By Vladimir Tismaneanu
(Monica Lovinescu, a Paris-based literary critic and journalist who
encouraged intellectual resistance to Romania's communist regime from
the microphone of Radio Free Europe from 1964-92, passed away on April
21 at the age of 85.
The daughter of influential interwar academic Eugen Lovinescu, and a
mother who was to die in a communist prison, Monica Lovinescu enjoyed
tremendous prestige and influence in her native Romania. She was
considered a chief ideologue in arguing that communist crimes were
equal to those of the Nazis, and her work angered dictator Nicolae
Ceausescu to the point that he ordered the beating in 1977 that left
her in a coma. She recovered to return to her seat behind the
microphone, where she observed the downfall of Ceausescu's regime in
1989.)
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