For three decades Romania was unrivaled in the Eastern Bloc for the ruthlessness of its dictator and the extent of its state censorship. It is thus no surprise that two works refining and extending Czeslaw Milosz’s analysis of intellectuals under totalitarian regimes in The Captive Mind have now come from a Romanian writer. Norman Manea was twice exiled from his country, first, in 1941 at the age of five, to a concentration camp in the Ukraine and then, six years ago at the age of fifty, to the United States. As a writer in Romania, he suffered vicious smear campaigns for, among other things, his objections to neo-Fascist editorials in the main Party journal.
Romania’s lack of a revolutionary tradition or any uncorrupted organized religion, along with its citizens’ propensity to political aloofness, left it vulnerable to a dictator at once absolute and ridiculous. In the essays collected in On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist, Manea vividly recounts, with flashes of wry humor, the horrors of living under Ceausescu’s repressive and sadistic regime. The endless tedium of censorship proceedings and the paranoia engendered by the Securitate, the fifteen police officials for every citizen, and the even more numerous “volunteer informers” ensured that even the most banal of truths would not be openly, or even privately, expressed. In the title essay, Manea skillfully portrays the terrifying absurdity of Nicolae Ceausescu, a “small provincial tyrant,” as supreme ruler. Through a reading of Fellini’s text on the traditional hierarchy