Proud Budžes

The heroine of the story, eight-year-old second-grader Helenka Součková, guides us through the tragicomic years of Husák's normalization through a child's perspective—both naive and penetrating at once. The action takes place in the early 1970s in the setting of a school and theatre in an unnamed provincial town.

The story is a sequence of comic incidents, embarrassing experiences, and minor and major misfortunes that Helenka not only experiences but also evaluates and comments on with the directness characteristic of her age.