Word: schweik
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Private Ivan Chonkin bears a Slavic resemblance to Jaroslav Haśek's The Good Soldier Schweik. But where Schweik was a shrewd operator in the Austro-Czech army of World War I, Good Soldier Chonkin belongs to an older tradition. He is the wise fool, the slow-witted peasant who mulishly plows a straight furrow through a devious world. Chonkin even looks as if he had plodded from the pages of folklore, "his field shirt hanging out over his belt, his forage cap down over his big red ears, his puttees slipping...
This tradition is best represented by the work of two authors writing at Prague at the end of World War I: Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek (The Good Soldier Schweik). The tradition could be called the literature of the absurd: with Kafka it is expressed through the feeling of alienation, with Hasek through a satiric sense of humor. Joseph Skvorecky continues the latter tradition with his novel The Tank Brigade, where the contemporary Schweik is confronted with the stupidity and absurdity of the Czech army at the height of the Stalinist era, instead of the Austrian Army of Franz Joseph...
...introduced to European readers in the early '20s. Along with Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, the book became a popular symbol of the antimilitarism and distrust of glorious causes that flourished between the wars. Published in the U.S. in 1930-with Švejk spelled Schweik-the book, illustrated by Josef Lada, became a bestseller. The editors of that day discreetly excised more than one-third of the text, because of Švejk-Schweik's scatological expressions. This new version by Sir Cecil Parrott of the University of Lancaster translates every excremention that Švejk...
Paul Selver translated The Good Soldier Schweik into English in 1930, and it won a lot of admirers in that form--the New York Times, for instance, used to periodically announce that the Czech national character as portrayed by Hasek made the victory of the Czech revolution over its bureaucratic opponents inevitable. Since the Soviet invasion, Svejk's appearances in the American press have been less frequent, so maybe it's time for a new translation on those grounds alone. Moreover, the old translation took out all the obscenity and most of the blasphemy in the novel, which left more...
Thanks to Anouilh's vividly ironic vision, much of the evening is howlingly funny. Wallach has always possessed perfect comic pitch and he displays it again here. However, he lacks that certain panache which makes St. Pé a duelist with destiny rather than a Good Soldier Schweik taking fate's pratfalls. Jackson is an awesome virago who delivers her lines like bayonet thrusts...