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Bora Kuguku, University of Tirana Faculty of Foreign Languages French Language Department E-mail: [email protected]
THE RECEPTION AND CENSORSHIP OF SURREALISM IN ALBANIA
Abstract: Surrealism was censured and harshly repudiated in post-war communist Albania. Even though several Surrealist authors were important members of communist parties in France and other countries, and even though they were prominent voices who, through their works have had an undeniable impact on the establishment of the communist political ideals, Enver Hoxha did not spare his ideological scissors of censorship on Surrealist literature. Heading the black list was Louis Aragon, with whom Hoxha is thought to have met during his student years in France. The aim of this article is to show — through the official texts and the translated texts of that period — how flagrant, ideologically-biased and non-coherent the censorship and the perception of Surrealism were in Albania. The censorship in Albania differed from that in other communist countries. Censorship of Surrealism and (mis)interpretation of Surrealism in other communist countries were not as radical as those effected in Albania. The article draws attention to a number of fragments from Surrealist literature published in communist Albania. The purpose the authorities had in publishing these fragments is obvious and unequivocal and is oftentimes ridiculous — even though the fate of these works and of the Albanian intellectuals and readers who were punished and interned because they desired to understand and relish this greatest artistic movement at the start of the twentieth century was severe. To this day the cultural gap for the Albanian readership concerning Surrealism has not been completely filled. The merits of that movement have not been fully revealed, considering that whole generations were taught to discredit and reject Surrealism seeing it as experimental art, hollow and incomprehensible. We believe that Surrealism was precisely censured because the message it had was powerful; it promoted freedom, saw man as independent from social, political and moral contracts, and this, of course, went against the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat and communist ideology, which suppressed Albania for almost fifty years and was responsible for the country's isolation.
Keywords: surrealism, censure, communist ideology, Surrealist literature.
Introduction period in which Surrealism came into being and fully
The article holds that the main reason Surrealism developed — but both before and after this period. was rejected and/or censured in Albania is related to Considering the Albanian social context, the artists the historical and cultural hiatuses that the country of the time were unable to experiment with various has experienced during several crucial stages in the forms of art, and it was impossible to implement the development of the artistic output in Europe, not only principles of the emerging psychoanalysis with visual in the 1920s and, in general, the interwar years — a arts, such as painting, photography or the cinema.
The cultural impasse continued to hamper the elite of Albanian artists in the post-war period, during the dictatorship, and even during and after the 1990s, years in which a wide conceptual gulf existed between Albanian art and the international modernist and postmodernist art, as a result of the long-term artistic "sterilization" as well as the deliberate absence of information. What prompted the writing of this article is precisely the awareness that, to this day, information on Surrealism remains scarce, even though, our hope is that this need will gradually and eventually be satisfied.
After World War II, on the other side of the Curtain, where the new Socialist Empire was being established, Surrealism was naturally seen as a reactionary movement, but the reasons behind this view were not so much related to the new aesthetic that it propagated, to the linguistic concerns related to it, to its dissolution of the syntax, or to the expanded register of the forbidden words; it is not even a truly ethical question. Anyone who dared read Surrealist texts, to explicate them, let alone to adhere to this new modern trend would suddenly find himself coming under threat from the state authorities. This is what Enver Hoxha writes about Louis Aragon in his book "Eurocommunism is Anti-communism":
Modern revisionism, not only in France but in all capitalist-revisionist countries, is also attacking Marxism-Leninism in the field of literature and the arts, because it wants to use them as means to poison the minds of people and make them degenerate. The revisionist writers, poets and artists too have taken the road of bourgeois degeneration. Today it is difficult to distinguish an Aragon from a Beauvoir and an André Stil from a Sagan. This is not referring to a similarity in style and form, but to an identity in the content and purpose of their works which are inspired by anti-Marxist philosophical trends, in order to emerge on the same course, to fight the revolution, to tame the spirits, to make them "dead spirits", equally degenerate.
Or:
Let us take Picasso. He was a member of the French Communist Party till he died, but he never became a Marxist. This is reflected in his works, while the French Communist Party boasted of him and the only criticism which they made of him was for a scrawl which was called "Portrait of Stalin", and which his friend Aragon published in the newspaper "Les lettres françaises", of which he was director [1, p. 218].
Enver Hoxha has taken here the stance of someone who is able to discuss and pass judgments on art, even though he did not belong to the realm of art. The conception Hoxha had on literature and the arts was the Leninist one, which, essentially precluded the freedom of artistic creation. Without a doubt, artists had to serve the state ideology and had to be put under the utter control of the Party. The writers themselves were to be party members so as to ensure their loyalty to the regime. As a consequence, all communist writers or artists who departed from this subordination were denounced as revisionist, reactionary, and decadent, all of them at the service of the bourgeoisie.
After Khrushchev's slanders against Stalin, the French Communist Party was shaken and such intellectuals were the first to capitulate (referring to Duras, Claude Roys — B.K.). It launched the slogan of "complete freedom in art and culture", and such former defenders of socialist realism as Aragon, André Stil, and André Wurmser not only turned their coats but even sold their souls and their hides to revisionism. Thus the French pseudo-communist literary figures began to fall in love with the Lukacses, the Kafkas and the Sartres. Critical discussions began throughout the whole party on the platform which the bourgeoisie desired, such as, "what is the relation between literature and ideology?" ... Speaking as an "authority", Roland Leroys pronounced the conclusion that,
"there cannot be a specific form of proletarian art or an art which is completely revolutionary"... [22, p. 219].
It would be necessary, from the very start, to mention that the Surrealist literary texts in Albanian have been originally translated as illustrative extracts in few occasional articles, as accompanying and illustrative fragments of university lectures focusing on this important 20th-century movement, but these fragments are virtually inexistent and unavailable in Albanian libraries. The first published article on Surrealism was by professor Ilia Lengu, in the monthly review "Nentori", in 1973, that is, 41 years before. The author has simply titled the article as "Surrealism" but was forced — by the editorial board — to add the words "reactionary movement". In it you can find several translated poetical fragments and titles of various poetical works, which, are, naturally, very carefully selected or are instructively labeled as "reactionary". No anthology, even a minor one, or a full work of any of the Surrealist authors has ever been published in Albanian, whether it be a work of a poet, playwright, prose-writer, theoretician, philosopher or any other artist experimenting with the "unusual" Surrealist artistic methods. Taking into account the import of Surrealism as the largest and most important artistic movement in the previous century, scholars have the duty to fill in this gap that exists in Albanian scholarship on Surrealism through the publication of serious research and professional translations of Surrealist texts; that gap is possibly the result of both the conceptual difficulties the readers encounter when faced with Surrealist works as well as the total rejection of Surrealism by Albanian scholarship until the early 1990 s.
For quite a while, in Albania, Surrealist texts and principles have been shrouded in a cloud of uncertainty, which virtually continues even in our times. We have here in mind the psychical automatism, which engenders the surrealist image. This image is fostered by several factors, such as the state of sleep, that of half-sleep (i.e., the hypnotic sleep),
the dream, the recounting of the dream, the play of chance (or, to use a different term, objective chance), madness, (mad) love, or the sexual liberty/liberation. All of these elements were proscribed in the literature of Socialist Realism. This explains the selection and translation of only a handful of politically committed poems, which were in line with the ideology of the political system in Albania and its propaganda. Besides, such poetry collections never included any kind of information about the Surrealist movement and its followers. Here we certainly need to keep in mind those landmark dates in the artistic development of the Surrealist authors and also the historical context of the political developments in Albania, which led to the steady isolation of the country. It should be remembered that Aragon ceased being a Surrealist in 1930, when he officially withdrew from the movement after his noted quarrel with Andre Breton. Eluard died in 1952, and the rupture with the "Soviet brethrens" occurred in 1960. Poets which until the year 1960 were hailed as the French disciples of the engaged art, were immediately denounced as reactionary bourgeois, supporters of the decadent schools, and they were anathemized "for eternity" (luckily until the beginning of the 1990s). Here are some of the few titles of Surrealist works which were published during the dictatorship in Albania:
1. Lui Aragon Poezi tëzgjedhura (Poèmes choisis), përkthyer nga Misto Treska, Ndërmarrja Shtetërore e Botimeve Naim Frashëri, Tiranë, 1960.
2. Lui Aragon Këmbanat e Bazelit (Les cloches de Bâle), përkthyer nga Petro Zheji, Ndërmarrja Shtetërore e Botimeve Naim Frashëri, Tiranë, 1964.
3. Pol Elyar Poezi të zgjedhura (Poèmes choisis), përkthyer nga Dritëro Agolli, Shtëpia Botuese Naim Frashëri, Tiranë, 1980.
The Bells of Basel (Les Cloches de Bale) is a novel published in 1934 and modified in 1964. In the preface the author writes:
«...le roman est demeuré le même, mais les yeux ont changé. Le nouveau lecteur ignore
une foule de choses encore vivantes, en marge du texte, il y a trente ans. » [1]. ("... the novel is just the same, but the eyes have changed. The new reader now ignores a plethora of living things, which swarmed in the margins of the text, thirty years ago.") Aragon justifies himself in the preface, in which the focus is more on his Elsa, something which, as is widely known, angered so much the other Surrealist artists. The Bells of Basel, as well as the novels that followed it (Les Beaux Quartiers (The Beautiful Neighborhoods), Voyageurs de l'impériale (the Imperial Voyagers), Aurélien (Aurelian), and Communistes (The Communists), inaugurated the novel cycle called Le monde reel (The Real World), in which Aragon is firmly established as an author veering towards the path of Socialist Realism.
Quand se brisèrent les liens entre les surréalistes et moi, je l'ignorais, c'était en moi le réalisme qui revendiquait ses droits. Pourquoi la décision réaliste, la conscience du réel fondent-elles la nécessité du roman? ... Le roman est une machine inventée par l'homme pour l'appréhension du réel dans sa complexité . [1].
(When the ties between the Surrealists and myself were severed, I did not heed the fact that the realism with me was claiming its own rights. . . Wherefore the realist decision, the consciousness of the real are the grounds of the existence of the novel? The novel is a machine invented by man so as to grasp the real in all its complexity [1]). The publication of the novel in Albanian is, certainly, that of the first version, published in 1934, since the second version was published in 1964, during the "reactionary" stage in Aragon's writings. The year in which the Albanian translation is published coincides with the year in which Aragon published his second — now changed — version in France. In the Albanian preface there is no reference to the fact that until that period (early 1930s),
Aragon had been one of the first Surrealists and that, without him, the Surrealist movement would not have followed that path it did. The preface vaguely notes that the author had courageously departed from his former association with formalism (?), and that, by then, he was engaged in a responsible way in a polemic against the abstract art and was following the best tradition of the 19th-century Realism (it is likely that with the term "abstract art" the preface alludes to Surrealism, which is never mentioned in the book).
Aragon has been presented to the Albanian public as an exemplary author of the Socialist Realism, and a novelist who follows the classical models of realism. No other piece of information appears in the corpus of criticism written in Albania, apart from the first — and also the last — article of professor Lengu in the Nentori review (1973), in which Lengu was constrained to describe Surrealism as a reactionary movement. For the rest, the word "Surrealism" became a taboo, which is subsumed into the larger category of "abstract art", a term which itself was largely unclear and obscure. The fact remains, however, that Surrealism was the largest artistic movement in France and throughout Europe that developed in the previous century.
In general, the intellectuals who worked in the field of artistic creativeness have played a role more negative than positive for the French Communist Party. Irrespective of their class origin, they completed their schooling and sought "fame". The party never influenced and guided them with the proletarian ideology and culture. To these intellectuals of the party it was their free, subjective, individual, creative work, and never the true interests of the proletariat and the revolution, that was important [...]. The intellectuals of the French party had been raised and inspired in the Bohemia of Montparnasse, in "La Closerie des Lilas" "Pavillon de Flore", "Le Bateau-Lavoir" and in other clubs in which all kinds of decadent trends came together, trends from which emerged the Aragons, the Picassos, the Elsa Triolets
and many other friends of the Lazareffs, the Tristan Zaras, the dadaists, cubists, and a thousand and one decadent schools of literature and art. This tradition and this road continued uninterruptedly within the French Communist Party, until it arrived at its 22nd Congress at which the revisionist Georges Marchais flaunted all the anti-Marxist corruption which had long been festering in the French Communist Party [22, p. 221].
It can be noted that in Enver Hoxha's work, Eluard is already unquestionably established as part of the elite of the engaged writers, having died in 1952, much earlier than the emerging "decadence" of the French communist artists. To Albanian readers, Aragon has consecutively been a Socialist Realist writer, then a reactionary writer, then a pseudo-revisionist, and, eventually, after 1990,— as has always been the case with Aragon — a poet of "a thousand faces" or, as Ilia Lengu asserts, "To everyone his own Aragon" [29, p.193].
The unnamed preface of the Albanian translation of The Bells of Basel gives the following view as to Aragon's revisionist stance and activity:
Aragon's revisionist stance and activity today represent a repudiation of the path that led him to the composition of the novel The Bells of Basel and of several other works, which are now rightly considered as part of the world literature. [1, p. 13].
In such a context, the question arises as to what is the aesthetic link between Socialist Realism and psychical automatism in this work? Are there still traces of the unconscious and oneiric world which animated and swarmed the past Surrealist works of Aragon? There certainly are, but the Albanian scholarship of the day either pretended not to take any notice of them or it lacked altogether the cultural and theoretical framework necessary to identify them. The latter idea is highly questionable, considering that the literary figures who dealt with the work of Aragon, including Enver Hoxha himself, were familiar with and had been educated in a
Western — mostly French — intellectual cultural context. Thus the censorship was wary, calculated and deliberate, especially after the dictator's own comments on Aragon:
(...But a day will come with orange colours..." This is Aragon's way of saying that he himself and his party have abandoned the red colour, communism. Thus the French revisionists threw overboard the principles of the immortal theory of Marxism-Leninism. Now their party is floundering in a revisionism which is a mixture of the old utopian theories. [22, p. 221].)
In the same paragraph of his Eurocommunism is Anti-Communism, Hoxha cites verses from Aragon's poem Un Jour Un jour (One Day One Day), a poem which Hoxha harshly and cynically condemns.
The discussion of the Surrealist authors in Albania is brought to a halt at this point in history. Albania had to wait for the overthrow of the regime in order to explore the Surrealists again, now from a different perspective. The reception of Surrealist poetry has been, however, problematic even during the years of the political transition, a transition which seems to continue to the day. The cultural milieu and, generally, the public awareness of "good" literature, especially poetry, is constantly vacillating and the critical thought has yet to reach a point of maturity and stability in the context of the chaotic and jarring Albanian social and political transition. Arguably, creating a serious critique and establishing an appropriate approach to the study of modern literature of the twentieth-century French, or, generally, European literature, will be difficult. The censorship which lasted for half a century and the long silence have created a huge lacuna between the Surrealist texts and the Albanian reception of these texts. The issues related to the reception of Surrealist works are closely linked with their non-conformist character, and their reception is further complicated by what can be termed as the "untranslatability" of such texts.
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