This post is a summary of the dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Harvard University, written by Abigail Weil, published in 2019 at https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/42013078/WEIL-DISSERTATION-2019.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
The goal of my project is to offer a critical reading of Hasek's oeuvre that takes seriously the legend as a cultural product, one that he sometimes enacted and sometimes inscribed into his fiction. My reading of Hasek also reconsiders the concepts of authorship and authority and examines the interplay of these two forces. Both become potent only through a dialogic exchange that establishes legitimacy; they have meaning only when perceived as meaningful. Hasek came of age in the late imperial Austro-Hungary, served in the World War I and then in the Russian Civil War, and returned home to the newly-founded democratic Czechoslovak Republic. In each of these regimes, he encountered forms of authority that differed radically, or at least attempted to justify themselves by radically different means. The title of my dissertation, "Man is Indestructible," is taken from Max Brod's review of an early stage adaptation of Osudy. Even in Hasek's lifetime of political pivots and other improvisations, we see the belief that unified his life story and his oeuvre, the individual alone is sacrosanct. Political and religious institutions have the power to shape our lives, they can conscript us, imprison us, beem us enemies and degenerates. But the human spirit is resilient, and in the few, those we call heroes or geniuses, it is unbreakable. There is, however, another dark way to understand the indestructible man: as the pernicious individual whose status within powerful institutions shields him from consequences. This dynamic is at play in both abuses of power, and those expressions of power that oppress, exploit and victimize disenfranchised people and communities, including war, environmental damage, and unfair labor practices. Hasek's embedding of autobiographical stories into his fiction always relies on his reader recognizing them as the stuff of legend. Hasek and his characters treat storytelling as a world apart in which offensive or upsetting ideas can be encoded into a form that defies censorship or punishment. By presenting his ideas in the form of fiction rather than journalism, he evades the responsibilities, but at the same time, he activates his own legend, creating a version of himself as the protagonist, thus reminding the reader of his authority to speak on the topics of Soviet Russia, their civil war, and himself. In The Good Soldier Svejk, Hasek presents the tension between authorship and authority as a problem of self-expression. In terms of actual power, writers can do little to upset the systems of authority put in place by the monarchy and military. But the force of these characters' activities is in their refusal to adhere to those systems. Authorship becomes a defiant act of taking authority on oneself. Two critics who advance theories about Hasek's representation of authority are Lubomir Dolezel and Premysl Blazicek. Dolezel's work from 2008 touches on the line between Hasek's biography and his creative output, and representations of auhtority in his work. According to Dolezel, the characters of The Good Soldier Svejk, are defined by their permissions and obligations, a system Svejk undermines through ludic play. This strategy, Dolezel shows, is not intended to challenge authority, but to expose the characters who represent it. In my own analysis of the novel, I argue that the novel champions characters whose creative activities simultaneously conform to and reveal the oppressive system, thereby defying the authorities that seek to order their lives. Hasek's depiction of the oppressive imperial regime in Prague is an portrait of the imperial administration, a situation where Czech subjects of the crown are denied free and authentic self-expression. The result of this is a stifled society. A world where atypically heroic characters such as Sveijk find non-normative methods for self-expression that do not rely on traditional or conventional journalistic or literary forms. We may refer to Hasek's biography for some explanation, as the narrator once more uses first-person, and the author also spent time in a Ukrainian prison camp. The inclusion of this story gives the narrator's discourse an oral quality, making it at once concrete, relatable, and dynamic. The tone once again becomes conversational. The narrator transgresses his literary boundaries and by doing so, makes the reader an active participant in the discourse. As Hasek infuses his novel with elements of historical discourse in order to reveal the fictive components that underlie it. History's unspoken artifice, Hasek argues, distracts us from questions about the investment in state power. In the world of the novel, storytelling is the narrative from of choice for the powerless. Throughout the novel Hasek experiments with various means of fictionalizing historiography and propose this subversive activity as an empowering creative method of reclaiming critical reasoning for writer and reader alike. Whereas history tends to disempower the reader, the relationship between Hasek and the reader of The Good Soldier Svejk, is mutually constitutive and empowering. Svejk is not a historian, yet his commentary reveals a wealth of historical knowledge. Like Part II of Don Quixote, the epilogue insists on the veracity of the book's contents, claiming that its characters have lives outsides these pages. The preface, quoted here, does the same thing: 'Great times call for great men. There are unknown heroes who are modest, with none of the glory and history of Napoleon. Today you can meet in the streets of Prague a shabbily dressed man who is not even himself aware of his significance in the history of the new era. He goes modestly on his way, without bothering anyone. If you asked him his name, he would answer you simply: I am Svejk. And this quiet, modest, shabbily dressed man is indeed that good old soldier Svejk. He didn't burn down the temple of the goddess in Ephesus, like that dummy Herostratus did, just to get himself into newspaper and historian books. And that's enough.' Hasek makes a claim for Svejk's worthiness for historical record, the author elevates the status of ordinary folk conventionally deemed unworthy of note in history books. Through his irreverent treatment of historical personagens and historiography, Hasek shows that, more often than not, historical discourse is essentially an expression of power. But his project is not to spur historians towards greater critical thinking or self-awareness. He proposes critical and self-aware fiction as a worthy and more honest alternative: a source of information and inspiration whose inventive elements are transparent, though not necessary easy to comprehend. Hasek's ideal reader: skeptical, perceptive and holding nothing so sacred that it can't withstand ridicule.
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