Reading the Politics of Exile: Matei Vișniec’s Mr. K Released

Visniec’s political exile in Paris provides an occasion to remember the brutality of the Stalinist regimes that the USSR implemented in the Soviet Bloc countries. Like the author’s native country of Romania, the communist countries held millions of political prisoners, as well as “free people,” embroiled in a system of repression, punishment, and corruption that terrorized the entire society. Exploring the worst tendencies of both Soviet communism and liberal democracies, Mr. K. Released offers a fictional account of the expansion of communism in the East while forging unexpected, ironic analogies with the absurdity in Kafka’s fiction and the despair of Becket’s tramps, important figures for all those who wish to understand the history of exile in the twentieth century.