“Teatrul” Journal, between Norms and Emancipation. The Years of the “Thaw” and Those of the New “Freeze”

Abstract

Teatrul Journal, dedicated to both professionals, and devoted spectators, appeared in 1956 following the so-called “thaw”, which took place in the part of Europe controlled by the Soviet regime after Nikita Khrushchev’s secret report at the 20^th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. As we know, this “secret report” highlighted the horrors which took place during the decades dominated by Stalin, incriminated his “cult of personality”, and promised a certain openness in the fields of science, culture and arts towards communicating with the West, as well as loosening the chains of censorship. This phenomenon was felt, in a more or less discrete way, at all levels of the Romanian society; and for the theatre domain, the sign of this change of politics was the launch of the Teatrul journal, under the patronage of the writer, playwright and aesthetician Camil Petrescu[1]. This paper (which is part of a wider research dedicated to theatre criticism discourses in the communist period) looks at the relation between party orders and the editorial policy taken on by or imposed on the journal from its birth (April 1956) to the new „freeze” wave (1958-1960).

[1]. Camil Petrescu (1894-1957) was a novelist, literary theory author and playwright. He was the Manager of the National Theatre of Bucharest between 1938-1939 and a member of Romanian Academy form 1947.