Mourning Communism Through Art

By RICHARD BYRNE

Mourn communism? More than 14 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the concept may seem absurd. Yet as Charity Scribner, an assistant professor of European studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, observes in her first book, Requiem for Communism (MIT Press), playwrights, sculptors, filmmakers, and other artists of Europe's "second world" socialist states (and many fellow travelers in the West) still explore communism's demise through their creative work. In the best work of