ARTISTIC BRIGADE

I could recite very well, I can tell you that, so I was a permanent member of the artistic brigade and always took part in the literary performances. It was nice. We helped ourselves too, and rehearsed a lot before the festivals.

I was directly involved: recitations and dramatic dialogues. I could also act and sing in the chorus and the Russian language vocal group. It did me good, this involvement is good, we were not like the young people today who would do nothing but ramble around the streets, the pubs and the canals. There are few who are really willing to do something nowadays. (C. S., 20)

In ?84 or ?85 I was appointed the task of organizing the literary-artistic performance show of the faculty. And a number of students were appointed participants in that show. It was the first time I met them. I went to the Polizu bookstore and bought some 4 or 5 books of classic patriotic verse. First I told the students what I wanted to do. That we were going to select the most bombastic stanzas of them all. Cross my heart. Topmost was that thing we did not find in those books, but which I remembered from 5^th grade: ?The Party? by Tarnea:

The Party is in all there is

And all that is going to be

Joyfully laughing in the sun.

The subversion (or diversion) was a great success. The students understood what we were going to do, and they liked it, otherwise it didn?t make any sense. We selected the texts together. I told them there was nothing they could do to us. As a rule, the texts used for the artistic brigade were checked by someone, I never knew who. They could make you drop one text or cut some passages. But it wasn?t our case. They couldn?t object to what we were doing, we could show them the book: it was official, published, already censored. No one could say a thing. And the whole was our doing. We threw in everything that really crossed the line. Imagine, 30 stanzas from 30 poems. We just had to arrange them in such a way as not to sound too weird. We ended up with a long poem made of other 30 poems and got the second prize. Mind you, no first prize was awarded! (I. H., S. R.-B., 132)