Yugoslav Literature under (Il) Legal Censorship: 1945-1990
| Autor | Dijana Zrnic |
| Ocupação do Autor | Assistant in Legal English, Law Faculty in Banja Luka, Banja Luka University, Republic of Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina |
| Páginas | 957-973 |
Special Workshop: Law and literature - experiences from my country • 957
Yugoslav Literature under (Il)Legal Censorship:
1945-1990
Dijana Zrnić, M.A.1
Abstract: The main aim of this paper is to discuss the legal framework and
the actual practices through which the Communist regime aempted to con-
trol Yugoslav literary production. Agitprop’s role as a “prime censor” of the
regime will be examined together with its centralisation of the control system
over the publishing industry. The development of legal solutions and the role
of judiciary in support of the control of the circulation of ideas in the society
and legislative connement of the inuence of writers whose literary creativity
was potentially harmful to ruling political ideology, will be exposed to critical
review through certain historical timelines.
The paper will also examine the response of major publishing houses
and individual authors to the new cultural policies imposed by the Commu-
nists. It will discuss a number of examples, ranging from open opposition – as
was the case of prof. Mihajlo Đurić’s comments on newly proposed Constitu-
tional Amendments or Alija Izetbegovic’s Islamic Declaration – to involuntary
collaboration - as exemplied by self-censorship of literary majority. It will also
provide examples of other means through which the regime exerted pressure on
the publishers and authors like granting nancial favours, nationalizing the
press often supported by the application of illegal means such as direct and in-
direct threats, informative secret police interviews, etc.
Key words: censorship, author, law, literature, Communist regime, Agitprop,
publication, judiciary, prosecution, the Publication Act.
1. Introduction
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well wrien or badly wrien. That is all.”
(Oscar Wilde, Preface to the Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891)
1
Assistant in Legal English, Law Faculty in Banja Luka, Banja Luka University,
Republic of Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Email: dijanapetkovic@blic.net.
958 • XXVI World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy
The struggle for freedom of expression is as ancient as the his-
tory of censorship. The rst concrete case of censorship occurred with
Socrates (c. 469 BC – 399 BC), a classical Greek philosopher, who was
sentenced to drink poison for promoting his philosophies. It is believed
that the main reason for his execution were his aempts to improve the
Athenians’ sense of justice.2 The Greek playwright Euripides (c. 480 BC
– 406 BC), much to the consternation of the conservative audiences, de-
fended the true liberty of freeborn men and women, and their right to
speak freely. He believed that traditional codes of value needed to be
re-examined and scrutinized through reversals of social expectations.
These strategic discontinuities between character and social status sug-
gested that status, including slavery, was not the result of natural hier-
archies, but imposed by custom or chance.3
Thus, the struggle for freedom has throughout history been de-
ned as a struggle against censorship as “ocial prohibition or restric-
tion of any type of expression believed to threaten the political, social,
or moral order imposed by governmental, religious, or local powers“4.
In other words, censorship consists of any aempt to suppress informa-
tion, points of view, or method of expression such as art or profanity.
The purpose of censorship is to maintain the status quo, to control the
development of a society, and to suppress dissidence.
The history of literary censorship in the post-bellum Yugoslavia
largely builds on earlier and concurrent traditions of, foremost politi-
cally provoked censorship. Namely, the Communist regime believed in
ideological homogeneity and universality of thought, whose stability
was constantly undermined by guerrilla aacks of literary dissidents
and intelligentsia in opposition. To preserve its dominance, however,
the ruling regime had never prohibited anything in a vacuum, but
had rather tried to control the circulation of literary ideas in the soci-
ety and conne the inuence of those that were potentially harmful to
their interests. In order to do so, a variety of procedures was developed,
spanning from repressive, such as restrictive legal codication, judicial
injustice in the form of stage trials, and police brutality to softer, more
sophisticated methods such as exclusions, lists of forbidden books or
2
See: Plato, Apology, trans. by Miloš Đurić, Dereta, Belgrade, 2008;
3
Op.cit.: Ruby Blondell et al., Women on the Edge-Four plays by Euripides, Routledge,
Newyork-London, 2002;
4
e most detailed study of censorship done by Jonathon Green and Nicholas J. Karo-
lides, Encyclopedia of Censorship, Facts on File, New York, 2005;
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