Adam Bodor gained wide literary fame after the publication of his story “Zone Sinistra”. Sinistra (the meaning of the Latin word “sinistra” is ominous, terrible) is the name in the story of a corner of the Carpathians somewhere on the border of Romania, Hungary and Ukraine; but Sinistra is also an artistic image that personifies not only life in Transylvania, where the dictatorship of Ceausescu was superimposed on the oppression of national minorities: Hungarians, Germans, etc. This “zone” is a symbol of that “real” socialism, which in the last decades before its collapse all more turned into a terrible phalanstery, something between a prison and a mental hospital. Without any tendentiousness, without didacticism, Bodor shows how, under conditions designed - according to the declarations of the authorities - to form a “new man”, people lose their human essence and even their human appearance. "Zone Sinistra" is a sad literary monument to a grandiose experiment on humanity, an attempt to build a utopia, regardless of spirituality or the characters of people.