Peter Kalmus

“Of course, there were many official artists who had works of high quality. Some of them played both sides and worked also for Bolsheviks. Although, there were some unique artists, who worked just for the public sphere and had monumental pieces without idealistic intervention. First of them was Ján Mathé and the second was Mária Bartuzsová, whom I used to help for over a year. She reproached herself even for making a state seal with a star. Heineken has a star, too! This is a proof that there were prime artists in Bohemia and Slovakia, as well as in Košice, who earned well and didn’t have to do ideological works. They were able to defend themselves in not doing Lenins, Gottwalds, sickles and hammers; they didn’t do ideological art, but art the way they felt it. This is how Ján Mathé, and let’s say, in a way also Alexander Eckerdt worked.”

“Suddenly in 1968, when you didn’t perfectly know Solzhenitsyn and his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, you had an F at school. However, a year later, if they found this book at your house, you got arrested for 5 years. That’s how it changed. We had literature and at the study room, my classmates tore out pages from the students’ books describing Mňačko, Solzhenitsyn, just because they didn’t manage to print out new books. I refused it.”