| Sumario: | Censorship in socialism was a long-lasting institution. Frightening and invisible, it harboured, in fact, various institutions and underwent different historical phases. It prescribed attitudes and themes by partially or totally suppressing them. What was incriminated at some point could be accepted a few years later. A theme, however, has always been taboo: censorship itself, political power’s discretionary and abusive act of limiting the freedom of expression in literature. Based on archival documents (mainly from the National Archives of Romania), this paper aims to reconstruct the way in which the Censorship removed fragments or whole texts in which it could see (or appeared to see) its own image. The reports of the censors may be seen as self-portraits, including the points of collision and the lines of tension between literature and power.
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