Einsteinove zvony Lajosa Grendela ako parabola normalizácie a Nežnej revolúcie
Lajos Grendel’s Einsteinove zvony [Einstein’s bells] as a parable of Normalisation and the Velvet Revolution

Summary/Abstract: The study analyzes the literary work of Lajos Grendel (1948 – 2018) in the context of the Normalization period in (Czecho)Slovakia, with particular focus on the novel Einstein’s Bells (1992/1998). Through an examination of the memoir Biographical Fragment (2025) and the novel itself, it demonstrates how the author transforms his personal disillusionment with Normalization into a grotesque allegory of late socialism. The Anabatic Research Institute is interpreted as a Kafkaesque parable of the power apparatus, which, instead of open repression, maintains consent through material rewards, cover identities, and rituals of pretense. The novel is read as an ironic anti-Bildungsroman, in which the protagonist’s journey from ideological enthusiasm to opportunistic identity fragmentation becomes emblematic of the double life under Normalization. Grendel’s poetics of the grotesque and the absurd thus reveals not only the mechanisms of power in real socialism, but also their persistence in the chaotic transformation following the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

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