REAKCIE SLOVENSKEJ KULTÚRNEJ OBCE NA SOVIETSKU KAMPAŇ PROTI TZV. FORMALIZMU V UMENÍ MEDZI ROKMI 1936 – 1938

The study focuses on the reactions of the Slovak cultural community to the Soviet campaign against so-called formalism in the arts between the years 1936 and 1938. The paper analyses public reactions to the fabricated political trials and the subsequent persecutions and wide-ranging arrests of Soviet artists and intellectuals in the Slovak cultural journals. While the discussions among communist and Ľudák intellectuals about Stalin ́s terror in the thirties have been the subjects of several historical studies, the opinions of Slovak liberal and democratic writers and intellectuals are barely known. Many of these writers shared communist ideas about the liberalization and democratization of the Soviet Union, although this cannot be completely generalized and depends on specific authors. The study wants to emphasize that the illusions and unrealistic ideas remained among them during the whole period of the thirties and also after the Second World War during the last part of the Stalin epoch.