Word: hasek
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...natal year of a pair of Czech novelists whose lookouts on the problem of monolithic authority and what to do about it are presently very much in point. In a country which has earned its reputation as the common stamping ground of optimistic power, Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek came to know the texture and stink of vast administratives schemes so vicious, irrational, and irremediably tacky that they generate comedy and tragedy, like industrial waste, in awe-some volume, beyond any man's capacity to absorb without the saving intercession...
...writers would have had, I think, little quarrel. But about the solution their views are crucially divergent. In Kafka there was simply none available, for the very qualities which render the dreaded state intolerable--its impressive size, structural inefficiency, and grotesque involution--also render it effectively invulnerable. Hasek, on the other hand, saw in these same qualities the faults which invite the wedge: nothing so ludicrous could really expect to survive. Hasek created the figure of Schweyk, the good soldier, whose will to survive encompasses his will to resist, and whose native innocence and peasant cunning provides the specific antidote...
...very much with us, and justly so. But like the people say, consider the alternative. In the extremely informal comfort of an Eliot House main dining room spotted with wrestling mats, army blankets, cushions and chairs, the next weekends offer a free, funny, and frequently poignant update on Hasek, in the form of a rare English language production of Bertolt Brecht's Schweyk in the Second World War. An update it is, for in his telling epilogue to the production, translator Charles Sabel would have it emphasized that even for folk heroes times change...
...Hasek's Schweyk was an Austro-Hungarian Imperial recruit whose very literal-minded obedience proves the bane of his superior officers. By the time of the Second War, Schweyk's position has become more complicated, and Brecht's hero has as more difficult task; a civilian now, he juggles the roles of partisan and seeming colla-borator. He still feeds his friends, still rattles military authority, still tries to stay alive, but there is somewhat less call on his innocence, somewhat more on his cunning. Brecht's Schweyk is already a conscious, canny resister. Nor does the progress end there...
...camp followers of A Man's a Man could not have been conceived by anyone else; yet they do most obviously have a model, the Kipling of "O, it's Tommy this an' Tommy that . . ." So too their spineless victim-- only he is patterned after, not Kipling, but Jaroslav Hasek's Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik--a book Brecht thought one of the "three literary works of this century which . . . will become part of world literature...