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.

'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, London, Basingstoke: Macmillan/SSEES, 1990.


'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, Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025.