Overview

With their courageous and engaging critique of Communism in the 1950s, these critically acclaimed Slovak classics demask one of the founding myths of modern Slovakia. The Hours and The Minutes was first published in Bratislava in 1956, the year of Nikita Khrushchev's ""secret speech,"" in which the Soviet leader formally acknowledged Stalin's tyranny and opened the way for political reform throughout the Eastern Bloc. Alfonz Bednár's writing was one of the first free of nationalist and communist propaganda, rejecting earlier ideologization of life by both the fascist right and Stalinist left and finding more empathetic ways to explore the complexity of human experience. His novellas defy traditional heroic depictions and portray the human individual, his relations, and morality as the subject of history rather than a utopian, collectivist ideology. In these five novellas, Bednár is preoccupied with the insensitive, even inhuman, rootless, and amoral modernity that the war and Communist Party import into traditional Slovak life. The destruction of the traditional Slovak countryside during the twentieth century through modernization and urbanization, and with it a particular approach to life, forms his central theme. His spare, epic style and devotion to plot and dynamic narration render The Hours and The Minutes a genuine and gripping read.

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9788024658964

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Reviews

""Bednár's The Glass Peak (1954) marked the beginning of the Thaw in Slovak literature, the beginning of a reaction against oversimplified, schematic, tub-thumping depictions of Communists heroic in war and peace. [...] To find Communist villainy, however, one had to wait for The Hours and The Minutes (1956), which expresses disillusion with the new socialist state, but also with the Slovak National Uprising (actually one of the largest mass Resistance struggles of World War II) [...] Stalinist society appears almost more ruthless than German occupation because it works by cold manipulation on top of cruelty and violence. [...] Bednár abhors violence but is desperately resigned to the ubiquity of naturally violent human beings, and hence of gratuitous violence. He fears that such violence can all too easily be embodied in political ideologies."" * Robert B. Pynsent, 'Introduction' in Robert B. Pynsent (ed.), Modern Slovak Prose: Fiction since 1954 * ""In undermining the heroic story of the Uprising, Bednár challenged the reigning narrative of history put forward by the Communist Czechoslovak authorities. The title itself reminds the reader that even if time goes by, there are still similarities and overlap between the Nazi and Communist eras, deeply undercutting the progressive narrative of Marxist ideology.""   * Daniel W. Pratt, 'Foreword' in Katarína Gephardt, Charles Sabatos and Ivana Taranenková (eds), Home and the World in Slovak Writing: A Small Nation's Literature in Context *

Author Information

Alfonz Bednár (1914–89) was a Slovak novelist, screenwriter, and translator. David Short is an acclaimed translator of numerous books from Czech and Slovak to English.

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