COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

A leading Romanian intellectual of Jewish origin, Nicolae Steinhardt (1912–1989) came to be known mostly for his “literary testament,” an autobiographical volume which focuses on his conversion to the Christian Orthodox faith while imprisoned under communism. Published after 1989 as Jurnalul fericirii (Diary of blissfulness), this book epitomises the idea of “resistance through culture,” a post-1989 definition of the pre-1989 mainstream intellectual reaction to the system of values imposed by the communist regime in Romania (C. Petrescu 2008). Steinhardt was a member of the so-called generation of 1927, which comprised the most prominent intellectuals of the interwar period. Although he held a doctoral degree in legal studies, he nonetheless dedicated himself to cultural activities. As a Jew, he suffered from the wave of anti-Semitic persecutions perpetrated by the extreme right Iron Guard party and the military dictatorship of Marshal Ion Antonescu. Consequently, he lost his job as editor of the state-sponsored Revista Fundațiilor Regale in 1940. Under the communist regime, Steinhardt was a political prisoner for five years following a trial which the communist authorities staged against a group of prominent intellectuals from his generation during the wave of repression unleashed in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. 

It was not because he really belonged to an opposition group that Steinhardt was imprisoned; the accused in this trial were an informal group of highly educated and cosmopolitan intellectuals, who were transformed in the vision of the Securitate into an alleged “hostile group.” Taking his Jewish origin into consideration, the secret police summoned him to testify against his Romanian friends and fellow intellectuals, for the intention of the secret police was to incriminate them as “mystic and legionary [i.e., fascist] intellectuals.” Because he refused, the Securitate put him alongside the others and set up a trial against the entire group, which later came to be known as the Noica–Pillat trial, after the names of two leading personalities in the group. Due to the prestige and number of those involved, this event was the most notorious persecution perpetrated under communism against non-political intellectuals (Tănase 1997). Sentenced to thirteen years of imprisonment, Steinhardt went through the worst prisons in communist Romania, such as Jilava, Aiud, and Gherla.

A secularised Jew, Steinhardt converted to Christianity in 1960 in the Jilava prison, following an ad-hoc religious service performed by several of his inmates who were clergy of various Christian denominations, including Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox. It is worth emphasising the striking similarity between Steinhardt’s baptism and the widely known conversion to Catholicism of a Polish intellectual of Jewish origin, Aleksander Wat, while in a Soviet prison (Wat 1988). Steinhardt was released before completing his sentence, with the general amnesty of political prisoners in 1964. He resumed his literary activities as journalist and translator, managed to publish several books, and re-established himself as a reputed intellectual. A turning point in Steinhardt’s life occurred in 1980, when he became an Orthodox monk at the secluded monastery of Rohia in the northern region of Maramureș. Even there, he was continuously kept under surveillance by the Securitate. However, he dedicated himself to the writing of his secret memoirs, which he considered his literary testament. In spite of the constant surveillance, Steinhardt managed to transmit his extraordinary life experience, in particular that of his imprisonment and conversion to Christianity, through the manuscript entitled Jurnalul fericirii (Diary of blissfulness). He stubbornly rewrote the manuscript each time the secret police confiscated the version he was working on. He even managed to send some copies abroad to RFE, which broadcast them back to Romania. His funeral in March 1989, which was attended by some of the most prominent intellectuals in Romania, was also monitored by Securitate employees.

Nicolae Steinhardt was not involved directly in the making of any collection, but he is the author of one featured item from the Confiscated Manuscripts at CNSAS Collection, which seems to be a condensed version of his Jurnalul fericirii. This non-ad-hoc collection founded by the Securitate includes today only a copy, for the original was returned to his heirs in 2002, in accordance with the 2001 decision of the then Collegium of CNSAS to return confiscated materials upon request. Besides this abridged version of his memoirs and that which reached RFE, at least two other versions survived communism to be published. Before his death, Steinhardt was able to pass a version to a friend and to hide another in the monastery. Steinhardt’s memoirs became extremely influential during the time of ideological decay in the late 1980s for three reasons: (1) the author spoke about the solace of religion and proposed a different vision of the world than that based on the atheist communist system of values; (2) some versions of the manuscript, which was intended to be Steinhardt’s intellectual testament, circulated as a kind of samizdat in the intellectual circles close to the author; (3) the message of the memoirs was widely spread among Romanians via RFE. Thus, Jurnalul fericirii became after 1989 not only a bestseller, but also the epitome of what Romanian intellectuals name “resistance through culture” and claim – rightfully or not – to have been the only possible reaction against the Ceaușescu regime, which the powerful and ubiquitous Securitate defended until 1989 (C. Petrescu 2008).

Post-conceptual artist Mladen Stilinović was born in Belgrade in 1947 and spent most of his life in Zagreb. As a young man he left high school and opted for self-education. He was interested in history, theatre and the visual arts, and he wrote poetry. From 1969 to 1976, his primary field of interest was experimental film. He was a member of the Group of Six Authors (1975-1981) together with Vlado Martek, Boris Demur, Željko Jerman, Sven Stilinović and Fedor Vučemilović. He was one of the co-founders of the Podroom Gallery, and ran the Extended Media Gallery in Zagreb from 1981 to 1991. He cooperated with the IRWIN group on the Retroavangarde project in 1994.

Stilinović's artwork ˝Work is a Disease. Karl Marx˝ was censored by the Party in 1981. It was exhibited at the Youth Salon, and removed by Party. But he exhibited it again in the group exhibition in the SC Gallery three months later. “Work” aroused great interest among experts, and Stilinović described it as follows: ˝When I started making artworks about work, like ‘Work is Disease (Karl Marx)’ (1981), in Yugoslavia it was interpreted in two ways: the first was that it was an actual Karl Marx citation; the second interpretation argued that I signed it as Karl Marx, which was true. I was making fun. During the socialist regime, anything signed by Karl Marx was taken as an absolute truth. So I was being ironic˝ (link: http://www.flashartonline.com/article/mladen-stilnovic/).

Stilinović's artistic work includes collages, photographs, artist's books, paintings, installations, actions, films and video features. He continued the tradition of avant-garde art by advocating the social dimension of art. Consequently, he was critical of the artistic establishment of the 1970s and 1980s, and critically, cynically and ironically commented on social reality. His most renowned artistic cycle is the "Exploitation of the Dead", with other recognizable works such as "Money", "Death" and "Economy".

Stipčević attended primary school and the classics gymnasium in Zadar, and graduated with a degree in archaeology from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science in Zagreb in 1954. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science in Zadar in 1977. He worked at the National and University Library (1957-1974), and was a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science in Priština (1970-1973), the head of the Library of the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Science (1974-1983), the editor-in-chief of the Croatian Biographical Lexicon (1983-1989, volume 2) at the Yugoslav Lexicography Institute, and a professor at the Department of Librarianship at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science in Zagreb (1987-1997). His academic interests included the culture of the Illyrians, ancient bibliography and encyclopaedism, and the history and sociology of books. He was a member of the Academy of Arts and Science in Kosovo.

As a social historian of books, Aleksandar Stipčević (1930–2015) was among very few Croatian scholars who approached the topic of censorship from the scholarly standpoint after the fall of communism in 1990. He wrote several books about it, both theoretical-historical as well as biographical, in which he related his own experience of censorship during the Yugoslav socialist period (e.g. On the Perfect Censor, Censorship in Libraries, The Story about the Biographical Lexicon). His personal collection, consisting of 66 archival boxes when handed over by his widow to the Croatian State Archives in 2015, reflects this interest, because the materials in 17 boxes are devoted to the topic of the “general history of censorship.” As a librarian, Stipčević was especially interested in different forms of censorship, and, as a hobby, began taking clippings from different types of journals and periodicals, both national and international. Eventually, this passion for collecting information enabled him to write several books on the topic of censorship.

Stipčević was interested in censorship as a means of repression because he experienced its violence on several occasions. In 1944, when Partisan troops liberated Zadar they purged libraries of “fascist” books, which were burnt just because they were written in Italian. In 1955, libraries had to be purged of books by Party dissident Milovan Đilas (1911-1995). At that time, Stipčević was serving in the Yugoslav People’s Army and was ordered to remove Đilas’ books (if he was the author) from the military library and to cut his pictures out of books by other authors. Finally, he experienced the force of censorship when he became editor-in-chief of the second volume of the Croatian Biographical Lexicon in 1983. The previous, first volume was withdrawn from bookshops at the request of certain Party members and members of the World War II veterans association due to alleged nationalism and non-Marxist standpoints. This is why a great deal of material in his folders is dedicated to the topic of “purges” in libraries, which he metaphorically called “the castration of books” (Stipčević 2008: 345).

According to his wife, Aleksandar Stipčević was a “harmless anti-communist”; he did not call for revolution, he opposed the communist ideology only in his head, and more openly after 1990, which is apparent in his books. He was never a member of the Communist Party. However, a direct conflict emerged during his editorship of the second volume of the Croatian Biographical Lexicon, when in 1985 the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia held a conference dedicated to the ideological situation in Croatia. The speakers identified the penetration of nationalism in culture and science, with the Croatian Biographical Lexicon as the most prominent example, wherein Croatian national history was interpreted without a Marxist approach. It was not enough to say that the edition was scholarly, for its Marxist orientation had to be specifically emphasised.

In 1989 Stipčević applied for a job at the Department of Librarianship at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, where each candidate had to have ”moral and political character.” In other words, he/she had to be a sympathiser of communism, but the dean accepted Stipčević’s application, although obviously lacking these qualifications, because of his contributions to Croatian culture.

Aleksandar Stipčević was against the suppression of all manner of freedom under any regime (not only communism, but also fascism, because he was born in Zadar in 1930 and lived his youth under the Fascist rule.) He condemned both communism and fascism because they were both totalitarian regimes. Even so communism, especially the Stalinist type, was in his view even worse because Stalin killed his own people (Interview with Stipčević, Anđelka).

Lazar Stojanović was a director, journalist, intellectual, anti-war activist and one of the most prominent cultural dissidents of socialist Yugoslavia. He spent several years in prison. Lazar Stojanović graduated from the Academy for Film, Theatre, Radio and Television in Belgrade in 1971. In parallel to studying at the Academy, he was near completion of a degree in Psychology at the Faculty of Philosophy. 

Stojanović became politically active in the early 1960s, and in 1966, he joined the Communist party from which he was excluded in 1972. He explained his Party membership as stemming from his interest in politics and the fact that many other youth from his millieu joined the Party in the hope that this would be one of the ways societal change could be brought about. Stojanović was active in the Yugoslav student movement and was one of the leaders of the organizational board at the Academy during the protests in 1968. In the interviews with COURAGE, Stojanović considered the broaching of questions of political, sexual and gender rights and freedom, relevant issues to this day, and as the most important legacy of the 1968 student movement. During this period, he was both an active author for and later editor of student magazines “Student” [The Student] and “Vidici” [The Views] (1968-1971). The first controversy he caused while editor of “Student” when he published “The letter to young Gorani: go forth in forestation of the Otok” in the “It will get better” column. This was a satirical critique of the political detention camp “Goli Otok” [Bare Island]. In 1971, Stojanović was again at the heart of a larger scandal, this time while editor of “The Views” when he dedicated one issue to the political, legal and press systems of the Third Reich. The cover of the magazine showed a post stamp depicting Adolf Hitler in a frighteningly similar way to one of Josip Broz Tito. The intention was to compare and highlight the similarities between the two cults of personality and between Nazi German and socialist Yugoslav propaganda. This issue of “The Views” was instantly banned while Stojanović was arrested. In the end, however, he was not put on trial.

At the end of the 1960s, Stojanović dedicated himself to the study of film. He devoted his first student film to a critique of the communist regime. This film, “The Healthy Offspring” [Zdrav podmladak] ridiculed the League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia (SKOJ) [Savez komunističke Omladine Jugoslavije] and its labour actions. When Stojanović was later arrested, this film was confiscated and remains lost to this day. His second work, produced for his graduate final project at the Academy, “Plastic Jesus”, was filmed in 1971. Although the film was never screened publicly in Yugoslavia, it was produced at a time in which Party-infighting was calling the regime into question. The subsequent backlash led to supression of artistic liberties. Against this background, Stojanović’s trial and prosecution of his film were used as warnings to other potentially critical artists. Stojanović spent full three years in prison, between 1972 and 1975. He was accused and convicted of the criminal offense of “hostile propaganda”. His verdict (delivered on 14 June 1973) stated that the artist “represented the socio-political situation in the country maliciously and falsely,” that he depreciated the socialist revolution, its fighters and self-governing socialist system, and that he had insulted the figure of the President, Josip Broz Tito, “the most distinguished representative of the Revolution and of the construction of the socialist social relations.” After serving his sentence of three years of prison, Stojanović was released in 1975. His passport was withheld, similarly to other persecuted artists and intellectuals of socialist Yugoslavia. Only a few years later, in 1978, amid mounting international pressure did such artists and intellectuals have their passports returned. Stojanović seized this opportunity to leave the country. He spent the following years in London, Afghanistan, India and Iraq, with several shorter stays in Belgrade.

In 1976, before being able to leave the country, Stojanović took part in the creation of the “Open University”, together with Ilija Mojković, Voja Stojanović and Vlada Mijanović. The “Open University” was a specific form of intellectual oppositional activity, modeled after similar concepts in Czechoslovakia and Poland, and organized as gatherings in private apartments with discussions regarding different topics. Apart from the political issues, discussions of historical and philosophical topics as well as of the sciences were held. The “Open University,” as Stojanović noted in an interview in the weekly “The Time” [VREME] on 16 February 2016, functioned for several years with 750 people passing through it. A police raid in the apartment of Dragomir Olujić in 1984 marked the end of the “Open University”. On that occasion, Lazar Stojanović was also arrested; yet, he was released a few days later without charges being filed. However, the state began proceedings against six other members (Dragomir Olujić, Miodrag Milić, Pavlušk Imširović, Gordan Jovanović, Milan Nikolić i Vlade Mijanović). Nevertheless, since the witnesses refused to testify and owing to public pressure, the charges were dropped. 

In the 1980s, Stojanović returned to Yugoslavia and worked as a director in a theatre. He was also one of the founders of “The Time” [VREME] magazine for which he also wrote as a journalist. From the beginning of the 1990s, he was an anti-war activist. He worked as journalist for “Ship” [Brod] radio, and later as a freelancer for “Radio France Internationale”. Afterwards, he left the country and moved to New York City. In the US, he worked as a translator and was a guest lecturer at several American universities. During the conflict in Kosovo at the end of the 1990s, Stojanović worked for the OSCE and UN missions. During this period he also made several documentaries: “Serbian epic” [Srpska epika] in 1993, “Almost Serbs” [Približno Srbi] on the status of Roma population in 1997, “The rise and fall of general Mladić” [Uspon i pad generala Mladića] in 2005, “The life and adventures of Radovan Karadžić” [Život i priključenije Radovana Karadžića] in 2005 and “The Scorpions - A scrapbook” [Škorpioni-Spomenar] on the crimes of Serbian paramilitary formations in 2007. Since 2011, he lived and worked in Belgrade.

Stojanović claimed that his dissident activism was constant. Even after being released from prison, he continued to be active socio-politically. However, after he was expelled from the Party, he was never again a member of any movement or of any official organization. In the interviews with COURAGE, he described the dissident movement as a network of individuals who were friends connected by their shared political views. They were not, however, a structured and organized opposition, but they maintained contact and shared critical attitudes towards the socialist regime. In Stojanović’s opinion, there were at most two hundred active individuals who can be considered dissidents and a cultural opposition. In an interview for the newspaper 24sata on 29 November 2016, he expressed his attitude on repression, stating that it “only shows the real boundaries of civic freedom, especially the freedom of thought and expression.”

He believed that the borders of freedom should always be reconsidered and shifted, and that he dedicated his life to this cause. Stojanović stated his opinion on courage in the same interview: “Courage is a mental attitude, not a part of the character. It neither presupposes education nor talent. It is not made of testosterone but of beliefs and decisions. You are not born with it – you either learn it or you don’t. You choose it or it chooses you. Of course, the authors are brave, when they decide to be. Everybody has to decide for themselves.”
Stojanović believes that studying the dissident movement is of great importance for understanding socialism but also, to a large degree, to understand the present. He considers learning about the culture of resistance crucial, especially for the young and future generations. In the interview with our researcher conducted on 10 December 2016, Stojanović maintained: “Utopia stands for the only solid bridge, the only trodden path which takes you from the past to a future of any kind, because if you do not reflect on utopia, you have no idea of future whatsoever."

Sanda Stolojan (1919–2005) was one of the prominent members of the Romanian exile in Paris, very active in organising public protests against the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu and privileged by her position of official translator into Romanian for several presidents of France. She was born on 19 February 1919, in Bucharest, in a family of intellectuals. She was the granddaughter of the writer Duiliu Zamfirescu and daughter of diplomats, which fundamentally influenced her professional career. She received a fine education both in interwar Romania, and especially abroad, because her parents took her with them to the countries where they were sent on diplomatic service: Italy, Germany, Holland, Brazil, Portugal, Poland, Denmark, and France. She graduated from high school in Paris in 1937, after which she returned to Romania, where she enrolled at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Bucharest. In 1943, she married the engineer Vlad Stolojan Filipescu, with whom she tried to flee to the West in 1949. They were captured and sentenced to prison for acts preparatory to illegal emigration. They were political detainees between 1949 and 1950. Later, between 1958 and 1961, he was again arrested for "hooliganism." They were also expelled by the communist authorities from their own house and dispossessed.

In Romania, Sanda Stolojan worked as a translator and as a clerk at a typography co-operative. She emigrated to France with her husband in 1961, where she worked as an official interpreter of Romanian for French presidents. She was also actively involved in the activities of the Romanian exile community. She was a collaborator of Radio Free Europe, coordinated the League for the Defence of Human Rights in Romania (1984–1990), based in Paris, and co-founded a literary magazine, publishing mainly writers from Eastern Europe, Les Cahiers de l'Est. She also published poetry and prose in Romanian journals in the West, including Limite, Ființa Românească, Revista Scriitorilor Români, Ethos, Dialog, Lupta, Cuvântul Românesc, Curentul, Contrapunct, România, and La Nation Roumaine, as well as in such magazines as Revue de Belles-lettres (Geneva), Creation, and Polyphonies (Paris). Some of her volumes of lyrics were published by various foreign publishers. In the same vein, she wrote a number of articles of literary criticism and essays in foreign publications such as Journal de Genève, Esprit, Le Monde, L'Alternative, Lettre Internationale, and ARA Journal. In 1980 she published in English a monograph on her grandfather, the writer Duiliu Zamfirescu, which appeared in the Twaine World Authors collection in Boston, she translated into French Lacrimi și sfinți (Tears and saints) by Emil Cioran in 1986, and poems by Lucian Blaga contained in the anthology L'etoile la plus triste in 1992. In 1989, she was awarded an Honorary Diploma by the American Romanian Academy for her work on human rights. After the collapse of the Communist regime in Romania, she returned to her native country, without establishing herself here definitively. She was involved in a series of actions aimed at helping to rebuild democracy in her country of origin. Since 1994, several books of her have been published in Romania, principally her journals kept between 1961 and 2001, but also a volume about her visit to Romania with President Charles de Gaulle in 1968, as well as her correspondence with Constantin Noica during the Communist regime. From 2003 until her death she was part of the Moral Guarantee Council of the National Institute for the Memory of the Romanian Exile, a body that brought together Romanian personalities in exile. She passed away on 2 August 2005 in Paris.