The communist censorship and the reception of Dostoevsky in the Romanian literary consciousness

Abstract

During the communist regime, the process of translating, publishing and interpreting Dostoevsky’s works has been heterogeneously: decades of being almost forbidden have alternated with moments when his novels have been widely published and promoted. However, particularly in the first two-three decades after the instauration of the communist regime, but later as well, we can notice a predominant paradigm of referring to and interpreting Dostoevsky’s writings by the literary exegetes. Using the content analysis and the comparative analysis, the paper identifies the main constitutive elements of the critical Marxist approach of Dostoevsky’s works in Romania. The interest is also to understand how communist censorship acted in different periods of time.

Keywords

• Dostoevsky
• communist regime
• censorship
• Marxist interpretation
• content analysis.