(Liszt Ferenc Square, Budapest, September 25, 1993)

Part of a civic and ethical project with no equivalent in any of the other former communist countries of Europe, the Museum collection of the Sighet Memorial is an extraordinary site of memory, both individual and collective, of Romanian communism seen from the perspective of the victims of the regime. The Museum collection of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance includes an impressive number of documents, photographs, letters, newspaper collections, books, manuscripts, albums, and various other objects illustrating both the repressive dimension of the communist regime in Romania and the reaction of Romanian society to that regime, in accordance with the vision promoted by the Civic Academy Foundation through the intermediary of the International Centre for Studies into Communism. 

Among the manuscripts of Adrian Marino’s works in his collection, his memoirs entitled Viaţa unui om singur (The life of a lonely man) stand out through the virulent criticism of the Romanian literary life of the period 1964–1989. The manuscript is a printed text, in A4 format, containing 633 pages. The posthumous publication of this volume of memoirs in 2010 generated a heated debate in the Romanian press concerning the relationship of the Romanian intellectuals with the communist regime, which attracted special attention to the case of Marino himself. A first draft of his memoirs, which stopped in 1989, was written between February and December 1993. Dissatisfied with this first draft, Marino rewrote the text in the second half of the 1990s, adding the post-1989 period as well. The author relied on his personal archive, especially the correspondence, to reconstitute in detail events that had taken place decades before. Marino’s memoirs represent – beyond the story of the life of an intellectual under communism – a critical analysis of literary life and of the relationship between the intellectual and the authorities in communist Romania. In this respect, Marino criticises the compromises made by a series of Romanian cultural figures during the communist period, for example, the historian and literary critic George Călinescu, and attempts to explain what he calls the “mass collaboration” of Romanian intellectuals. According to Marino, this phenomenon can be explained by the “total lack of tradition and civic consciousness of the liberal democratic-Western type” of the Romanian intellectuals, who are “structurally, organically, and traditionally conformist and obedient,” all the more so in the communist period, when they depended from an economic point of view “wholly on the State” (Manuscript, 71; Marino 2010, 57). This last aspect of the intellectuals’ economic dependence on the institutions of the communist state was analysed by the American anthropologist Katherine Verdery through the concept of “mechanisms of bureaucratic allocation” (Verdery 1991, 94). The “mechanisms of bureaucratic allocation” of resources and the competition among intellectuals for accessing them represented instruments through which the communist authorities co-opted the intellectuals in order to implement certain cultural policies to legitimate their power (Verdery 1991, 94). Trying to escape this mechanism through which intellectuals were turned into instruments, Marino chose not to work in an official cultural institution, explaining this option in his memoirs: “I was and I remain a ‘free man.’ [...] I owe nothing to the communist regime. I was and I have remained foreign to any idea of ‘social career,’ university, academic, etc. I was and I have remained since my release from prison (1963), a complete freelancer, with no ‘employment record,’ not listed on any ‘payroll,’ etc.” (Manuscript, 309; Marino 2010, 254). Thus, Marino tried to avoid the subordination of his intellectual work to the “official culture” (Manuscript, 309; Marino 2010, 254), by which he meant those cultural products created in accordance with the cultural policies of Ceauşescu’s regime. Instead, Marino claimed to be part of the so-called “alternative culture,” by which he understood those cultural products which did not follow the official guidelines, but escaped censorship. (Manuscript, 309; Marino 2010, 254). In fact, Marino`s books received publishing permission from the censorship authorities, and consequently these books were published by state publishing houses. This means that these cultural products were tolerated by the regime, which never ordered the withdrawal of his published books from bookshops or libraries. 

The Oral History Collection of the Sighet Memorial contains several thousand testimonies of great relevance for what the Romanian communist regime meant in general and especially for the prison experience of thousands of former political detainees. The distinctiveness of this oral history collection is strictly connected to the recovery and systematic conservation of the memory of those who went through significant traumatic experiences during the communist regime, with the aim of saving from oblivion that part of history which was officially suppressed until 1989, but which emerged spontaneously to the surface immediately after the change of regime.