?CELEBRATION OF ROMANIA? FESTIVAL

Why did I never go to the Celebration of Romania? At a certain moment when I was, I think, in my fifth grade, they came to my school to recruit us for the Celebration of Romania. What we had to do was to fill the stalls and to handle the plates with the eulogistic captions addressed to the leaders of the country. Of course, everything was compulsory. A year before, the same thing had happened with my brother?s class. He got away for the mere reason that he wore glasses. Then, mother came with the idea to invoke the same reason in my case as well. And it worked. Anyway, I was really disappointed, because all my colleagues had a wonderful time and they kept telling stories about it long after this happened. (160)

You should know that the sober teachers did not take this seriously. My opinion is that this had a positive feedback, in the sense that some values got promoted. The authors got to confirm their value and this was a good thing, but taken as a whole, the festival was Kitsch. But there had been a few good things too. In our county, Tulcea, a group of dancers led by a methodologist from the culture and education center of the county, who had been abroad many times, even won the Big Prize at Efes. And Privighetorile de la Niculitel (the Niculitel Nightingales), a choir of traditional folk music, I cannot explain to myself why, I think maybe because of all the wine that was there, was extraordinary. One of the nightingales was magnificent, an unschooled soprano voice, just with God?s gift, was absolutely divine. (I. P., 134).

CENSORSHIP

Censorship exercised in different domains: military, ecclesiastical, artistic, means first and foremost an ideological control of the discourse. The control is attributed to an official institution. In communist Romania, censorship as an autonomous institution is abolished by a decision of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party in June 1977 as a consequence of external pressure. From then onwards, the censor roles multiply. There will be an auto-censorship practiced by each institution. In a publishing house, for instance, the publication of a volume ?considered inadequate by the Board in charge of Literature and Publications of the Culture and Socialist Education Council (C.S.E.C) implied the responsibility of the decision factors: head, chief editor, editor in charge of the book.