violent one, including words from the semantic area of prison, death and isolation, revealing negative matrix spaces: the cell, the solitaire, the personified prison. Some other poems created in prison do not meet the literary criteria but, even so, they serve a therapeutic purpose, allowing their creators to speak up their hardship, to symbolically exorcise the evil from prison. Many people found in these poems the strength to move on, against all odds. Addressing the spirit, poetry has common grounds with prayers and sometimes a transfer occurs between the two, facilitated by the cathartic function that they share. In the case of Lena Constante, the poetic creation is, literally, a key to escape. Her secret of surviving the solitude of the cell is realizing the body-soul dua lity and the superiority of the latter one. The moment she reaches that understanding, the author gains the battle with the regime, knowing that the prison is not the walls, but one’s own body. The result is a silent evasion out of her own self: “My body could only be here. I could be anywhere. It had no room to move its sore feet. I’ll make it grow wings. Wings of a bird. Wings of wind. Wings of stars. And I’ll break out.”4 We notice in the quoted passage the opposition between here – there, as well as between the category of enclosure and limit on one hand, and the image of flight on the other hand. Constante’s writing provides ample metatextual fragments, in which the writer examines her reasons for writing: to testify on a unique and undesirable experience, but also to assert her hope in human spirit’s ability to regenerate and, why not, to protest and demand justice and mercy between people. Her detailed account of life in complete isolation is an attempt to raise our awareness to how difficult it is to keep one’s mental health and fill the long minutes of solitude with meaningful things. As far as she is concerned, the most meaningful activity in prison was the creation of cultural products, be it tiny sculptures made from soap or breadcrumbs, or poetry: “Weaving the words on the webs of time, I have lived. I have survived. I have even managed to be pleased… Sometimes…”5 According to her confessions, Lena Constante created the verses for eight plays (around 2000 verses for each play), which she repeated constantly in an attempt to fight madness. In her books, The Silent Escape and The Impossible Escape, Lena Constante confesses her fears, the anxiety of imprisonment, the hunger and the punishments she had suffered with many details, but she does it with dignity, using an artistic expression of high sensibility. Accordingly, her confessions hold a triple value: testimonial (being a document of an age), therapeutic (spiritual freedom by sharing a personal experience), as well as a genuine literary value. All the previously mentioned autobiographies describing the horrors of the communist prisons in Romania converge to a single remark: one’s cultural load can make the difference

4 Lena Constante, Evadarea tăcută, 11-12. 5 Ibidem, 56. 527

SECTION: HISTORY LDMD I between being defeated and being free. All these people, and many others yet unknown have literally survived due to knowledge and culture which nurtured their inner force. They came out of prison better persons, improved at all levels, they came out winners! Therefore, we must conclude that culture was their haven, their safe place, the one that kept them going on as whole persons.

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