Nicolae Manolescu Nicolae Manolescu Nicolae Manolescu (; b. 27 November 1939, Râmnicu Vâlcea) is a Romanian literary critic. As an editor of "România Literară" literary magazine, he has reached a record in reviewing books for almost 30 years. Elected a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy in 1997, he was upgraded to titular member in 2013. During the civil unrest of the 1960s, because of critical opinions voiced against Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej and the Romanian Communist regime, he was expelled from the University of Bucharest, where he was studying philology. After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, he was a founding member of
Nicolae Ceaușescu's cult of personality Nicolae Ceaușescu's cult of personality During the Cold War, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu presided over the most pervasive cult of personality within the Eastern Bloc. Inspired by the personality cult surrounding Kim Il-sung in North Korea, it started with the 1971 July Theses which reversed the liberalization of the 1960s and imposed a strict nationalist ideology, established Stalinist totalitarianism and a return to socialist realism. Initially, the cult of personality was just focused on Ceaușescu himself. By the early 1980s, however, his wife, Elena Ceaușescu—one of the few wives of a Communist leader to become a power in her own