INTELLECTUALS' NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND
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new realities that face the world, especially as they are revealed in the
liberating revolutions of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
One final point: perhaps bad governments bring out the best in
writers and intellectuals. In this country, most literature does not take
the form of any kind of dissidence. Most poetry in this country, as you
know, is occupied with personal and psychological questions. I am not
saying that's wrong. Perhaps that is the sense of what writers feel is the
proper metier and response to their experience in this country. Yet, ob–
viously, different kinds of social conditions do create different kinds of
writing and literature.
QuestiMI:
I teach French here at Rutgers-Newark, and I'm proud of all
of you, of this conference, and of Professor Kurzweil. I have a question
for Mr. Mihaies, but first I would like to comment on one of your re–
marks, Mr. Phillips. I disagree profoundly with you that most writing in
this country is personal and psychological. I think you tend to ignore the
last twenty years' of resurgence of writing by women that has certainly
had political themes.
Mr. Mihaies, I was wondering if you are familiar with the British
playwright, Carol Churchill. Her work,
Mad
Forest,
is about Romania.
One of the premises of the play, produced here in New York on a lim–
ited run last December, suggests that the regime of Ceausescu actually
staged the revolution and goes on to demonstrate the confusion of the
Romanian people and the variety of its population. Do you give that
any credence?
Mircea Mihaies: I
wouldn't call the events of December 1989 a
revolution, because revolution happens according to a program; obvi–
ously there was no explicit program of events in Romania at that time.
The events were absolutely miraculous, a pretext for the creation of so
many scripts or scenarios that reflected our experiences in Romania that I
can't tell you if the one scenario you bring up is acceptable from the
historical point of view. In my opinion, what happened in December of
1989 was due to the external pressure of what was happening in all the
other East European countries, something we all expected. Objectively
speaking, everyone had had enough of Ceausescu and his regime. To as–
sume that, based on this not very spectacular situation, Ceausescu and his
regime staged a coup requires a lot of imagination.
Question:
It's been a very stimulating conference, and I agree with Mr.
Phillips that one of the themes that has come up is the heroic behavior of
dissidents over the years. But there is also the theme of the heroic stance
