When Censorship is over – Ana Blandiana’s Return to Writing after the 1989 Revolution
When Censorship is over – Ana Blandiana’s Return to Writing after the 1989 Revolution

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims at retracing Ana Blandianaʼs ban from publishing, between 1988 and 1989; it also looks at the way in which the writer managed to elude censorship. Ana Blandiana was banned from publishing during the one and a half year before the end of the communist regime in Romania. The reviews of her last poetry anthology were banned, but not the anthology itself, which was published shortly after the author’s ban from publishing. Ana Blandianaʼs name was allowed to appear in literary studies about generations and groups of poets, but book reviews regarding her literary works were not allowed. The writer lost her column in the literary magazine “Familia,” but kept writing another column, anonymously, in the same magazine. Our study looks into the fresh memories of literary critics and Ana Blandianaʼs confessions, in the days following the events of 1989, in order to explain a paradoxical case of censorship: banning discourses about a writer, but allowing the author’s discourses.

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