The frozen time block Nicolae Monolescu
(Literary Romania, no.45, 15-21 November 1995)

" I was kept in a big frozen time block" wrote Gheorghe Ursu in the poem "Trajectories". On November 17-th ten years passed way from the assassination of the 59-th years old man by Ceausescu's Securitate (he was born on 1-st July 1926 in Soroca), engineer by trade, poet, script writer, prose writer, an enamoured of film, music and painting, and an unusual thing since Maiorescu, he maintained, from 18-th years till the day he was arrested, in September 1985, a diary containing about 61 writing books (over 6000 pages). It isn't known the real reason of this political crime. Two job mates, Petre Elena and Pirguta Croitoru (where are they now?), denounced him for writing an diary, he was investigated for some months, forced to collaborate with the Securitate, and in the last, he was arrested, brutally tortured and murdered.

Gheorghe Ursu wasn't a person who could jeopardize the communist regime. Few people knew about his diary in which he noted especially the movies he had saw. He had few friends among writers and artists. Stefan Augustin Doinas wrote the preface of the only book he had published in his life, the booklet of poems "Always two" (The Publishing House Litera, 1971).

Dan Desliu, a close friend of Gheorghe Ursu, thought that Securitate wanted to give an example to Romanian dissentient. The Scuritate wanted to frighten them, in other words, for those whose reputation was an inconvenient for harsh treatments. I have to admit that, at this trivial level, characteristic of the Securitate, I don't see a better explanation. So it has been ordained for Gheorghe Ursu to die instead of some colleagues being somehow sheltered by their celebrity in the country or aboard. The investigation started after 1989 got tied. It is amazing how life repeats sometimes literature. In Constantin Toiu's novel, "The Gallery of wild vine", printed in 1976, is storied the investigation by the Securitate of a young Romanian intellectual for " the guilty" of keeping a diary. When I commented upon the novel, at its publication, I remarked just the atrocity that a diary undesignated to be published, to be considered as material evidence in an action essentially brought to human being's privacy. As a matter of fact Gheorghe Ursu had the novel's character fate. Less fortune than the character, he completely experienced the humiliation and the absurd suffering. That is, to his death. The frozen block time, in which we all were kept, real or fictive persons, was the Communism. The Gheorghe Ursu's trial was, in a lot of respects, a Kafkian one [because, at its turn, the communism is a Kafkian regime]. Milan Kundera wrote in a recent book: "…The court accused K. without pointing out the crime" and "K. is guilty not because he made a mistake, but because he was accused". And because he was accused he has to die". Here it is the meaning's overturn that the communism operated in legal matters. It remains to say that not only a certain deed is charged in communist trials, but the man himself, with all his roots, parents and ancestors, the man as man, because he exists as a being in the world. The Gheorghe Ursu's tragedy is the most horrible ontological exemplifying of this semantic aberration, by which the Communism revealed its Kafkian essence. And on this level the literature is in advance of life".