Positive criticism, from both professionals and laypersons, could accomplish much here; unfortunately, its state today shows that, on the basis of our isolation, and having grown up among the “young postwar fighters,” it has churned out more or less personally pointed, comfortably convincing, and attractive slogans about the decadence of foreign art and the elevation of our art above that of all nations of the world, thus fostering a “healthy” conservatism and petty-bourgeois indolence, simultaneously with an inability to healthily express the [critic's] personal relationship to the real values of artistic works. From whence come all these tiring and shaming arguments, not touching the core of the issue and expressing themselves only through the assembly of mutually antagonistic theories, within which Smetana's name appears like a deus ex machina, invoked to help in the most convoluted circumstances.