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.