Pavel Branko was born on board a French ship heading to Trieste, a port city on the Adriatic Sea.

Branko's father was a Slovak Jew converted to Protestantism, a clerk in Hatshava (Hačava), Hnushtya (Hnúšťa) county, Slovakia and thus a citizen of Austria-Hungary, a multi-national state, till 1918.

The Slovak clerical-fascist regime of Jozef Tiso (which was noted for its Antisemitism) brought Branko into the resistance while he was still a high school student.

In 1939, propelled by an "enthusiasm for leftist ideals", Branko joined the illegal Communist Party, the most outstanding antifascist force in Slovakia at the time.

[8] During the winter of 1945, fearing that the advancing Red Army could liberate the political prisoners, the Tiso regime made a dirty deal with the German Gestapo.

[10] After liberation, Branko worked as a freelance translator of fiction, as well as philosophical non-fiction from English, Russian and German.

The years 1945–1949 meant for him a gradual disillusion concerning the real practices of the Communist Party and the Comintern which ended in public withdrawal from the CP in 1949, with many consequences involved.

He decided to resign as a film critic and withdrew with his first wife Mary to a lonely cabin in the High Tatras, a mountain range in North-Eastern Slovakia, where he restricted himself to translating books.

"[17] In 1968, while the Prague Spring was still flourishing, Branko was in charge of a seminar offered for budding screenwriters at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava.

In 1967, he obtained honorary awards from the SÚKK and the SV ČSSP for his translation of Maxim Gorky's "Life of Klim Samgin" (Zhizn Klima Samgina / Жизнь Клима Самгина).

In 1970, Branko briefly managed to land a one-year job as scientific collaborator at the Slovak Film Institute (SFÚ).

Also in 2000, Pavel Branko was awarded the Zlatá kamera (Golden Camera) at the MFF Art Film Fest, together with a laudatory diploma by the Prime Minister.

[23] The title refers to Lermontov's novel that depicts a "superfluous man" – a hint which serves to remind us that Branko sees himself ironically or skeptically as a ‘superfluous man.’ Indeed, neither the Tiso regime nor the Stalinists ‘needed’ somebody like him, who ‘swims against the current.’[24] In 2010 Jaro Rihák shot a portrait of Pavel Branko for the Slovak TV series GEN (Gallery of national elite).