COURAGE

gyűjtemények hálózata

After listening in November 1987 to the news broadcast by Radio Free Europe (RFE) about the anti-communist revolt of the workers in the factories of the city of Braşov, Doina Cornea openly displayed her solidarity with the protesters. On 18 November 1987, she drafted 160 manifestos, which were spread with the help of her son Leontin Horaţiu Iuhas in several public spaces in Cluj (Cornea 2009, 194–195). Consequently, on 19 November 1987, she and her son were arrested by the Securitate after a detailed home search (Cornea 2006, 203). During home searches on 19 and 23 November 1987, the Securitate confiscated many documents from Cornea’s private dwelling, including all the drafts of her letters to RFE.

Among these documents, the Securitate confiscated the handwritten draft of the first letter she sent to RFE entitled: “Letter to those from home who have not given up thinking with their heads.” According to interviews granted by Doina Cornea, this letter was drafted by Cornea and her daughter Ariadna Combes in July 1982 (Cornea 2009, 169-170). The document was smuggled to the West and sent to RFE with the help of her daughter, who chose to remain in France in 1976 and visited her mother in July 1982 (ACNSAS, FI 000 666, vol. 2, f. 11). In August 1982, the letter was broadcast by RFE during the radio programme “Talking with RFE listeners.” It was the first letter in a series of twenty open letters sent by Doina Cornea to RFE in the period from 1982 to 1989, through which she asserted herself as one of the most prominent Romanian dissidents (Cornea 2009, 195–196). The open letters sent by Doina Cornea to RFE intensified the surveillance and repressive actions of the Securitate, which had already been monitoring her closely since 1981. Due to the fact that the strict surveillance in communist Romania did not allow the development of a samizdat and tamizdat milieu, RFE played a key role in conveying the messages of Romanian dissidents to their fellow citizens (Petrescu 2013, 277).

The letter starts with a reference to radio programmes of RFE that had been previously broadcast. During these radio programmes, journalists specialising in East European issues had dealt with the crisis that affected communist Romania during 1980s and identified political and economic factors as the immediate causes. Instead of these causes, Doina Cornea emphasises in her letter causes relating to moral and cultural values. By idealising interwar Romania, she brings into discussion the destruction of the Romanian intellectual elite during the first two decades of communist rule and the decay of the educational system. In Cornea’s opinion, this “spiritual crisis” is illustrated by the everyday “compromises” and “lies” that citizens living under a communist dictatorship have to “accept and circulate” (ACNSAS, P 000 014, vol. 2, f.1). Her argumentation in this respect is similar to that developed by Vaclav Havel’s essays and epitomised by his principle of “living in truth” (Havel 1990). Cornea argues that “the people is fed only with slogans,” which stifle all openness towards “truth, revival, and creativity” (ACNSAS, P 000 014, vol. 2, ff. 2–3). She criticises the conformism of Romanian intellectuals and state policies which limit theoretical education (especially the humanities) and promote technical education in order to fill the need for cadres in the rapidly growing heavy industry.

She concludes her text by asking for a reform in the educational system and encourages those working in this field at least to take advantage of the limited possibilities available to them to promote what she considers to be authentic cultural and moral values. According to Cornea, those working with students should not teach them “things in which they themselves do not believe” and they should “encourage the creativity of young people and not be afraid to say what they think” (ACNSAS, P 000 014, vol. 2, ff. 4–5). At the end of the letter, Doina Cornea inserted her name with the mention: “for the messengers of RFE listeners” (ACNSAS, P 000 014, vol. 2, f. 5). She did not intend to reveal her real identity to the listeners of RFE, but just to prove the authenticity of the document to the editors of the radio programme. Due to a misunderstanding, her real identity was revealed during the radio show.

In November 1987, after the draft of this document was confiscated by the Securitate, the secret police used it as an argument of accusation during Cornea’s interrogation. This focused especially on the channels used by Cornea to send the letter to RFE. Although she did not mention it during the interrogation, the Securitate suspected that her daughter Ariadna Combes had helped her in this respect. For this reason, Cornea’s daughter thereafter did not receive a permit to enter the country to visit her family until the fall of the communist regime.

The photograph represents Cornel Chiriac during one of his broadcasts at the Romanian desk of Radio Free Europe (RFE). Taken in 1970, it was sent together with a letter to his mother in Pitești. Unfortunately, the Securitate confiscated the letter and the photograph and thus they never reached their destination. The picture is very telling for Cornel Chiriac’s passion for music and his rebellious nature. He is smiling to the camera as he is about to play one of the many vinyl records on his desk. His broadcasts at RFE enjoyed huge popularity among Romanian young people. This popularity was partly due to his passion for music, his vast knowledge about it, and the dedication with which he performed his job as radio producer at RFE. The photograph also showed the same rebellious Cornel Chiriac with long hair and beard, and a lit cigarette placed on an ashtray. The outfit, a long-sleeved striped shirt and a jacket on a hook on the wall, complete his rebellious outlook specific to the period. It is interesting to note that, although Cornel Chiriac was the idol of an entire generation, many people were not at all familiar with his face. It is from this photograph in the Securitate files that many discovered the image of their hero after 1989: “The great majority of us did not even know what our hero looked like, but he had become a lively presence, our close-faraway comrade, the protector of our sounding utopia. In a Romania, which was more and more isolated in its unhappiness, the music that Cornel Chiriac offered us represented one of the few open horizons, one of the few breaths of hope” (Jurnalul 2008). Today, the photograph confiscated by the secret police is his most widely circulated image, and it was selected by his fans to illustrate the Facebook page which keeps alive his memory (https://www.facebook.com/Metronom-In-amintirea-lui-Cornel-Chiriac).

Members of the Eighth Day Theatre have been very open and vocal about their criticism of the socialist reality in the 1970s in Poland. Their contestation of the regime became even more clear when they got engaged in the activities of the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR). In response, the authorities started to obstruct activities of the Eighths. Members of the theatre collective were regularly denied passports and means to produce new shows. Mentioning the Eighths in the official press was banned. This part of the collection consists of the official letter exchanges between the Theatre of the Eighth Day members and the Ministry of Culture and Art and local authorities of the city of Poznań. These documents are a unique testimony of how the negotiations of the position of alternative art in the socialist cultural field looked like.  

In May 1989, Dr Sorin Costina decided to sum up on paper the principal steps by which his passion for collecting art had developed. The result of this effort of memory is an eleven-page text, typed single-spaced, in which are mentioned the most important landmarks of an unusual and spectacular passion. “Also in the years 1962 to 1963 I had my first contacts (as Paul Neagu puts it) with the visual, or the visual arts. A first shock, an exhibition from the Dresden Galleries seen at the Museum of the Republic (I still remember the reviews, my favourite magazine in those years: second-rate works and rather weak with the exception of Titian’s Lady in White). For what I was then, it was a great festive event,” recalls Sorin Costina, speaking of one of his first encounters with the visual arts. He places his first encounter with contemporary art two years later: “Finally, my first contacts with contemporary art took place in Iaşi in 1965.” According to his notes, on 16 August 1969 he bought his first picture, The Bridge of the Turk, a scene in the old town of Sibiu by Ferdinand Mazanek. The price was 138 lei.  His records of his purchases of items of visual art were kept in detail until 1989. According to this unpublished document, Sorin Costina bought most of the works that today make up his private art collection from galleries and studios in Bucharest. The last sentence of this testimony is particularly relevant for the way in which Sorin Costina conceived his own collection: “The marginalisation of all that is best in Romanian culture explains my ability to approach these figures of great value while unfortunately not rising to their level.” Small extracts from this document (which is also an account of the life of Dr Sorin Costina) have been cited  in various texts about Sorin Costina’s life or within several autobiographical texts by the author himself. The text has never been published in its entirety. The manuscript is to be found in Sorin Costina’s private collection.

The court documentation in the collection shows that Kiš defended himself by explaining that his book was created as a gesture of a "legitimate and necessary defense, as a value greater than the prosecutor's honor: [a gesture] of my literary existence and my literary approach, as well as generally, as a fundamental defense against fatal and destructive judgements of a layman". In court, Kiš took the view that he was a writer and had the right to defend himself, using literature, against unfounded attacks on his work.

In a written statement delivered to the court, Kiš wrote: "The particular polemic sharpness of my book was, in addition, dictated not only by rough challenge and polemic fervour, but also by the literary genre itself: traditionally, polemic uses irony, sarcasm, ridicule, because it is a form of literary struggle." Kiš claimed further that polemics is a category of literature which an author can legitimately use and cannot be subject to claims of defamation. He listed a series of polemic writers and literature to try to defend his right to artistic expression. He also advocated for the view that literary controversy is actually a kind of public debate and is subject only to public judgment and literary history, not to be interfered with by the court.

In the end, the court accepted Kiš’s view, and acquitted him of the three counts of defamation. The court ruled that Kiš's response to Golubović in The Anatomy Lesson represents a "personal and subjective view to the prosecutor's conduct, and that this does not amount to facts serving to prove the truth, and thus it cannot be accepted as a charge for defamation.” The court also called for observing the broader context in which the book was created, which was in Kiš’s favour. However in 1979, after the lawsuit, Kiš left Yugoslavia embarrassed and disappointed.

In 1951, a group of 12 people, mainly actors, poets and translators, were arrested and sentenced to between seven and 25 years in prison, for ‘treason to the Motherland’. Although the charges differed in each case, the main charge common to all of them was being a member of an anti-Soviet group, whose main activity was anti-Soviet propaganda, that is, they met more or less regularly between the autumn of 1945 and the spring of 1947, in order to discuss books, plays, etc. Although the defendants claimed that political topics were not discussed at their meetings, they were charged with presenting excerpts from Andre Gide's book Le Retour de L'U.R.S.S. at one of the meetings (not all the defendants participated in this particular meeting). In fact, contrary to the claims of the security structures, there was no organized resistance group. It was a loose framework of intellectuals, who tried to continue the cultural practice of private intellectual exchange that they had been used to in independent Latvia, and that was their main crime in the eyes of the security services. In fact, they were two circles of friends who grouped around the painter Kurts Fridrihsons (1911-1991) and the translator and philologist Maija Silmale (1924-1973). Both were strong personalities, who stood out in the depressing atmosphere of the cultural life of post-Second World War Riga. They had a deep interest and knowledge about French culture, and Western culture in general, and were unable to and did not try to adapt to the new Soviet cultural environment, with its explicitly anti-Western position. Among their friends were other people who loved French culture: the poetess Elza Stērste (1885-1976), the translator and lecturer Ieva Birgere-Lase (1916-2002), and the actress Mirdza Lībiete-Erss (1924-2008). Perhaps, this was why the group was later known as the ‘French group’, although not all the people detained in these cases had a special knowledge of French culture. At the beginning of the 1950s, the persecution of the ‘bourgeois’ and especially social-democratic intelligentsia of independent Latvia reached its peak, and the arrests and sentencing of this group were intended by the security services as a warning to all the Latvian intelligentsia that attempting to exist in parallel with official Soviet culture and keep an orientation towards Western ‘cosmopolitan’ literature and art was a crime. Although the files should be viewed with caution, because they were written in such a manner as to confirm the version of the interrogators, they contain an abundance of material about the mood of the Latvian intelligentsia in the post-Second World War years, the still-existing hope that the independence of Latvia would be restored, the attempts to maintain an intellectual life outside the official constraints, and the attempts to learn about cultural life outside the USSR. Today the ‘French group’ is seen in Latvia as a vivid example of intellectual resistance to the Soviet regime. Material from the criminal files is used by academics and authors of biographical books and articles, and in the preparation of documentaries and television programmes.

The first free elections in Czechoslovakia after 1948 took place in June 1990. During his first visit to Prague after the fall of the communist regime, Beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg signed the Czechoslovak election program. This artefact was lent by Jiří Hromada, a leading activist for the rights of sexual minorities and former president of the national organization of the Czech gay and lesbian movement, for the exhibition dedicated to Allen Ginsberg. The exhibition, organized from January to April 2018 by the Centre for Queer Memory, was related to Ginsberg’s visit to Prague in 1965. At that time, Ginsberg was elected “King of the Majales” within students’ May Celebrations “Majales”, and then was expelled from Czechoslovakia for alleged indecent behaviour. The opening of the exhibition was accompanied by a lecture dedicated to the events of 1965. Other objects that the Centre had in its collections were presented during the exhibition as well, such as the Ginsberg’s poem “Kral Majales” written in 1965 and visually arranged by the painter Robert LaVigne.

A válaszúti kiállítás elsősorban a mezőségi magyar közösségek szellemi és tárgyi javait mutatja be. Ebben a térségben egészen a 20. század közepéig minden módosabb háznál általános volt a tisztaszoba, ami rendszerint a család tárgyi értékeinek, vasárnapi templombajáró ruháinak és a több éven át készített hozomány kiállító- és megőrző helye volt. Szegényebb családoknál elsősorban a jelentős ünnepek előtt, karácsonykor, húsvétkor és pünkösdkor díszítették fel a tisztaszobát és a kiállítás a tárgyakat elsősorban ebben az ünnepi környezetben mutatja be. Azonban a különböző szegrevaló kendők, falra akasztott dísztányérok és bokályok, vetett ágyak, asztalok, gondosan megmunkált székek, padok, padládák, ládák között a mindennapi tárgyak, konyhai edények, fonáshoz, szövéshez használt eszközök is helyet kapnak.

A néprajzi gyűjtemény keretében bemutatott földrajzi és kulturális tájegységek világából a Mezőségi tárgyi kultúrához igazodó válaszúti terem hagyományos lakáskultúrája az egyik legérdekesebb. A mezőségi falvakban még a második világháborút követő időszakban is kevesen végeztek beható, rendszeres néprajzi kutatásokat. Mivel ezt a tájat különböző ajkú, kultúrájú, felekezetű közösség lakja, a legtöbb kutató messze elkerülte ezt a területet. A mezőségi magyarság kultúrájának felfedezése viszonylag későn, csak a két világháború közötti korszakban indult meg. A néprajzkutató Palotay Gertrúd széki varrottasokról 1944-ben közölt tanulmánya (Palotay 1944) felkeltette Kodály Zoltán figyelmét is, aki vallotta, hogy ha ilyen csodálatosak a vidék varrottasai, akkor népzenéjük is hasonlóan gazdag lehet. Az ő ösztönzésére jutott el a zeneszerző és népzenekutató Lajtha László előbb Székre, majd Szépkenyerűszentmártonba. Szabó T. Attila rendszeres helynév- és nyelvészeti kutatásokat végzett, ugyanakkor 1944-ben az Erdélyi Múzeumi Közleményekben csakhamar megjelent egy tudósítása is Ismeretlen mezőségi hímzések címen. A kezdeti érdeklődés ellenére ez a terület csak az 1968-as eseményeket követően kibontakozott táncház-mozgalom hatására került újra a kutatók nézőterébe. A rendszerváltás előtt a néprajzkutató és muzeológus ifjabb Kós Károly inkább a tárgyi kultúrával foglalkozott, míg az 1980-as évektől kezdődően a néprajzkutató és egyetemi tanár Keszeg Vilmos végzett itt jelentős hiedelemkutatást.

A Mezőségen belül néprajzi szempontból külön karakterisztikus vidéket alkot nyolc falu: Válaszút, Bonchida, Kendilóna, Alsótök, Kolozsborsa, Fejérd, Telekfarka és Magyarmacskás. Ezeket a településeket képviseli a Válaszúti szoba. Ezekben a helységekben feketével rendszerint nem szőttek vagy hímeztek, a gyapjú szőttesek kivételével. Ugyanazt a motívumanyagot használták, mint a szomszédos falvakban, de a hímzéseknél a piros-kék színkombinációval találkozunk, ugyanakkor az áttört részt rendszerint szürkével emelték ki. Ez az eljárás a női ingek hímzésében is dominált. Itt általában a hosszúderekú viseletet használták, míg a szomszédos falvakban darázsderekú, kurtaderekú öltözet volt inkább jellemző. Széken kívül, minden faluban általános volt a tiszta fehér hímzés is. A gyapjú feldolgozása ezekben a falvakban napjainkig fennmaradt. Szőrlepedővel, szőrabrosszal és házilag szőtt felsőruhával ma is találkozunk bármelyik hagyományos falusi háztartásban. Mivel ezen a vidéken általában sok juhot tartottak, Feketelakon például még a zsákokat is gyapjúból szőtték. Az ott élő gazdáknak rendszerint sok juhuk volt, juhnyíráskor és aratáskor a máramarosi román asszonyok lejöttek ide gyapjút mosni. Ezt a munkát általában gyapjúval fizették. A szőttesek előállításában jellemző volt a borzas technika. A legelső darabot Válaszúton Hofer Tamás gyűjtötte, majd a budapesti Néprajzi Múzeumban helyezte el. Fél Edit szerint erről a szövési módról az első adatok a Kr. e. IV. századból származnak, így érthető, hogy szakmai berkekben a borzas párnavégek miért keltettek oly nagy feltűnést, hiszen a szakemberek nem is tudták addig, hogy magyarlakta vidéken is használják ezt a jellegzetes szövési technikát.

Ezeknek a falvaknak a tárgyi és a szellemi hagyományai sokkal gazdagabbak voltak, mint a szomszédos nemes falvaké, mert a jobbágylányok, akik az úri lányoknak varrtak, a megkedvelt motívumokat maguknak is elkészítették. A nemes falvak szintén az úri osztály kultúráját utánozták és követték. A mezőségi írásosnak nevezett textíliák az úri hímzésnek erőteljesebb paraszti megfogalmazásai. Válaszúton rendszerint csak pírossal hímeztek, míg a szomszédos falvakban általában feketével vagy pirossal, de gyakoribb volt a piros-kék színkombináció. A Válaszúti szobában reprezentált nyolc faluban általános volt a könyökbe varrott ing. Említésre méltóak a férfi női bőrmellények és ködmönök, melyek szabásukkal, hímzésükkel, díszítésükkel tűntek ki. Lábbeliként rendszerint csizmát hordtak, amit általában a kolozsvári piacon vásároltak és csak ünnepi viseletre használtak. Hétköznap, nyári időszakban legtöbbször mezítláb, télen pedig bocskorban jártak.

A festett hozományos ládákat is a kolozsvári piacon szerezték be a mezőségi emberek. Ezeket rendszerint kolozsvári mesteremberek készítették. A kiállított kerámiák főleg a 19. századi nagy fazekas központok termékei. Az enteriőrben tordai, besztercei és dézsi bokályok, tányérok láthatók a falon. Azokat rendszerint vásárban szerezték be vagy vándorló fazekasok árulták csereárúként gabonáért. Az 1900-as évek elején szűntek meg a falusi fazekasműhelyek Válaszúton és Széken. A legutolsó Magyarköblösön körülbelül egy évtizede szűnt meg, amikor az utolsó fazekas is meghalt. A válaszúti szoba egy már majdnem letűnt kor, a paraszti társadalom működésének részleteit ismerteti meg. A mai napig a mindennapi élet szerves részét képezi a nagyszülőktől átörökölt, és a térség lakóira áthagyományozott kultúra, tapasztalatok és értékek felbecsülhetetlen tárháza, melyeket az itteniek csak akkor tudnak érdemben használni, ha tudják, mikor, mit, miért és hogyan kell cselekedni ahhoz, hogy felelősségteljesen éljenek abban a közösségben és társadalomban, amelybe beleszülettek.