LIKE SECRET POLICE FILES FROM OTHER EASTERN BLOC COUNTRIES, files of the Romanian secret police (or Securitate) present fragments of individual lives that consist of a collection of informers’ notes, officers’ reports and analyses, letters, photographs, and transcripts of interrogations and wiretapped private conversations. While these notes and reports resemble particular snapshots of a person's life, often taken from different angles and through various lenses, confirmed and reconfirmed by numerous Securitate sources, they typically resist attempts to assemble them into a coherent plot. Yet they do offer relevant insights into the organization of the Securitate and its tactics. The selectively collected facts are astonishingly detailed and focus on many events in a person's life, but the way the Securitate processed them, and to what end, as well as the numerous inherent lacunae in these files, make it difficult for postcommunist researchers to trace a story—a life story.

Every file presents a life story, literary scholar Cristina Vatulescu contends in her award-winning book, Police Aesthetics, which deals with Romanian and Soviet secret police surveillance and its portrayal in film and in literature. As she explains, “[L]ike any biography, a personal file tells the story of a life; unlike most biographies, the secret police file also has enormous power to radically alter the course of that life, and even to put a full stop to it.” Coining the term “arresting biographies,” Vatulescu focuses mainly on victim surveillance files and how the secret police managed to translate lives into texts—texts assembled from a chorus of incriminating narrative voices that belonged to sources (informers), officers, interrogators, and to the victims themselves whose letters were intercepted and private conversations tapped. Vatulescu's analysis of files also points to the difficulty of reading these files, as they challenge “both the potential and limits of literary studies” (12) while also underlining the “porosity between literary and non-literary writing” (7). The very basis of the analysis, the sheets collated between two covers that contain fragments of a person's life, typically follows a structure that is deceptively orderly and redundant while also offering, albeit rarely, real gems: pieces of information that bring together the biographical narrative.