On 3 January 1923 a rackety Czech ex-Communist, ex-anarchist, exeditor, ex-soldier named Jaroslav Hašek died in straitened circumstances in the village of Lipnice, east of Prague. He was not yet 40 and did not live to finish the book he was writing. By that time, however, The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War was already hundreds of thousands of words long and gave every appearance of going on indefinitely. Three volumes and a part of a fourth were complete; the hero, the ‘certified imbecile’ Josef Švejk, after a long and irregular journey east from Prague as a soldier in the 91st Regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army, was about to stumble into the slaughterhouse of the Galician front.
It might be assumed that Hašek’s failure to finish his book was a tragic loss. In fact, he left behind a masterpiece, one borne on a ceaseless flow of stories, misadventures, jokes and satire. The Good Soldier, finished or not, may be the most effective, and certainly the funniest, piece of anti-military (and generally subversive) writing ever produced. It might be longer but it could hardly be better.
I first came upon Švejk (pronouced ‘shvake’) in the early 1950s when I was drafted into the American army. I was instantly captivated. Despite the fact that ours was a different era and a very different army from Švejk’s – it’s a long way from Fort Knox, Kentucky, where we were undergoing basic training, to the plains of Central Europe – the similarities were irresistible. It was deeply satisfying to learn how, like us, the forces of Emperor Franz Josef were so richly supplied with pompous and bone-headed officers, pointless regulations, boring duties and lousy food. Who would be a soldier? None of us conscripts (especially the college graduates) was happy to be there. Fortunately I had a copy of
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Subscribe now or Sign inOn 3 January 1923 a rackety Czech ex-Communist, ex-anarchist, exeditor, ex-soldier named Jaroslav Hašek died in straitened circumstances in the village of Lipnice, east of Prague. He was not yet 40 and did not live to finish the book he was writing. By that time, however, The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War was already hundreds of thousands of words long and gave every appearance of going on indefinitely. Three volumes and a part of a fourth were complete; the hero, the ‘certified imbecile’ Josef Švejk, after a long and irregular journey east from Prague as a soldier in the 91st Regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army, was about to stumble into the slaughterhouse of the Galician front.
It might be assumed that Hašek’s failure to finish his book was a tragic loss. In fact, he left behind a masterpiece, one borne on a ceaseless flow of stories, misadventures, jokes and satire. The Good Soldier, finished or not, may be the most effective, and certainly the funniest, piece of anti-military (and generally subversive) writing ever produced. It might be longer but it could hardly be better. I first came upon Švejk (pronouced ‘shvake’) in the early 1950s when I was drafted into the American army. I was instantly captivated. Despite the fact that ours was a different era and a very different army from Švejk’s – it’s a long way from Fort Knox, Kentucky, where we were undergoing basic training, to the plains of Central Europe – the similarities were irresistible. It was deeply satisfying to learn how, like us, the forces of Emperor Franz Josef were so richly supplied with pompous and bone-headed officers, pointless regulations, boring duties and lousy food. Who would be a soldier? None of us conscripts (especially the college graduates) was happy to be there. Fortunately I had a copy of Svejk in my duffel bag. This, an abridged and somewhat expurgated version published as a Penguin Special, became thoroughly dog-eared as it passed from hand to hand. Josef Švejk is a sort of wise fool, a man brilliant in his stupidity. Time and again he blunders, only to be saved by still greater ignorance or malevolence on the part of those around him. Almost his first act, for example, is to get himself arrested for treason while carrying on an innocent conversation in his favourite Prague pub, U Kalicha (The Chalice). Typically, he escapes because nobody can quite believe how stupid he is. He then gets called up and in spite of being crippled with rheumatism, decides to go to war, getting his charlady to push him in his bath-chair. This admirable aim goes awry when the authorities declare that he must be a malingerer, mainly because he is so eager to enlist, and treat him with enemas and stomach pumps. Švejk ultimately succeeds in joining up, and is claimed by a drunken chaplain named Katz as his batman, to Katz’s eventual dismay. I wish it were practical to follow our hero through the whole narrative of his adventures, to describe how the chaplain loses him at cards to Lieutenant Lukáš, how he misses his train and spends days wandering in the Czech countryside, how he is threatened with court-martial and has countless run-ins with feckless officers, vicious non-coms and venal bureaucrats, as a rule winning out. But it is simply too complicated, and in any case has to be regarded as of less significance than the way the plot lays the ground for satire. This is sharp and continuous. No form of authority appealed much to Jaroslav Hašek; the chaplain Katz (‘whoever of you is dead must report to Army Corps headquarters within three days so that his corpse can be sprinkled with holy water’) represents a splendid attack on the Church, while Švejk’s goofy patriotism (‘Humbly report, sir,’ he says to Lukáš, ‘I’m awfully happy. It’ll be really marvellous when we both fall dead together for His Imperial Majesty and the Royal Family’) offers a running assault on the pretensions of the Austro-Hungarian state. As for the army, no opportunity for a dig goes unused, from the general who ‘regarded saluting as something on which the success of the war depended, and on which the whole power of the army was built’ to the captain who kicked his batman to death but was acquitted ‘because it was only the second time he had done it’, or the unspeakable Lieutenant Dub, a one-time schoolmaster whose single ambition is to make enlisted men suffer. Then there is Marek, the battalion historian, who spends his time before arriving at the front writing detailed accounts of the heroic deaths various members of the unit will undergo once they get there. A particularly pleasant feature of the text is Švejk’s habit of coming up with an apposite story from his own past experience at almost every juncture. This garrulousness doesn’t appeal to everyone – it maddens Lieutenant Lukáš, among others – but most readers won’t object. The stories are funny and sometimes actually to the point. Witness Švejk explaining how he made his living pre-war as a dealer in dogs, faking thoroughbreds, or how he once worked for an apothecary manufacturing herbal cures for cow flatulence. If there is anything to complain about here, I suppose it must be that the book does not have much shape. But then neither does Candide or Catch 22 or Tom Jones, for that matter, with all of which Svejk has affinities. What’s important to its success is the tone of the writing, and the enormous vigour that informs it. Rereading The Good Soldier Svejk now, many decades removed from all things military (thank heaven), it’s easier for me to see how much broader and deeper than a mere attack on the military its satire really is, and to feel the anger seeping through the humour. As we approach the end of the book the mood gets blacker. Instead of jokes about fraudulent pedigree dachshunds, Švejk narrowly escapes hanging; there are mentions of lice-ridden billets, of stinking burial pits and boneyards left from earlier battles. It’s frightening to imagine what Hašek would have done with the fighting itself, had he lived to bring Švejk and his fellows of the 11th March Company actually under fire. He knew what it was like – he had experienced it personally. In spite of various bannings and confiscations, The Good Soldier Svejk was a great popular success from the start. In time Hašek would be mentioned in the same breath as Cervantes and Rabelais. Švejk himself lived on after Hašek’s death – the playwright Bertolt Brecht imagined his adventures in the Second World War – and seems likely to do so as long as wars and armies and a sense of humour exist in the world. At least I hope so.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 32 © Charles Elliott 2011
About the contributor
Charles Elliott is a former journalist and book editor who spent three deeply informative peacetime years in the US Army. He is the author of several books of essays, the latest of which, Every Man Needs a Tractor, has just been published.
A word should be said about the translation by Cecil Parrott, the first complete edition published in English. It is crisp and clever and far better than the abridged version by Paul Selver that I read in the 1950s. A new edition translated by Zenny K. Sadlon and Emmett Joyce and recently published in the United States claims to be better yet, but it is hard to get hold of. The illustrations by Josef Lada are now classic. Hašek and Lada were close friends, but Hašek died before he had a chance to approve Lada’s concept of Švejk. Some connoisseurs have argued that it shows him as too much the congenital idiot, neglecting his crafty side. Whether or not that is a fair criticism, the association is now permanent, and they are wonderful pictures.