Word: hasek
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There is a Czech tradition of satirizing mindless officialdom that goes back to Kafka's The Trial and Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk. But this is not Kundera's main theme, and there is no reason to think that his work would be wholly different if his country's absentee landlords were still the Habsburgs, not the Soviets...
...vejk revisited seems a timely project, especially since it introduces the book's creator, who uncannily resembles his own hero. Jaroslav Hašek's father died of drink in 1896 when the boy was 13. Hasek became a dropout, vagabond, drunk and professed anarchist. He was constantly in trouble and often in jail. Like Švejk, too, he was less political than impudent...
Some time in 1915, for instance, Hasek checked into a hotel-brothel in Prague, registering under a Russian-sounding name. On the accompanying police questionnaire, he gave as his reason for being in Prague, "to investigate the activities of the Austrian general staff." The police at once surrounded the hotel. They discovered that the Russian name spelled backward came out in Czech as "Kiss my arse." Blandly Hašek explained that he just wanted to see if the Austrian police were on their toes-and got off with five days in jail...
...HASEK's life, no less than his book, suggests that under the right circumstances there are other options open to people besides self-protective passivity in the face of martyrdom. As a young man--Parrott tells the story in an illuminating introduction--Hasek behaved in many ways like the people in The Good Soldier Svejk. Dissatisfied with the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Austria-Hungary, with the parliamentary politicking the monarchy permitted, and with the middle-class respectability his family pursued, Hasek set about making himself objectionable to them. He was editor of Animal World magazine, and he made up imaginary...
...October Revolution, which took place while he was a prisoner of war in Russia, Hasek found something worth more than irony. He gave up drinking, joined the Bolshevik party, fought in the Red Army, and became secretary of the Committee of Foreign Communists in Ufa. He went back to the new Czech republic in 1920 to spend the last three years of his life doing articles for the left wing of the Czech Social Democratic party and writing The Good Soldier Svejk. Respectable people thought him disreputable, he couldn't find a steady job, and he went back to drinking...