Eastern Europe: Author! Author!

For Eastern Europe's nervous stable of writers, finding an outlet offers a far greater challenge than finding a theme. Tons of newsprint flow from publishing houses weekly, saturating stores with technical books, biographies of Communist leaders and heroic novels of the Tractor School. But most other works gather dust on censors' desks, forcing many writers to resort to the dangerous system of publishing under a pseudonym in the West.

Last week a significant crack occurred in that system with the German-language publication in the West of The Taste of Power, by the Slovak writer Ladislav Mňačko. Although his book has not...