COURAGE

connecting collections

(reconstruction by György Galántai, based on George Maciunas’s idea, 2001)

George Maciunas’s idea and work made in 1976 was reconstructed by György Galántai on the occasion of the exhibition Impossible Realism in 2001. Maciunas imagined the Flux Ping Pong as a ping pong table with rackets being made unusable for playing ping pong: one half of the table has a big hole, the other half is not flat and not horizontal; the rackets are superposed with interfering objects and surfaces. Though the equipment is thus unusable, using it to play guarantees an extraordinary experiment. The audience had the opportunity to try to play on the table in the exhibition entitled Fuxus East – Fluxus Networks in Central Eastern Europe, which was organized in several venues; in the Fluxus (Sport) Events in 2011 at Galántai House in Kapolcs; and a different version was also on show in the frameworks of a project in Sidney in 2013 (http://artpool.hu/2013/fluxpingpong/).

http://www.artpool.hu/lehetetlen/real-kiall/nevek/galantai_pingpong.html

Interview with Albertas Žilinskas. The interview reveals the life of intellectuals in the late Soviet period. He speaks widely not only about connections and the networks among them, but also about the existence of different groups in the dissident movement, and critical attitudes towards each other. In the interview, he speaks about the appearance and dissemination of the samizdat journal Perspektyvos, which was read mostly by members of the intelligentsia. 

The several hundred pages that make up the manuscript of the book Tortura pe înțelesul tuturor (Torture made intelligible to all) have been in the possession of the Sighet Memorial for seven years. The original manuscript was donated after the publication of the second edition of the book by the Civic Academy Foundation. “The first edition of the book was published in Chişinău; for the Romanian edition, he chose us, and on that occasion he gave us the original manuscript of the book, partly with a view to the preparation of an exhibition of manuscripts. Since 2011, it has been the property of the Sighet Memorial,” explains Ioana Boca, the executive director of the Civic Academy Foundation, the historian of this donation.

Like the other memoirs of the Romanian Gulag, this book whose manuscript is in the Museum was in fact written after the fall of communism. Before 1989, such memoirs were only written in exile. In comparison with other memorialistic works of the same type, this book deserves special attention, because it enjoyed an impressive critical reception. In his Istoria critică a literaturii române (Critical history of Romanian literature), Nicolae Manolescu remarks that the book is an outstanding example of the literature inspired by communist detention in Romania: “Two things are striking in Pavlovici’s recollections, apart from his immense literary talent: the capacity to suggest, without a trace of emphasis or of the desire for revenge, the banality of evil, as it was characterised by Hannah Arendt; and the pince-sans-rire humour, often black, that the author proves himself capable of, even in the face of the most horrible atrocities. His arrest and his passage through all sorts of evil places are very close to the absurdities of Kafka. However the neutral tone, the voice that is never raised, the ironic commentary, irreverent but never cynical, bring out of bestial behaviour and terrible experiences not only salutary lessons, but also a bearable, positive appreciation of human nature, which is never irreversibly corrupted.” Ruxandra Cesereanu too appreciates that “the exceptional merit of Florin Constantin Pavlovici is that it presents the infrastructure (minutely analysed from a psychological and socio-political point of view) of the apparatus of repression in communist Romania with the narrative tools of a refined intellectual. His story has subjective value, but it also offers the matrix for an understanding of what the Romanian Gulag was and how it functioned.”

The pages making up this original manuscript of the book Torture Made Intelligible to All are displayed in Room 70 of the Sighet Memorial, on the second floor of the building. This room is dedicated to “The Memory of Manuscripts,” those texts that for the communist regime constituted “hostile writings.” The Museum guide characterises the collection of manuscripts in this room as follows: “Whether they were confiscated, or circulated clandestinely, or led to the sentencing of their authors, or mark their destiny in the prison system, they are linked by that purity of expression that is the mark of true literature. Together with the manuscript donated to the Sighet Memorial by Florin Constantin Pavlovici, Room 70 also houses, original manuscripts or copies of Jurnalul fericirii (Journal of happiness) by Nicolae Steinhardt, Testamentul din morgă (Testament from the Morgue) by Remus Radina, Așteptând ceasul de apoi (Waiting for the day of judgement) by Dinu Pillat, Drumul crucii (The way of the Cross) by Aurel State, and Istoria Partidului Național Țarănesc (The history of the National Peasant Party) by Ioan Marta. It also houses correspondence of Gheorghe I. Brătianu, Silviu Dragomir, Corneliu Coposu, Cicerone Ionițoiu, and Mircea Carp.

The Petru Negură Collection includes an interview with Alexei Marinat. The collection also holds a personal archival file on Marinat’s case (originally stored in the former KGB Archive, currently the Archive of the Intelligence and Security Service of the Republic of Moldova). These pieces are important as illustrations of one of the most well-known and representative examples of opposition toward the regime in Soviet Moldavia. The interview was taken on 8 December 2003. In its transcribed form, it comprises almost forty pages of text. The interview is a comprehensive overview of Alexei Marinat’s life story. It focuses on three main topics: (1) the interviewee’s personal and educational experiences in his early youth, from the late 1930s to his arrest in 1947; (2) his labour-camp experience and the impact of this life-changing tragic period on his worldview and political opinions; and (3) Marinat’s integration into the Soviet Moldavian intellectual milieu after 1954, his position within that era’s debates and conflicts between rival factions of local writers. Two early experiences made Marinat particularly critical of the Soviet regime, especially in the context of the 1946–1947 famine, when he was writing the diaries that ultimately led to his arrest and deportation to a Siberian labour camp. The first was his role as a low-level clerk in his village under the Romanian administration of 1941–1944 and his family’s history of “collaboration” with the Romanian authorities. Marinat’s father was one of the well-off peasants in his community and was appointed mayor by the Romanian authorities during the occupation regime. After the war, his father was persecuted by the Soviet regime and sentenced to several years of hard labour. The second formative experience was Marinat’s mobilisation into the Soviet army in 1944. As a Soviet soldier, he participated in military operations on Romanian, Hungarian, Czechoslovak, and Austrian soil and had the opportunity to witness at first hand the situation in Romania and to make a number of Romanian friends and acquaintances. It was around this period that his passion for literature, already visible in his teens, matured. He also wrote his first diary entries in 1945 and 1946. After returning home from his military service, his interest in literature prompted him to enrol in the Language and Literature Faculty of the newly created Moldova State University. During 1946–1947, as a university student, he was lucky enough to be taught by several instructors with a solid educational background in inter-war Romanian schools, which shaped his world-view accordingly. It was during this student experience that Marinat wrote most of his personal diary, later published as Eu și lumea (I and the World). In this text, he expressed open and strong criticism of the regime and of Stalin’s policies. This view provided the pretext for his arrest in May 1947. Interestingly, the camp experience was formative for the consolidation of Marinat’s anti-regime opinions. He socialised with a number of exiled intellectuals and practised several “survival strategies,” among which humour was prominent. His writing skills also helped him to overcome the extremely difficult experience of detention: he frequently wrote letters for other inmates and received small gifts in return. Summing up his experience in the camp and immediately after his release in 1954, he used the metaphor of a “great camp” to describe Soviet society as a whole. He noted, moreover, that there was ultimately more freedom for the inmates, who were not afraid to speak out, while his former colleagues in Chișinău were “afraid of Stalin even after his death” and “were afraid to say anything.” After his return, Marinat worked as a journalist for several youth and satirical journals. In 1957, he became a member of the Union of Journalists, and in 1959 he was inducted into the Moldavian Writers’ Union. His first novel – Fata cu hărțag (The Naughty Girl) – appeared in 1960 and was well received. Although of Transnistrian origin, he sided with the “Bessarabian faction” of the Moldavian writers, who advocated a return to standard Romanian and a higher quality of literary output. Marinat mentions Romania’s fundamental role as a source of high literary models in the early 1960s. He acquired a number of Romanian books from Kiev and Moscow and read voraciously, which helped to improve both his style and his literary status. His most famous novel – Urme pe prag (Footprints on the Threshold) – was published in 1966. It provoked a minor scandal in Moldavia’s literary circles because of its subject matter – the Siberian camp experience – and because his novel displayed a clear “anti-Soviet” message. The subject matter of the novel revolves around two previously taboo topics of “Soviet Moldavian” literature – the role of the secret police and the effect of deportation to Siberia on the personal destinies of the protagonists and on society at large. In this sense, Marinat’s prose was directly compared by contemporaries to Solzhenitsyn’s critique in his famous story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. However, while Solzhenitsyn’s work appeared at the height of Khrushchev’s thaw, in 1962, the context was much less favourable in Marinat’s case. The authorities severely rebuked him for this novel and forced him to “repent” by writing an apologetic work praising Soviet heroism and condemning the “Romanian Fascists” in the Second World War, which was published in 1973 under the title Izvoare fierbinți (Hot Springs). Marinat claims that there was practically no samizdat at the time, but his novel was widely read in this key, even if it was published legally. The author himself acknowledges his astonishment at the official approval of its publication. Marinat also speaks about his active role during the national movement of the late 1980s. He claims that he made “countless speeches” and that it was he who “first raised the question of the Latin alphabet” at a meeting on 30 October 1988, held at the Writers’ Union. Apparently, Marinat directly confronted the first secretary of the Moldavian Communist Party. As a reprisal, the authorities tried to re-open the criminal case against him (on grounds of wartime collaboration), but ultimately failed. Marinat kept his distance from some of the colleagues he suspected of being “KGB agents” and remained critical of the regime throughout the Soviet period. 

The interview with Jiří Gruntorád was carried out by Milan Otáhal in 2003 during two different sessions. The interview was conducted within the framework of the project “Elites and contra-elites during the so-called normalization period”.

The interview took place at the workplace of Jiří Gruntorád in the library Libri Prohibiti. Jiří Gruntorád wished that only Milan Otáhal asked questions because he was shy and not used to talking about his life. In both of these interviews, Jiří Gruntorád primarily talked about his dissent activity and answered questions about his private life, but only briefly, as he did not want to pursue this subject and did not consider it important.

In the first interview, he talks about his childhood, he mentions, importantly, that he never joined the Pioneer (was a youth Marxist-Leninist organization in communist Czechoslovakia. Although the organisation proclaimed to be voluntary, every child was expected to join from the age of six), although it was usual at the time, and was not even a member of the Socialist Youth League (Svaz socialistické mládeže) later. At the time when Jan Palach set himself on fire, which in his own words influenced him very much, he protested at school, for example, against the mandatory observation of Gustav Husák's speeches by turning his back to the screen. In the conversation, Otáhal and Gruntorad spoke a lot about Gruntorad´s history of dissent, his arrest, his memories of interrogations, his activities within the VONS (The Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted), Charter 77, etc.

This interview is by its contect and detail the unique testimony of Gruntorad's memories of not only his involvement in dissent and activity in opposition to the regime, but also the opportunity to recognize the personal and private life of this well-known and important person of cultural opposition in the former Czechoslovakia, as well as his activities after the year 1989.