Socialist realism in Romania

After World War II, socialist realism on the Soviet model was imposed on the USSR's new satellites, including Romania. This was accompanied by a series of organisational and repressive moves, for instance the incarceration of numerous poets (some of whom had had links to the Iron Guard). Cultural Stalinism, between 1948 and 1956, broke down Romania's pre-existing system of values and corresponding cultural institutions in an attempt to create a "new man". As in the political and economic spheres, cultural Stalinism was forcibly imposed, intellectuals' links with the West were completely severed, and the Romanian Academy and long-standing professional organisations such as the Society of Romanian Writers or the Society of Romanian Composers were dissolved and replaced with new ones, from which members inconvenient to the new regime were purged. In 1948 a catalogue 522 pages long was printed, encompassing some 8,000 banned books and magazines, which were removed from public libraries and school textbooks. Certain authors' works were banned entirely, including those of anti-Semitic authors as Octavian Goga, Nichifor Crainic and Mircea Vulcănescu. Western authors on the banned list included Plato, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, Poe and Gide.

The symbolic debut of socialist realism in literature, as an official ideology, took place in January 1948, when three articles signed by Sorin Toma were published in Scînteia. Titled "The Poetry of Putrefaction or the Putrefaction of Poetry", they dealt with the poetic works of Tudor Arghezi. The language used was extremely harsh and marked a complete break with interwar values: "With a foul-smelling vocabulary [...], Arghezi does in poetry only what Picasso did in painting, introducing excrement as artistic material... One finds bits of real beauty here and there in Arghezi's poetry." In 1950, the Mihai Eminescu School of Literature was founded, with the aim of forming a new generation of writers in the Romanian People's Republic. In an article published in Viaţa Românească (nr. 3 of 1951), Mihai Beniuc, a member of the Writers' Union of Romania, offered a definition of the socialist-realist poet: "He must be a philosopher familiar with the most profound ideas of the age [...], toward which Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin opened the way [...], and an activist in service of those ideas."

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