There were changes to the good, too, in the drama, bringing fruits in the 1930s and 1940s, the trend here being sustained until 1948. The ballet corps had been moving towards a professional standard – thanks to maitre de ballet and choreographer Achille Viscusi – from as early as the 1920s.
It is a paradox that the first apogee of Slovak theatre, when a number of outstanding achievements were recorded, should come at the end of the 1930s and the first half of the following decade – in other words, at the time of the Second World War. Slovakia found itself between two totalitarian states – Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. As a consequence of internal division in Czechoslovakia, when the maintenance of centralist pressure and the stifling of democratic principles of autonomy by Prague proved no longer tolerable, demands for the independence of Slovakia became the more clamorous. This coincided with Hitler’s efforts to incorporate the Czech lands and Moravia into the German Reich. In 1939 the Slovak Republic was formed, Jozef Tiso becoming its president. It was a republic fettered by the powerful influence of Germany, which assumed the new state into its protective zone, with all the familiar negative consequences this entailed.
And yet, in this Slovak Republic people of democratic constitution were able to maintain for themselves sufficient latitude for a relatively free artistic life. In all the other European countries at the time (including Spain, Germany, occupied France, Poland, the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Hungary and Soviet Union) members of the interwar avant-garde suffered victimisation and were either obliged to emigrate or were killed. But in Slovakia artists, writers and people of the theatre animated by the century’s modernist trends continued to operate unimpeded. The Slovak National Theatre, for example, not only accommodated the director Janko Borodáč, a devotee of the realist Stanislavsky System, but also afforded great creative scope to fellow director Ján Jamnický, who was directly inspired by the pre-war Russian, Czech and French avant-garde. And there was also another director in the modernist mould, Ferdinand Hoffmann. Maximilián Froman, a Russian emigre and former member of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, was a director with the corps de ballet.