After a string of rather dreary contemporary Slovak novels wallowing in the meaninglessness of it all, I was happy to return to Ladislav Mňačko, whose The Taste of Power and The Seventh Night I’d enjoyed previously. It’s a testimony both to the dreariness of the other novels and Mňačko’s own skill that I’d consider this book an improvement, given that the subject of the novel is military failure and mass carnage.

The setting is early spring 1945. The story opens with the narrator, called Volodia (though this is evidently not his real name), being hauled to the hospital after his legs have become paralyzed in battle. As he lies in bed, wondering if he will ever walk again, alternately flirting with and berating Nurse Eliška, he starts to walk back through recent events, and in time to share them with Eliška. The war is pronounced over during his recuperation, but the plot does not tend toward victory: it recounts the relentless march of death in the final days of this devastating war…

This novel is another in the series produced by Artia, a Communist-era publishing house based out of Prague. Artia overwhelmingly favoring Czech authors, Jesenský’s book is one of only three (so far as I can tell) by Slovak authors that got translated into English. Therein lies a tale of its own.

What, exactly, was the motivation for a state-run publisher to produce English-language versions of its national literature? It takes little imagination to see the propaganda angle at work. For example, Rudolf Jašík’s St. Elizabeth’s Square recounts the horrors of growing anti-Semitism in pre-war Slovakia leading to collaboration with the Nazi occupiers, a very popular point of contrast for true-believer communists like the author—and one conveniently ignoring the totalitarian and anti-Semitic policies at work in the so-called workers’ paradise. But Jašík fit the bill so nicely that two of his novels were seen fit for wider a readership (a review of his Dead Soldiers Don’t Sing will be forthcoming) and hence comprise two-thirds of Artia’s modest Slovak translation program.

The prolific Janko Jesenský, author of The Democrats, didn’t quite have Jašík’s bonafides, but at least he had the good sense to die in 1945 after having openly expressed his opposition to fascism…

I ordered this book as a matter of course, simply because it’s another Slovak novel in English. But as soon as it arrived, I became even more intrigued by the circumstances of its publication than its plot. Because this novel, which first came out in 1958 in Slovak, was translated and printed in English in 1964 by a publisher in Prague. In other words, during the severe censorship of the immediate post-Stalinist era, this book was selected not only for public consumption in Czechoslovakia but to send a message to the hostile outside capitalist world of English speakers. How and why did this happen?

My suspicions, of course, were that author Rudolf Jašík must have been a true believer in the Communist cause, and from what I can find out about him, my suspicions were correct. After five months imprisoned by the Nazis for distributing Communist leaflets in 1940, Jašík came out more convinced than ever of the evils of fascism and the righteousness of the Reds. He fought in the Slovak puppet state’s army on the side of the Axis but sabotaged his own regiment, for which he was again imprisoned. Jašík didn’t waste either bout in prison but worked on his Russian and even tried to join the Soviet army at one point. After his second release from jail, he joined the partisans in the Slovak National Uprising. This most revered moment in Slovak national history actually failed, but it put Jašík in good stead with the regime change of 1948. He held prominent jobs in industry and the arts, organized study groups in Marxist-Leninist thought, and was allowed to publish his handful of novels and poetry.

I came to this, his most famous novel, expecting a work of pious and overt propaganda. In fact, it is considerably more subtle than that…