Censorship as a Negotiation: Strategies of Autonomy in the Literature of Socialist Poland

The article provides a review and comparison of the aesthetic strategies developed by Polish writers of the socialist era in response to State-sanctioned censorship of their work. Highlighting the nature of socialist state censorship as, in practice, a process of ongoing negotiation between the writers and the State, it seeks to contribute to a theoretical and contrastive account of the modern autonomy of literature and art. The coda offers remarks on the relationship between literature of the Eastern bloc and certain elements of Western modernist aesthetics. This, in turn, contributes to a more general understanding of the role of the counter-textual within the modernist tradition.