Another highly interesting, and very disturbing, chapter in a 17-year old’s essay on Albania in 1997.
In the name of socialist realism many things were truncated. Art was only realism that presented real individuals working the lands and protecting the country. Expressing individual feelings and emotions was prohibited, unless the person was expressing real life of real cooperative workers, real life of soldiers, real life of teachers teaching Marx and Engels’ philosophy on proletariat. The love of the Labor Party was to prevail in every text, in every novel and article of newspapers.
Everything was subdued to the review of the “critical eye” of the party and its selected ones. Erotic content was not only not allowed, but also prosecuted. Love was pure and idyllist. In the cinematography scenes of kisses, touching, and other intimacy were considered as obscene. No surrealism, no expressionism, no cubism, nothing of the modern streams of painting. It was obscene to have erotic poetry and poems as well. Poetry had to express love for the family, love for the country, party and so on. Intimacy was expressed in simple words of a superficial relationship. Music mustn’t contain strong rhythms and other elements of the western music. All these components were considered as decaying, decadent, and as imitation of hippie streams. Those who dared to oppose this oblivion of human nature and freedom of spirit, were imprisoned, stained in biography, were set aside or were fully ignored by the system. Despite the contribution they gave for the nation, it was immediately opposed. Everything, everybody had to be within the frames of socialist criticism.
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