The Hours and the Minutes

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 to destalinization in culture and society throughout the Eastern Bloc. 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 in their didactic, schematic literature, and finding more empathetic ways to explore human fallibility and the complexity of human experience.

Bednár is fundamentally preoccupied in these five novellas with what he presents as the insensitive, even inhuman, rootless and amoral modernity that the war and then the 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.

But in the end, it is his spare, lyrical style and devotion to plot and dynamic narration which render The Hours and The Minutes a genuine modern Slovak classic and gripping read.