Censorship starts with the author who anticipates the official reaction as he creates. ?Each of us has a militia voice in our head?, a Romanian writer used to say in the ?80s. The disaster could not be made public: hunger, cold, darkness, church demolitions, village systematization. Apart from these events known to us all and hidden behind censorship, death, sex, desperation, fear, loneliness were forbidden. The new man had to be a ?revolutionary romantic? without any of the shades of old romanticism. It was all about courage, victory and light, all about climbing on the highest peaks of progress, without rest or shadow. ?Comrades, a reputed activist used to say, let us help science climb on the highest approved peaks!? (7)

In a manner of Balkan mockery, a painter surprised his Holiness, the Teoctist, doing poo-poo on a potty, in a company of orgy of a Bacchus-like nature, in some sort of The Last Supper kind of thing, but which was taken even further into ridicule, it was hilariously placed in the complete madness of the epoch. In the decision-making whether a work will be exhibited or not, the first and most important word was that of the chairman of the cultural committee of the county, who was an electrician. I was a turner myself, but he still remained a troglodyte and I got to b as I am. There was between us a state of incompatibility. Then there was a whole network, after him came a certain Filicenco, instructor or I do not know his position in the party, who was in charge of art, an this one was even more primitive than the latter. The criterion mainly consisted in having there on the canvas a red flag, a worker or a kolkhoz (collective farmer), so this is what he learned, and this is what he was doing. Sometimes, some authors would sneak a ?lizard? on the background of a blissful work landscape; this was the only way in which we managed to fool them. The last decision-making person was the propaganda chief, who was of the same stock, an ex-greengrocer, you can imagine? But they had some methodological norms at the level of their management and knew, this goes, this does not go. Sometimes, I got to the point in which I could even amuse myself. 

Eugen Ionescu was in disgrace, because he condemned both left and right totalitarian systems. Ioan Cantacuzino, who was a friend of Eugen Ionescu, told him that my diploma paper had the same subject, so I fell into disgrace as well. Eugen Ionescu wrote too about this in a newspaper in France. This both protected and accused me at the same time. Coman, too, the next Internal Affaires Minister, said that my luck was that ?the enemy of the people?, that is Eugen Ionescu made such a fuss about my diploma paper, otherwise I would have been swimming with the fish (there at the Sfântu Gheorghe fishery). (I. P., 134)