On Clowns The Dictator and the Artist : Essays

"Like Kundera, Milosz, and Kis, Manea is Central European not only because of where he was born but because of his spiritual outlook and his cultural horizons. In the formulation of Danilo Kis that Manea cites, "Consciousness of belonging to Central Europe is itself in the end a kind of dissidence!" In On Clowns, as in his fiction, Manea shows how artistic creativity and intellectual freedom go far beyond dissidence: they are a morality, anathema to the "captive mind" of the Communist dictatorship, that enable artists to survive and resist oppression."--BOOK JACKET.