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The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary
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Abstract: Angelo Mitchievici’s book, Umbrele Paradisului. Scriitori români şi francezi în Uniunea Sovietică (The Shadows of Paradise. Romanian and French Writers into Soviet Union) (Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2011) is among the latest titles in the collection
of Contemporary History from Humanitas Publishing House. As Vladimir Tismăneanu acknowledges in the preface, the book is ‘a true panorama of human blindness’. The more than 500 pages reenact the process of communist indoctrination not only among the ordinary people in the former Soviet Union, but among Western intellectuals, especially from France and Romania. In this manner, the perversity of the communist propaganda machine is exposed with a sharp eye and in an elaborate discourse.
Mitchievici states in the Introduction that his analysis is a comparative one, and that it follows five levels: historical, typological, topological, anthropological and aesthetical. The author slides from one level to another, combining the perspectives in order to render a complex view on the image of Soviet Union in travel diaries. Though a peripheral species, the travel diaries had a tremendous importance in the first half of the 20th century, since it was a safe and powerful way to construct the image of perfection that the Soviet Union needed outside its borders in order to be validated by the leftist Europe.
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