Sadoveanu's subsequent endorsement of authoritarian King Carol II and his corporatist force, the National Renaissance Front, saw his participation in the monarch's personality cult. In 1940, he offered controversial praise to the ruler through the official journal, "Revista Fundațiilor Regale", which caused Carol's political adversary, psychologist Nicolae Mărgineanu, to deem Sadoveanu and his fellow contributors "scoundrels". His renewed mandate in the Senate was a favor from Carol, also granted to George Enescu, philosopher Lucian Blaga, scientists Emil Racoviță and Iuliu Hațieganu, and several other public figures. During the Ion Antonescu dictatorship, Sadoveanu kept a low profile and was apolitical. However, Cioroianu writes, he supported the invasion of the Soviet Union and Romania's cooperation with the Axis Powers on the Eastern Front, seeing in this a chance to recover Bessarabia and the northern part of Bukovina (lost to the 1940 Soviet occupation). In spring 1944, months before the King Michael Coup toppled the regime, he was approached by the clandestine Romanian Communist Party and its sympathizers in academia to sign an open letter condemning Romania's alliance to Nazi Germany. According to the communist activist Belu Zilber, who took part in this action, Sadoveanu, like his fellow intellectuals Dimitrie Gusti, Simion Stoilow and Horia Hulubei, refused to sign the document. Also according to Zilber, Sadoveanu motivated his refusal by stating that the letter needed to be addressed not to Antonescu, but to King Michael I. However, and aside from its main topic, "Păuna-Mică" was noted as one of the few prose works of the 1940s to mention the wartime deportation of Romanian Jews by Antonescu's regime; "Caleidoscop" also speaks about the 1941 Iași pogrom as "our shame", and commends those who opposed it.