In the softer form of communism well represented by contemporary Hungary, writers and artists are not repressed, constrained and censored in the traditional style of a totalitarian dictatorship-they are coopted and given a stake in the prevailing state culture. The censorship largely becomes self-censorship; censors and artists are entangled in a mutual embrace. Haraszti, a dissident sociologist and poet who still lives and writes in Hungary but has clung fiercely to his creative freedom, gives us a number of variations on this theme in a brilliant essay which was first published in France (1983) and has circulated underground, in the Hungarian original, in Hungary itself.
