SWINGING BETWEEN SOCIALIST REALISM AND WESTERN AVANT-GARDE: ROMANIAN MUSIC IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE XXTH CENTURY

Authors

• Valentina Sandu Dediu For many Eastern European countries, post- World War Two History represented a brutal, rupture from the cultural, political, social and economic traditions of the pre-war period through, the installation of communist regimes with the support of the Soviet Red Army. The impact of, these political events upon culture was quite inevitable and would generate a set of trademark, characteristics beyond the differences in languages, traditions, and religions which singled, out the cultural manifestations behind the Iron Curtain. (For instance, a Romanian who reads the, novels of Milan Kundera will rediscover the obsessive themes of the epoch with a sense of, circumstances under which he himself lived. By the same token, the circumstances in which a, Shostakovich or a Prokofiev wrote can also be found in Romanian music written after 1948.) As, the Romanian communist regime, over its forty-five years of existence, had a more violent and, repressive character than did those in neighbouring countries, Romanian artists have had less, access to the West., Thus, after 1945, through the new cultural system imposed by Moscow, the arts and, literature became instruments of state politics, with characteristic co-ordinates.1 Autonomy and, formalism in the arts had become heretic concepts, dangerous for those who continued to support, doctrine of socialist realism, the message of a work of art had to be clear, mobilizing,, famous slogans stating that "writers are the engineers of the human soul". Invented in 1932 by, Stalin, with the temporary support of Maxim Gorky, socialist realism (a hybrid between the, methods of 19th century classical realism and the revolutionary ideology of the proletariat) would, be imposed, amply debated, applied, and officially praised in the communist countries of Eastern, Europe. It had its champions even in the West (Sartre, Eluard, Nono, etc.) until the time came for, the truth to come out. It was to oppose modernism and the avant-garde, attitudes accused of, 1 See the exposition made by Eugen Simion at the opening of the UNESCO Colloquium 1997, "Cultura în epoca, totalitarismului", Caiete critice 122-125, 1-4 (1998). Author