ABSTRACT
The appearance of a new leader in the Soviet Union, who was the first to dare to condemn publicly the personality cult of Stalin, and who somewhat softened the rigid pressure of the state censorship on art (at least at the beginning of his rule), evoked hope in the progressive part of society for democratic reform. It was during that period which later was poetically and tenderly referred to as 'Khruschev's thaw', that a peculiar burst of intellectual and creative activity took place. It was accompanied by the powerful spiritual and moral liberation of the artistic intelligentsia from the dead dogmas of the Stalin-Zhdanov cultural ideology.
