Word: ionesco
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Given the risks involved, Ionesco's outspokenness is impressive. "He never really worried about being called a reactionary by the leftists," remarks Gaetan. "As he himself once said, 'I wasn't afraid of their calling me Bolshevik in the 1940's when I was anti-Nazi, so I'm not going to be now because I'm anti-Marxist...
...Ionesco, of course, survived this estrangement from ideology. But beginning in 1968, with the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, he writes heavily in protest of the continual censorship of non-leftist artists by these "petit bourgeois leftist intellectuals who think they are revolutionaries." (He has also called them "Nazi intellectuals from the Sixteenth Arondissement," the wealthiest section of Paris where Sartre, Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Godard, Duras and others live.) In his book, Present Past, Past Present (1971) he notes: "We (in France) have a liberal press and a censorship by a literally authoritative opposition"--an opposition which until...
Perhaps the most important part of this outspokenness was its insistence upon the Eastern European and Soviet dissidents as models for a truly progressive liberalism in France. Ionesco sees the very fact that the voices of these intellectuals could still be heard under the mechanisms of state oppression as an optimistic sign for France's censored writers. It is proof that with a spirit of "real and genuine liberalism" there can be hope of non-doctrinaire artistic expression...
...What Ionesco anticipated then was an alternative to the imperatives of the bourgeois intellectuals. That alternative finally found a chance in 1973, when Russian dissidents such as Solzhenitsyn, Maximov, Siniavsky, Goma, Amarik and Bukovsky began trickling into France...
...Ionesco: Yes, I am optimistic, but one must go through a long period of purgatory. I think there is an awakening now and it is especially manifested in France with the "new philosophers"--Jean-Marie Benoit, Berbard Levy, Lardreau, Glucksman, Emmanuel Todd and others. That's to say there is a new tendency to go beyond politics towards metaphysics. I think this is very important, and moreover, these young philosophers whom the whole world should know about--including the United States--are demystifiers of Soviet Marxism...