In the period following Stalin's death in 1953, Marek Hlasko was 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 Hlasko was hailed as "a Communist James Dean." Two young people search for a place to consummate their relationship in a world jammed with strangers and emptied of all intimacy. Their yearning for the redemptive power of authentic love is thwarted by the moral and aesthetic ugliness around them. The Eighth Day of the Week memorably depicts the tension between the degradation to which the characters are forced to submit and the preservation of an inner purity which they refuse to relinquish.