Almost one month ago, precisely on April 30th, the Czech writer Jaroslav Hasek would complete 140 years old. This post is a tribute to him. He wrote about the stupidity and absurd of the war, about injustice and cowardice with ordinary people and the importance of fighting for a fairer and better world. A world where everyone fights against injustice, violence, bullying, war, corruption, slavery, hunger, human rights violations, hypocrisy, oppression, dictatorship, political exclusion, and ignorance. This post is a summary of four articles. The first was published at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaroslav_Ha%C5%A1ek. The second was published at https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Good-Soldier-Schweik-by-Hasek. The third was published at https://literariness.org/2022/10/12/analysis-of-jaroslav-haseks-the-good-soldier/. The fourth was published at file:///C:/Users/User/Downloads/RoutledgeHandbooks-9781003055495-chapter3-1.pdf
Jaroslav Hasek (1883-1923) was a Czech writer, humorist, satirist, journalist and anarchist. He is best known for his novel, The Fate of the Good Soldier Svejk during the World War, an unfinished collection of farcical incidents about a soldier in World War I and a satire on the ineptitude of authority figures. The novel has been translated into more than 50 languages, making it the most translated novel in Czech literature. His father, Josef Hasek, a mathematics teacher, died early of alcohol intoxication. Poverty then forced his mother Katerina with three children to move more than 15 times. He graduated from the Czech Business Academy and after graduation, he became an employee of Slavia Bank but soon began to earn his living exclusively in journalism and literature. In 1907, he became editor of the anarchist magazine Komuna, and was briefly imprisoned for his work. In 1908, he edited the Women's Horizon. In 1909 he had sixty-four published short stories. In February 1915, Hasek was called up to the replacement battalion of the Austro-Hungarian army. He was in July transported to the Eastern front in Ukraine. He served on the front until September when he was captured by the Russians. In 1920, in Irkutsk, Russia, he married a printing worker named Alexandra Lvov and in December in the same year, he returned to independent Czechoslovakia. An disciplined author, Hasek was very productive. From his works it is apparent that he had an humanistic education. Initially Hasek wrote mainly travel stories, features and humoresques, which he published in magazines. His prose was based on his own real experiences. In his life, he wrote about 1,200 short stories. Over the years nearly all the stories have been collected and printed in book's form. His most famous text, the novel The Fate of the Good Soldier Svejk during the World War, at first had few followers. Ivan Olbracht was probably the first to mark it as a major work, "it is one of the best books ever written, and The Fate of Good Soldier Svejk is quite a new type in world literature, equivalent to Don Quixote, Hamlet, Faust, Karamazov," he wrote. Vitezslav Nezval connected Hasek work with Dadaism. The philosopher Karel Kosik saw the novel as "an expression of the absurdity of the alienated world", he described Svejk as the "tragic bard of European nihilism." Jan Grossman associated Svejk with existentialism. The novel The Fate of the Good Soldier Svejk during the World War, reflected the pacifist and antimilitary sentiments of post-World War I in Europe. The title character is classified as naive, instinctively honest and guileless, Schweik is forever colliding with the clumsy, dehumanized military bureaucracy. Schweik's naivete serves as a contrast to the self-importance and conniving natures of his superior officers and is the main vehicle for Hasek's mockery of authority. The book The Fate of the Good Soldier Svejk during the World War, is usually accompanied by Josef Lada's illustrations, which help the reader to see Schweik as an amiable and simpleminded hero. However, such an analysis ignores Schweik's clever attempts to avoid active war's duty and his keen insight into the army's operations. Hasek's novel can be read as a surrealist text through its conflation of life and art. Trivial anecdotes are given great prominence by Schweik, who has two or more such stories or explanations for every occassion and situation. Although Hasek was not part of the surrealist movement, he frustrates readers' expectations by not describing a single battle in his war novel. This, combined with his emphasis on everyday people, makes his work similar to such surrealist texts as Andre Breton's Nadja. Jaroslav Hasek wrote only one novel, The Good Soldier Svejk which itself remained unfinished as he intended to write six parts, but only completed three before he died. Although his genius occasionally glimmers in his other works, none of them matches the brilliance of this novel. In 1917, he published the novel in Kiev as part of a legionnaire series. The theme of the ordinary man in the turmoil of history had a strong tradition in literary history, especially in the picaresque novels of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Svejk's most direct ancestor is Simplicius, the hero of Hans Jakob Christoffel, who lived through the horrors of the Thirty Years' War in Germany. Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk is a war novel in which not a single gunshot is fired, and war is not actually portrayed. The basic source of humour for Svejk is that the world itself has become topsy-turvy, absurd and unnatural. The absurdity of the world becomes visible in statements like the following: 'Sentencing an innocent man to five years, that is something I've heard of, but ten, that's too much', 'There is a freedom in the psychiatric asylum (prison) which not even socialists have ever dreamed of ', and finally, 'There have to be crooks in this world too...If everyone were honest with each other, they'd soon start punching each other noses'.The novel deviates from traditional psychological-social novels by not offering character portrayals. Svejk, then, has an aversion to all ideologies: 'It's bad... when a chap suddenly starts to get caught up in philosophizing. That always stinks of delirium tremens.
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