The article underlines the existence of major differences between the understanding of democracy and that of the autonomy of literature in Western and East-European cultures (during the totalitarian regime). In the particular case of Romanian culture, democracy used to be a concept claimed by both the official politics of the communist party and the writers who refused any form of political instrumentation of literature. The analyses highlights the tension between aestheticism and activism, formalism and commitment, and the drama of having to chose, as a writer, between moral and social responsibility. The contrast between the literary discourse and the discourse of the propaganda is emphasized through the binary usage of the same vocabulary. Between the schizo-words able to convey the tension between aesthetic and political, we have stopped at: beauty, morals, democracy, tradition, formalism, evasionism, utopia, message.
democracy; communism; formalism; commitment; responsibility