Today is Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the day in 1918 when the guns fell silent across Europe at 11am. My classics recommendation for today is the funniest First World War novel: The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War by the Czech author Jaroslav Hašek.
Hašek was born in Prague in 1883. He worked initially as a chemist and a bank clerk, but soon adopted an eccentric, bohemian lifestyle, haunting taverns, playing practical jokes and tramping around most of central Europe. He wrote stories, performed in cabarets, edited the anarchist magazine Komuna and founded an anti-political ‘Party of Moderate and Peaceful Progress within the Limits of the Law’.
During the First World War, he enlisted with an infantry regiment and was taken prisoner by the Russians. He promptly deserted the Austrian army, joined the nationalist Czechoslovak Legion and then the Russian Communist Party, and finally became a Bolshevik commander, leading attacks on the Austrians.
After the war, he returned to independent Czechoslovakia and began writing The Good Soldier Švejk. He planned to write six volumes, but his health declined sharply as he grew increasingly obese and his alcoholism worsened. He dictated chapters from his deathbed and died in 1923, at the age of thirty nine, having completed only three volumes and the start of a fourth.
The Good Soldier Švejk follows Josef Švejk, a dealer in stolen dogs, who attempts to enlist in the Austrian army, but whose bumbling incompetence leads to a series of increasingly farcical scrapes with preposterous authority figures. The novel is both hilarious and darkly satirical. Written in the pubs of Prague, it has been translated into more languages than any other work of Czech literature and the verb ‘to švejk’ has entered the Czech language.
It inspired Joseph Heller to write Catch-22 and Bertolt Brecht penned a sequel set during the Second World War. George Monbiot in the Guardian called it ‘perhaps the funniest novel ever written’. Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s close friend, said that ‘Hašek was a humorist of the highest calibre . . . A later age will perhaps put him on a level with Cervantes and Rabelais.’
A year after Hašek’s death, his friend the cartoonist Josef Lada was commissioned to illustrate Švejk. He produced more than 900 illustrations, which have come to be inseparably associated with Hašek’s text. In Prague today you can see Lada’s illustrations of Švejk all around the city.
The first English translation of Švejk was made by Paul Selver in 1930, who removed some of the more vulgar expressions and cruder passages. In 1973, the diplomat Cecil Parrott made a new English translation, reinstating the complete text, and this is the version that’s most widely available for English-language readers today.
Sir Cecil Parrott was the British ambassador to Prague from 1960 until 1966. He also wrote a biography of Hašek in 1978 called The Bad Bohemian.
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I have long wanted to read this novel, but every time I search for translations, all I encounter is a myriad array of articles discussing its untranslatability. Probably time to just bite the bullet and get on with it. Thanks!