Theatricality and Totalitarianism. Case study

Abstract

In my paper I shall approach the phenomenon of communist totalitarianism in relation to the theatricality developed by the inhabitants of the countries in the socialist camp, in a society under constant surveillance by the political police. At the same time, I shall look at the ways in which theatricality permeates and is reflected in the novels of the age, particularly in Norman Manea’s novel The Black Envelope, first published in Romania in 1986 in a censored version. In The Captive Mind, the Polish writer Czesław Miłosz devotes an entire chapter to exploring the forms of histrionism developed by the inhabitants of the Sovietized countries. Similar ideas are conveyed in an interview of Matei Călinescu, a Romanian-American literary critic and prose writer, who describes life under Ceauşescu’s neo-Stalinist regime as being governed by „Pseudo”. In this Orwellian universe the totalitarian, tyrannical fiction rivals literary fiction. The fiction-to-fiction relation between literature and the totalitarian world is significantly problematised in N. Manea’s writings.