The closer the past is, the less penetrable it becomes for the historian. The scholar's task is to recollect possible surviving data and to make them intelligible. This book explores some of the most important "existential programs" of the artists who lived in communist Romania. My main attempt in this study is to correct the canon of visual arts of the communist period by including some neglected "unofficial" artists in. I hope that the great majority of artists who have been at history's margins will be acknowledged and remembered, and I also hope that this rehabilitation will create a...

The essays in this collection make up the first study of "dropping out" of late state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. From Leningrad intellectuals and Berlin squatters to Bosnian Muslim madrassa students and Romanian yogis, groups and individuals across the Eastern Bloc rejected mainstream socialist culture. In the process, multiple drop-out cultures were created, with their own spaces, music, values, style, slang, ideology and networks. Under socialism, this phenomenon was little-known outside the socialist sphere. Only very recently has it been possible to reconstruct it...