Eighth Day of Week

In the period following Stalin's death in 1953, Marek HĹasko was unquestionably the most acclaimed and popular contemporary writer in Poland. The Eighth Day of the Week , his first novel, caused a sensation in Poland in 1956 and then in the West, where HĹasko was hailed as Poland's angry young man and considered a Communist James Dean. In this deceptively simple story, two young people search for a place to consummate their relationship in a world jammed with strangers and ugliness and emptied of all intimacy and significance; their yearning for authentic love, with its redemptive power, is thwarted by the debasement and ugliness, both moral and aesthetic, of their surroundings. The Eighth Day of the Week memorably depicts the unresolved tension between the degradation of surroundings to which the characters are inevitably forced to submit and the preservation of an inner purity which they, and Hlasko, refuse to relinquish.