While in the 19th century (and, in Slovakia, long into the 20th century) he was regarded as the conscience of the nation, while under socialism he boasted the title of "the engineer of human souls", after 1989 he became a private person who writes, a solitary individual (he had previously been protected by the nation or the working class, embodied by the communist party), from whom no-one demanded a "universal" message. His ties with society had been hopelessly slackened, even undone. He was left alone, to himself, and had to search for a new identity.

The socialist system, which lasted in Czecho-Slovakia from 1948 until 1989, saw a variety of periods in culture and art. More relaxed phases were always followed by a wave of clampdowns. The sixties are considered the most liberal and therefore the most productive epoch creatively, but they ended with a catastrophe - the Soviet occupation on 21^st August 1968. The so-called normalisation, which resulted from the occupation, meant a disruption of positive developments and had a harsh impact on the whole cultural community. Associations of writers, artists and journalists were disbanded or at least various artists or writers were expelled from them, literary magazines (Kultúrny život [Cultural Life], Mladá tvorba [Young Creation], etc.) had to cease publishing, dozens of authors were not allowed to publish, many emigrated, others voluntarily gave up publishing for years. Literature separated into three streams - legal, dissident and emigré. The majority of authors published legally, but there were many significant absentees. The writers who went underground published their work in "samizdat" form, the emigrés published abroad. Several works by domestic dissidents, Dominik Tatarka, Ivan Kadlečík, Pavel Hrúz, Martin M. Šimečka, and others, were also gradually published there.
           Dominik Tatarka's (1913 - 1989) problems with the communist regime started in the mid 50s with the pamphlet Démon súhlasu (The Demon of Conformism, 1956, 1963 in book form) and the statement that socialist writers were state writers. His critical relationship towards the regime (which he faithfully served at first) intensified in 1968, when he publicly condemned the occupation of Czecho-Slovakia by the forces of the Warsaw Pact states. The ensuing ban on publishing and persecution changed both his concept of literature and his poetics. While previously he had been concerned with the problem of alienation - which was supposed to be overcome by love and friendship (V úzkosti hľadania [In the Anxiety of Searching, 1942], Rozhovory bez konca [Conversations Without End, 1959], Prútené kreslá [Wicker Armchairs, 1962]), he now delved into intimate relationships between the sexes which represented to him an island of freedom in the sea of totality (Písačky [Scribbles, 1976], Sám proti noci [Alone Against the Night, 1984], Listy do večnosti [Letters to Eternity, 1988], Navrávačky [Tape Talk, 1985]).
           The most productive of the well known Slovak emigré writers was Ladislav Mňačko (1919 - 1994), who emigrated to Austria and published most of his work in German. In Slovakia he became first known for his novel set during the second world war, Smrť sa volá Engelchen (Death's Name is Engelchen, 1959), which treated the subject without the pathos usual at the time and raised the issues of guilt and responsibility. What gained him popularity, however, was a book of reportage on the political trials in the 50s called Oneskorené reportáže (Overdue Reports, 1963) and the novel-pamphlet Ako chutí moc (The Taste of Power, 1968), in which he described the process of a communist functionary's transformation into a totalitarian dictator. In emigration, where he earned his living by writing, he tried writing bestsellers on various themes (Niekto ma chce zabiť - An Event), but also continued to write pamphlets on the communist regime (Súdruh Münchhausen, [Comrade Münchhausen, 1972, 1990 in Slovak]). His final verdict on "real socialism" and the idea of the revolutionary transformation of the world is contained in the book Siedma noc (The Seventh Night, 1968 in German, 1990 in Slovak), where he assumed some of the responsibility for his ideological support of miscarriages of justice in the period of Stalinism.