COURAGE

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The last, 73rd, issue of bi-weekly newspaper (Literaturni novini" ("Literary News") was published on February 2, 1964, almost three years after its first issue came out on May 24, 1961. Then the newspaper was discontinued by the state because it was declared "harmful and anti-party".

In 1961 the head of the Bulgarian communist party, Todor Zhivkov gave his personal permission for the launch of this new literary newspaper in order to show his positive attitude towards intellectuals and to demonstrate the democratization of the artistic sphere. Vassil Akyov was selected as editor-in-chief of the newspaper. He gathered in his team people expelled from the "Narodna mladezh" ("People's Youth"" newspaper for their "anti-party behavior", such as Stefan Prodev and Simeon Vladimirov; the brave satirists Krum Valkov and Radoy Ralin; the then unknown, yet promising writers Ivan Paunovski, Yordan Vassilev and others. Akyov himself had been dismissed as head of the cultural department of the Communist Party's daily newspaper “Rabotnichesko delo" ("Workers deed”).

The new newspaper broke old stereotypes and personality cult clichés both in its graphic design and writing. It presented new books with poetry, fiction and literary criticism; it featured literary works, which had not been allowed to be printed (for example, the newspaper for the first time after September 9, 1944 published poems by the hitherto silenced poet Atanas Dalchev); it developed modern views on publishing and opened a column for young and talented authors; it also opened doors to contemporary Western European literature.  

All this predetermined the fate of the newspaper: the newspaper was banned without a scandal through a "silent murder". With the argument "to avoid unnecessary duplication [...], to improve and expand the information ..." the state order to unite "Literaturni novini" with the loyal to the regime weekly "Narodna kultura" ("People's Culture)". Zhivkov personally announced the ban of the newspaper to its staff. According to preserved memories Prodev said: "Comrade Zhivkov, the biggest mistake is to stop a newspaper. Every stopped newspaper remains in the history of a country!" Stefan Prodev and Yordan Vassilev acquired the text of the decision of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party to stop the newspaper and put it on the first page of the last issue - „Message" in black letters in the style of newspaper obituaries.

Although the editor-in-chief and the newspaper's associates were not subjected to repression, the ban on the newspaper functioned as an intimidation of the intelligentsia, imposing narrow frames on acceptable journalistic behavior.

The newspaper "Zemedelsko zname" (The Agrarian Banner) was the organ of the largest opposition party after the 9 September coup d'état - the "Bulgarian Agrarian People's Union - Nikola Petkov", the successor of the prewar peasant party which had roots in the early 20th century and ruled Bulgaria from 1919 to a coup in 1923. The newspaper, following the party line, criticized violations of democratic norms of the emerging communist regime and opposed the intrusion of the state onto private property. Apart from journalism, one of its most potent means of critique was political satire, which reached its peak in a slender series of commentaries on public processes at the time, an example of what are published in the selected masterpiece (issue 44 from October 2, 1945). These are materials such as "Thirst for Justice", "Let's be Clean", and others.

Many of the articles in the newspaper were written in response to letters of peasants about crimes of the new regime such as the article on the front page of the selected issue "We claim there is no freedom in Bulgaria, here are facts and documents."

On the front page there is also a feuilleton piece of the writer Trifon Kunev, one of the editors of the newspaper, "Slim, little ... like camels." From September 1945 to June 1946, Trifon Kunev published in the newspaper editorials which openly and sarcastically exposed the new government and the communist party. This was the expression of "protests against the insults against men and against the violation of the most sacred domain, freedom." In March 1946 he released a selection of his articles as a separate book publication with the same title. After that, he was prosecuted, his book was confiscated by the State Security authorities, and the writer was beaten up in the editorial department of his nespaper. He was imprisened for 140 days in the Central Sofia Prison, until his election to the Sixth Grand People’s Assembly.

Only between September and December 1945, the newspaper was repeatedly stopped, confiscated, and provided with so little paper that it was forced to reduce the amount of page of its issues. In 1946, the "Zemedelsko zname" newspaper was temporarily suspended due to the publication of articles critical of the Soviet Union. The newspaper was eventually forbidden on the basis of the Supplementary Law on the Press Act from April 19, 1946.

In 1989 the party Bulgarian Agrarian National Union "Nikola Petkov" and its organ "National Agrarian Flag" were restored.

The card contains five cut and glued press clippings containing reports on court trials against Dušan Makavejev, the director and producer of the film “W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism”, against Lazar Stojanović, the director and producer of the film “Plastic Jesus”, and against Kosta Čavoški, then an assistant professor at Faculty of Law in Belgrade, sentenced to five months in prison with a two-year suspended sentence, on charges of criticism of the 1971 Yugoslav constitutional amendments.    

The film “W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism” from 1971 was banned in the SFRY for 15 years, although it won many awards abroad (Interfilm, international criticism in Berlin, Luis Buñuel Award in Cannes). As further described in the Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography's film lexicon, Makavejev among other things ironically thematized the rigidity of the communist regime, i.e. the conservatism of supposedly advanced socialist societies. The main character Milena, a young Yugoslav communist, also represents feminist attitudes in relation to psychoanalysis and Marxism, while the film’s structure in general relies mostly on the experience of the so-called historical, especially the Soviet, avant-garde.

The film “Plastic Jesus”, directed by Lazar Stojanović, was made in that same year. The film was banned, locked away, and first shown in 1990. Its author was sentenced to prison. Besides its erotic content, the film was banned primarily because of its open criticism of Tito's cult of personality and the Yugoslav regime. This film led to  Stojanović’s as inclusion among the directors of the so-called Black Wave, a Yugoslav film movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. It was characterized by criticism of contemporary socialist society, ideology and government and their public presentation, and by realism in the presentation of everyday life versus the official socialist cultural statism which represented reality through the prism of the overall progress and prosperity of Yugoslav socialist society.     

Besides those described above, the collection also includes approximately fifty press clippings from the period 1972-1974 that are thematically linked to the crimes of enemy propaganda in artistic production, the crime of production and distribution of pornography, and the crime of impugning the reputation of the state, the highest state officials and institutions. The documents are available for research and copying.   

This covers Nikolić's account of the international bookfair in Frankfurt in 1981. The article was issued by Croatian Review in the December edition in 1981. Nikolić wrote that this was the ninth appearance of Croatian emigrant publishers at the Frankfurt fair, including Croatian Review, starting in 1973. Besides Croatian Review, other Croatian emigrant publishers also appeared: ZIRAL (Community of the Wounded Swan, Chicago-Zurich), Studia Croatica (Buenos Aires), New Croatia (London), Croatian Voice (London), Republic of Croatia (Buenos Aires), Croatische Berichte (Cologne) and Adria Verlag (Brugg). Yugoslavia was present with 52 publishers among the 86 countries of exhibitors. In comparison, he claimed that the quality of Croatian emigrant publishing was much higher than that of Yugoslav publishing. He also considered Yugoslav publishing worse than that of other East European countries, such as Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

One of the most attractive books, which caught the attention of visitors, was the book The National Question in Contemporary Europe by Franjo Tuđman. It was printed in 1981 by Nikolić’s publishing house Library of Croatian Review. That year Croatian emigrants organized a literary evening at which Nikolić recited his poetry. Emigrant publishers were subjected to particular scrutiny by the Yugoslav government, which lodged protests with the organizers because of their participation. At the same time, it posted its secret police agents at the exhibitor's booths to discover anyone from the homeland who was interested in reading émigré literature.

 

 

In the Irina Margareta Nistor Private Collection, there are ten notebooks in which are recorded the titles of all the films translated and dubbed before 1989. Basically, these constitute a sui generis inventory of her activity in connection with the translation of video cassettes. The titles of the films recorded in these notebooks respect the criterion of chronology: they are organised by days, months, and years. The entries are made in pen, ballpoint, or pencil. The owner of the notebooks mentions nostalgia as the decisive reason for her having kept them: “The notebooks in which I listed the films help me to recall exactly what I did back then.” The films translated include all possible genres, from Oscar-winners to mediocre productions, from drama to comedy, from romance to police films, from cartoons for children to action films with violent scenes that nowadays would be forbidden to minors. Their common denominator was their Western provenance and their distribution without going through the editing imposed by censorship, which would have resulted in all scenes considered problematic being cut.

Irina Margareta Nistor believes, however, that it is essential that all the translations she made before 1989 be discussed within the binomial “constraint–freedom,” which in this case was no longer defined by the censorship imposed by the communist regime, but by a self-censorship that depended on personal criteria. According to her analysis of her own translation activity, such a discussion “automatically comes round to the terms ‘constraint–freedom.’ On the video cassettes, I translated absolutely everything. Apart from the swear words – and I would like to dwell a little on those. When I was putting my voice on the video cassettes, I didn’t translate exactly how they swore in English. But this wasn’t a matter of censorship. It was a matter of upbringing. In my home, no one ever swore; my parents didn’t swear; my grandparents didn’t swear. And I couldn’t say such things either. We had political prisoners in our family. And I knew about those methods of torture – when they made them swear at their dead, their mothers, brothers, fathers, sisters. With hard swearing. And I said: ‘I don’t want my voice to turn into a torturer’s voice.’ From outside, what I’ve just told you may sound peculiar. It’s not at all. It seems to me perfectly normal to refuse to swear. No one was censoring me – as some might perhaps think. The communists swore horribly. I could have put those swear words on the video cassettes. When they got angry, they could swear like anything. And that includes the women. But I refused to do it.”