DOBRÍ PREDKOVIA A DÉMONI

The rapid changes of the ideological and cultural-political frameworks characterized the situation in Slovak arts in the 1950s. At the beginning of the decade it was the repressive way of the forging Socialist Realism, in the middle of it the liberalization stimulated by the Krushchev and at the end the restoration of the order, which was supported by the examinations of the party and civil loyalty in the year 1958. The period of time after the Hungarian and Poznan revolutions in 1956 featured an increase in censorship in Slovakia, which was related to the domestic political power struggle. The goal of the article is to reveal the inner tensions of the 1950s, to outline the power mechanisms of hindering the society liberalization and to vividly capture the contradictions of the situation in Slovakia in this particular period of time using the unpublished piece of writing Náš spoločný predok Kukučín /Our Common Ancestor Kukučín/ by Dominik Tatarka, seized in 1957 and discovered in an archive. The specific feature of the times was using the so called Burgeois Nationalist card. The study is built on archive research of the others and also it brings the author´s own. When reconstructing the transformation of Tatarka´s poetics from the hard core Socialist Realism doctrine to its softer versions, the author pays attention to the contemporary reflection of Tatarka´s works in the critical clashes with Alexander Matuška, the dominant figure of that period of time. As for prose, the initiation role was played by Tatarka´s travel book Človek na cestách (A Travelling Man, 1957), which was not spared from censorship either. The characteristics of the era necessarily include the life in Slovak literary institutions, the activity of the Institute of Literary Science, Slovak Academy of Sciences, as a tool of forging the desired form of the classic literary heritage, the publishing activities, and the activity of the Union of Czechoslovak writers. The study operates with some writings unknown until now and brings characteristics of the times and Tatarka´s work in a new context.