Alongside Milan Kundera's The Joke, The Axe was one of the most influential novels to appear in Czechoslovakia during the cultural reawakening of the 1960s. Blending lyricism and iconoclasm, Vaculik portrays a culture in upheaval through the timeless story of father and son, joined by idealism but separated by a changing world. It is the mid-1960s, and one middle-aged journalist, disillusioned with communist politics, retreats from Prague to the Moravian countryside of his childhood. There he rediscovers a complex relationship with his dead father, a crusader for communism in the early days, who reappears through letters written decades earlier. When the narrator is accused of disgracing his father and his proletariat background, he realizes that he, too, is a leader - but the stakes now are reversed.