Communist censors took over his manuscripts, some of which were unceremoniously burned.

The Polish poet Antonin Slonimski said it all in the 50's, in one line that got by the Communist censors: "How frightening is the past that awaits us."

Jerzy Turowicz, who skirmished with Communist censors for nearly four decades to produce a Polish Catholic weekly that became widely known as "the only free newspaper from Berlin to Vladivostok," died on Wednesday in Cracow.

The political aspect of the plays lay more in their attitude than in their specific references, which confounded the Communist censors.

The puppets share the screen with Jerzy Kryszak and Andrzej Zaorski, two well-known Polish actors who spent much of the 1980's figuring out ways to tweak the Communist censors.

"In this case, rather than there being Communist censors, there are people who fear some kind of imagined reprobation from the church or Polish readers," added Mr. Bernstein, who is best known for his reporting on the Watergate scandal.

He emerged as a major science-fiction author in the early 1950's with works that he later disavowed as simplistic, and he sometimes ran afoul of the Communist censors.

It has been a long time since Russian musicians or artists were forced to submit their work to Communist censors before presenting it to the public.

It also ignores Poland's tradition of surreal posters, those dark and elliptical designs created to befuddle Communist censors.