Jaroslav Hašek was an anarchist and anarchy runs through The Good Soldier Švejk like a stick of rock. It's anti-war, anti-establishment, anti-religion and, some say, even funnier than Catch-22. Apparently Joseph Heller based his hero Yossarian on Švejk. I read Catch-22 far too long ago to make a valid comparison. Oh, and Bertholt Brecht declared it the greatest book of the twentieth century. And, I can confirm, it really is quite something....

This Penguin Classics edition of The Good Soldier Švejk contains an informative introduction by Cecil Parrott which made me want to read a biography of Jaroslav Hašek. Helpfully, Cecil Parrott has written one: The Bad Bohemian: A Life Of Jaroslav Hašek Creator Of The Good Soldier Švejk.

Before starting I was little daunted by the book's heft. It's 752 pages and that's not including the introduction. However, I needn't have worried: it's highly readable, very addictive, full of wonderfully distinctive and pleasing cartoon-like illustrations, and I was regularly reading 50 pages at a time.

The book opens with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand where Švejk, a Czech living in Prague, immediately realises the significance of the assassination despite some initial confusion about which Ferdinand has been killed…

‘Which Ferdinand, Mrs Müller?’ asked Švejk, continuing to massage his knees. ‘I know two Ferdinands. One of them does jobs for Prusa the chemist, and one day he drank a bottle of hair oil by mistake; and then there’s Ferdinand Kokoska who goes round collecting manure. They wouldn’t be any great loss, either of ‘em.’ ‘No, it’s the Archduke Ferdinand, the one from Konopiste, you know, the fat, pious one.’

The Good Soldier Švejk is chock full of subversive humour and peppered with mad major-generals, hard-drinking priests, lecherous officers, all of whom operate in an absurd, imperialist world. Jaroslav Hašek combines amusing wordplay and piercing satire in this very funny depiction of the futility of war. I suspect this book is also an accurate depiction of the moral bankruptcy of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Švejk is a hapless, apparently guileless everyman who gets embroiled in the state’s bureaucratic machinery and yet, through his feigned stupidity, always manages to subvert those in authority to emerge unscathed whilst leaving chaos in his wake. Peter Sellers would have made a perfect screen version of Švejk and, coincidentally, Sellers used quotes from Švejk in his film 'A Shot in the Dark’.

Švejk is constantly reducing officers to despair with his homely analogies and rambling anecdotes, not least the long suffering Lieutenant Lukáš who develops something of a love-hate relationship with Švejk. Švejk's idiocy however is, perhaps, his way of dealing with an insane world fighting an insane war. It is all a ploy. By constantly becoming embroiled in tine consuming investigations about his conduct, so his arrival at the front line is further delayed. He is also a prankster whose genius is that he subverts the authoritarian world as much for its own sake as for any other reason. His humour and apparent imbecility rendering him indestructible. No wonder he's such an enduring character.

Josef Lada’s illustrations are one of the many delights of this book. Josef Lada (1887-1957) was a Czech painter and writer, however he is best known for illustrating this book. His cartoons are very simple but add another level of enjoyment to the book. He really captures the essence of Švejk’s simple charm and also the self-importance of some of the more senior officers. Click here to view some examples.

Jaroslav Hašek died having completed four of the six proposed books, which - had he lived to finish it - would have made this tome even heftier, and therein lies my only criticism, due to its episodic structure The Good Soldier Švejk can occasionally be too rambling and repetitive however, read on a few pages, and there's another amusing scene to enjoy.

This is an account of World War One far removed from heroism and honour, and which focuses more on idiotic, patriotic officers, drunk priests, skiving, conniving, brutality, boozing, death and the harsh reality of a moribund, unpopular Empire for those trying to survive at the bottom of the heap. The Good Soldier Švejk is a book which deserves to be more celebrated and widely read (outside the Czech republic where it is considered a classic). Jaroslav Hašek humorously shines an illuminating light on the experience of ordinary people whilst seismic historical events negatively impact their lives and so consequently inspires justifiable suspicion of patriotism, bureaucratic careerism and authoritarianism. All such nonsense is best mocked. The Good Soldier Švejk's truths are perhaps more relevant than ever.

If you like historical fiction written by contemporaries about recent events, like "All's Quiet on the Western Front," and that depict events from a new perspective - try out this hidden classic. If you don't often hear the German side of WWI in U.S. history classes, you also hear even less about the other losers like Austria-Hungary. This novel gives a great glimpse behind the scenes as the twilight years of the Hapsburgs unfold in this "first" of the Great Wars across Europe and the rest of the world. Svejk (Schweik in some translations) is a Falstaffian soldier who either deliberately or guilessly avoids all work, conflict, combat, etc. as he traipses through the war on the southeastern fronts in the multi-national conflict that was the collapse of four empires in the making. He's sort of a cross of an Everyman, a small nation Eastern European (Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Serb, Croat, Slovene, etc), Don Quixote, and a precursor to Hogan's Heroes Sgt. Schultz. A fun read that opens up how complex the times really were, how hard it was to be in a multi-national state trying to compete in the 20th century, and how horrible any outcome was going to be. A precursor to such novels as "Catch-22"; it makes you question your own understanding of events and what was lost to the grinding warfare of WWI on any front.

The satirical tale of a czech soldier, part of the austro-hungarian army during WWI. A lot of the humour of this story still holds up well. It would have been nice to know that the book is unfinished, however although you'd like more closure the story still stands up well as it is.
Svejk is very much like Baldric from Black Adder or Homer Simpson, but your never entirely sure how stupid he is. Oh he's certainly not the brightest but behind that suspiciously honest face is a pretty devious mind, at least at times.
The Czechs are looked down on by the rest of the army and people are constantly trying to find traitors or reasons to punish the lower ranks. Svejk has developed the perfect defense to survive in these dangerous conditions, constantly agreeing with everything the army does, coupled with a garrulous nature that usually drives his superiors nuts and makes them forget what they planning on doing to him.
His constant stream of little stories, are both a highlight and a problem of the book. It might be quite annoying for some to have these innumerable diversions and i personally thought it would get old fast but it never really did for me, i did however quite like it on those occasions when Svejk was ordered to shut up before he could finish :) .
Oh.. and the constant suspicion and risk of being locked up or executed by your own side, made it seem like a parody of 1984 at times.
As i said its unfinished and more of a denouement would have been nice but overall very good and i won't be forgetting Svejk any time soon.

Vanek asked with interest: "How long do you think the war will go on, Svejk?" "Fifteen years," answered Svejk. "That's obvious because once there was a Thirty Years War and now we're twice as clever as they were before, so it follows that thirty divided by two is fifteen"

This is an unusually succinct quote from our good natured Good Soldier Svejk , who is normally given to interminable rambling anecdotes to illustrate his point (or sometimes seemingly just to pass the time), and it neatly sums up the attitude of this great book too. Is he a flippant insubordinate, or is he a just a genuine idiot?

The idea of picaresque novels is something that I have been getting very interested in recently and so this book really hit the spot. Essentially the plot concerns Svejk's relationship to the military machine of the Austro-Hungarian empire in World War 1, and his journey from his comfortable existence in Prague selling "counterfeit dogs" (!) to the line of battle at the Galician front. At least it would be if Hasek hadn't died before completing the series.

After reading for awhile though, as he manages to get lost, get drunk, and get imprisoned again and again I started to wonder if Hasek had ever intended him to get into combat (proper, "official" combat instead of the occasional arse kickings and street rucks). Many reviewers seem to think this would never have been the case, but there is a slight shift in tone further toward the poignant and macabre near the end of the fourth volume that makes me think he would have been able to give us his gentle observations on the brutality of war. These moments, where Svejk and his comrades are bemusedly standing around, surrounded by human carrion and destroyed villages, make me wonder just how much darker these books would have become.

Svejk is firmly in the subordinate role throughout the book, serving as batman to a chaplain and then lieutenant (after being lost in a game of cards!) and moving on to being an orderly. For such a simple fellow he is a very interesting character, and you'll grow to love him even though he has a definite mean streak running through him. A sort of running joke throughout is the innocent, angelic expression on his simple idiotic face when confronted by raging authority figures (gendarmes, military superiors, and so on) and it never failed to make me laugh. The more pompous and outraged they become, the calmer and more gentle an expression he assumes.

It's not all flagrant disobedience of his superiors though, as Svejk does seem to warm to a couple of his immediate superiors. The eternally exasperated Lieutenant Lukas seems to warm to our main character as the story progresses, and the drunken, disgraceful, yet somehow still dignified chaplain Otto Katz seems and ideal match for Svejk and a stand up guy. He was probably my favourite character in the whole book and I was sad to see him go.

This is apparently the best translation there is of the book, but it also seems to be a rather impossible task. It seems that much of the humour in the original Czech comes from the cultural or religious differences between Germans, Czechs, Hungarians and Russians at the time, and while this does come across it seems that a lot of fun was had with language. Sometimes the only way to represent this is with, for example, Basil Fawlty-esque cod German (Haff You Viped Your Arsch?) which is a shame but obviously it would have been impossible to translate badly spoken Czech. I love the Czech names and pronounciation and the book is so vibrantly witty even in English that it makes one want to learn.

I need to enter a final note on the drawings accompanying the text. For me, Josef Lada's illustrations really make this book the complete article. While Hasek constructs the attitudes of his sometimes grotesque characters throughout the four volumes purely through their rollicking dialogue and absurd or deadpan behaviour, we almost never get physical descriptions of them and so the hundreds of brilliant, bold drawings really help to keep the storylines precise and to flesh out the characters. They are extremely expressive and fresh, reminiscent of a more rural E.C. Segar. I get the impression that they are as definitive to this book as Tenniel's drawings are to Alice In Wonderland

So, for anyone with distaste for authority, love of drinking, or interest in the historical period (Of which this book is an ideal way to get a bit more of an insight to- I was fairly clueless beforehand) you could do a lot worse than pick up Svejk! It's best to read in an episodic fashion due to the already mentioned rambling nature of the characters, but if that doesn't put you off you will be laughing until the sadly abrupt end.

The kind hearted, everyday man becomes a good soldier winding his way through the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War 1. He is either so stupid that he is brilliant or such a genius he is a moron. Through this foil Czech author Hasek shows his disdain for the various institutions and bureaucracies that drive the every day person crazy with thorough, bayonet pointed, mockery. Primary targets are the Monarchy, Army, Catholic Church, and well, about anything and everybody else.

The author explains that he cannot tell his story unless he tells it his way, which is about the same tale over and over. He wrote hundreds (thousands?) of short stories which were published about Soldier Svejk, and here after the war he does a superb job of melding them together into one long flowing tale.

The over 150 illustrations by Josef Lada are apparently a story in itself, as they became synonymous with the character and have appeared in the culture throughout the following years.

I’m glad I made way through it as an experience in literature, and not often one finds stories about this era of Austro-Hungary. Though I liken it to watching, say, a television situation comedy from the Golden Era of TV, after you watch a few episodes of ‘I Love Lucy’, you get the idea, after 30, you know what’s going to happen, and 100, well good Lord !

At page 750 the book ends with, - well the author died, so here the book stops. Like one of soldier Svejk stories, it may have just gone on forever.

whenever I feel under the weather, I reread this book. I've lost count of the times I've read it (could be over 30), and every time I enjoy it just as much as the first one. Αυτή τη φορά πρόσεξα ιδιαίτερα τις πρωτο-εθνικιστικές κόντρες των χωρών της παλιάς αυστρουγγρικής μοναρχίας

The first time I read this book, as a teenager, I could not see the point. So I put it down without finishing it. Now I see it as one of the great books. The character of Svejk is straight out of folklore. He is the foolish man who somehow kills the giant, gets the princess and claims the gold. Except that here is no fairy tale, but a story of war and a story of bureaucrats and officialdom.

Specifically, we at first witness Svejk, a bumbling lower class oaf who has been recruited into the army, and who, in consequence, daily encounters a sequence of bumbling upper class oafs, his officers. These latter individuals are running a totally disastrous war, the Great War for Civilization, which is destroying their own country of Austria Hungary.

Svejk, however, is not moderately stupid. He is very very stupid. Indeed, he is so very stupid that he somehow manages to keep himself out of trouble and out of danger. Gradually, we wonder whether Svejk might actually be quite a clever man, who knows how to handle himself in the face of arbitrary power, bureaucracy and bone-headed idiocy. Finally, because the war's stupidity is actually quite a serious matter, we make another discovery. By an imperceptible transmogrification, Svejk ceases even to appear to the reader as a fool. Instead, we discover him to be a quiet, intelligent hero, the model, indeed for the Czechoslovak hero who emerged from the old Empire to found a new society.

I remember reading this (probably an unbridged version) when I was a pre-teen and laughing with tears. I was happy years later to find the paperback in English this time. I have the bad habit of neglecting the books I own in favour of the many library books I borrow.
Upon noticing the audiobook on a library app, I thought I should try it again.
I can't say I paid close attention throughout, the narrator didn't exactly appeal to me that much not to mention there were glitches and paragraphs were repeated occasionally, a first for this audiobook consumer.

While I didn't laugh with tears, this was nevertheless amusing and quite the feat for its time.
Satire and war can be good battle companions.

A good example of why one must look into translations prior to reading. I grabbed by chance the first translation of Svejk into English, by Paul Selver. I don't know the underlying language, so I can't say anything about the quality. However, it is abridged and bowdlerized--so not the edition to be preferred. More recent publishers have used a complete translation by Cecil Parrott, who had been a diplomat from the UK to Prague; there's also apparently a relatively new translation by a Czech ex-pat in the US, Zdenek Sadlon.

The text is sufficiently great to warrant reading all three translations--but if one can only read one, this first English version is not it, unless one needs it to be PG. Its basic notion--the undecidable question of whether Svejk is an imbecile or a malingerer--continues throughout the narrative. That this ultimate form of speaking truth to power may in fact lack candor is fantastic, an illustration of the point that art uses lies to tell the truth, but here embodied in the praxis of resistance. Very comical, very much on point antiwar satire, a must for lefty libraries. It's advised to obtain a version with the Lada illustrations--they are iconic.

“Listen, Švejk, are you really God’s prize oaf?”
“Humbly report, sir,” Švejk answered solemnly. “I am!”

The good soldier Švejk repeats this answer, in one form or another, quite a lot over the course of 892 pages of being frequently grilled by various authorities under the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War One. You, the reader, will be entirely at liberty to ascertain the truth of the matter!

This was a re-read for me after many years. I remember as a young person being utterly amazed at it, as I’d never come across war satire of this kind before. I found the book less comic this time, and also a touch tedious as it went on, as Švejk (of whom the author admits he is very fond) relates innumerable, ever more far-fetched, stories, to illustrate a particular aspect of human behaviour, while generally sitting in one of a long succession of prisons, military transports, or mental asylums. I am still amazed, though, that Hašek could, seemingly effortlessly, come out with tale upon entertaining tale of unfortunate innocents at the mercy of the civil or military administration, or cunning malefactors who come justly to a sticky end, or unhinged military officials sabotaging their own war . . . having said all that, I attribute any intermittent tediousness I found in the narration to the novel being already almost a hundred years old. At the time of writing, Hašek’s work would have been innovatory, revolutionary, shocking beyond anything we might experience from it today, in our age of enlightened cynicism about “war and war’s alarms” (WB Yeats), where we are accustomed to more sophisticated satire. I found myself thinking that it was just as well the book was published posthumously or Hašek might have found himself treated just as his hero was.

This book contains no grandiose criticism but relies on incontestable and concrete detail. Of necessity, it’s earthy stuff. As the author points out in the epilogue to Part 1,”Behind the Lines”,
“Life is no finishing school for young ladies.”
Part Two is entitled, “At the Front”, and the language and the incidents are scatological and often bawdy. Hašek defends himself thus:
“It was once said, and very rightly, that a man who is well brought-up may read anything. The only people who boggle at what is perfectly natural are those who are the worst swine and the finest experts in filth. In their utterly contemptible pseudo-morality they ignore the contents and madly attack individual words . . . beneath this camouflage these drawing-room lions indulge in the worst vices and excesses.”
Hašek described conditions for the soldiers and the inefficiency of the army command from personal experience serving on the Eastern Front, although he died without writing his intended third volume, “in Captivity” which would also have reflected his actual experience (of being a prisoner of war of the Russians). Thanks to Ian’s review of “The Snows of Yesteryear” and Beata’s of “Wołyń zdradzony” (“Volhynia betrayed” according to Google Translate), I have more of an idea of the region of Galicia through which Švejk passes as Part Two ends.
I woke one morning from a Švejk-related dream (no, really!) wondering how I could sum up this novel in the style of Hašek. Just how easy was it to make up tales where Švejk’s point is couched in a ton or so of irrelevant anecdotal detail? I found that in a few minutes I wrote about 500 words of my own Švejk tale (don’t worry, I won’t include it all here!) but the image I had was of a man who, wandering through the halls of the city treasury, came upon ancient, dusty chests, which no one had ever opened or been remotely interested in. This man opened them, and found that they were full of human truths, accumulated over centuries. Perhaps the events they described had not actually taken place but their import was true. The man read them and realised their value to humanity. The man heaped these truths upon himself as if they were coats of ermine, and went out into the street, accosting all whom he met with wise words from the papers in the chests. Eventually he was brought before the city authorities. They listened carefully to his tales of truth hidden away in the cellars of the Treasury. Then they conferred briefly with each other, nodding their sage heads, and had the man thrown into the river as a danger to society.

Just be grateful you were spared the full version!

Τρομερά αστείο και επίκαιρο, ειδικά εάν έχεις κάνει ή κάνεις το φανταρικό σου. Είναι από τα βιβλία που τα απολαμβάνεις καθώς τα διαβάζεις και στενοχωριέσαι όταν καταλαβαίνεις ότι τελείωσαν. Η έκδοση του Λιβάνη είχε 310 σελίδες και πρέπει να είναι ένα κομμάτι της ιστορίας γιατί σαν έργο , αποτελείται από πολλά επεισόδια. Το τέλος δεν είναι ακριβώς τέλος, περισσότερο η αρχή ενός καινούριου ταξιδιού γεμάτο τραγελαφικές ιστορίες και διηγήσεις του καλού του στρατιώτη του Σβέικ.

I’m writing this review after finishing Book Two of “The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Svejk in the World War”.

In this review, I’m going to include my thoughts on the differing Cecil Parrot and Zenny Sadlon translations, as I feel which translation you read will give you a different experience with the titular character, and the story in general. In short, the Sadlon translation gives the reader a novel with extraordinarily more depth and layers than the Parrot translation.

“The Good Soldier Svejk” is little known here in America, but apparently is a folk institution in Central and Eastern Europe, and is especially important to the people of the Czech Republic, the land of its inception. On the surface, it’s a comedic and satiric take on World War One from the Czech perspective. In the Parrot edition, there are many moments of slapstick and levity. Conscripted Private Svejk is challenged with navigating the Czech bureaucracy, and is beset by one amusing situation after another. One reviewer calls him a, “European Forrest Gump”.

A deeper look, with more context reveals something else entirely. While the slapstick and levity remain, the book becomes more caustic. It’s not only the tale of a man beset by the absurdity of military bureaucracy, it becomes a story about a man who is a symbol for a subjugated country that exists within a larger dystopian governmental structure. The eponymous subject of the book, Svejk, is a man caught in the grinding gears of a police state, doing his best to survive not only the government’s machinery, but the war that it’s feeding him into. (Additionally, the book is not solely about Svejk. He is often a medium used to describe the state, culture and nature of Austro-Hungarian Czechia.) Svejk is not Forrest Gump. Gump was a symbol of America’s loss of innocence in the 1960’s and his author’s attempt to grapple with the change in American culture into the 1980’s. Gump is, in today’s parlance, “on the spectrum” and his responses to the situations he’s thrust into, are viewed in awe that someone with those intellectual “challenges” can rise to the occasion and succeed.

Svejk, is a different animal altogether, and this where the importance of what translation you read, comes into play.

When reading the Parrot edition, readers often question, “Is this guy an idiot, or is he extremely clever?”. Certainly there’s room for a lot of interpretation here. In the Sadlon translation, there is no mystery, Svejk is doing what it takes to survive, and that perception is possible through the clarity of the translation.

To what do we owe this crystal-clear focus and lack of confusion? In my opinion, it’s very simple. Sadlon is a native Czech speaker, and Sir Cecil Parrot wasn’t.

I don’t want to bash Parrot here. He served as a diplomat to the Czech people, and obviously had a great deal of love for the country and the culture. Translating this sprawling book must’ve been quite an undertaking, so we can’t fault his earnestness in wanting to bring this wonderful story to the English speaking world. However, having read 60% percent of his translation, and the same content in the Sadlon translation, I can say that Parrot’s vernacular obscures the subtleties and nuances that make a huge difference in what Hasek was communicating to the reader. I can’t state this enough, the Sadlon edition is a much different book that unmasks a significantly more intricate picture of World War One era Czechia.

I know some will consider attacking a Penguin Classics edition as sacrilege (Parrot’s publisher), but the differences exist. Sadlon’s translation is not 100% polished – but the problems I had with a couple of the words he used are minor and inconsequential. Sadlon was criticized for using the vernacular of modern American English, but to that I say, so what? Is it better to use far outdated British vernacular that doesn’t adequately communicate the story? Is Svejk not supposed to be the story of an Everyman for …every man? Should the story not be more accessible to today’s English language readers (even if they’re British?) If Hasek were the equivalent with a more florid writer, I might take issue. But in both the Parrot and Sadlon translations, the story is described in plain, concise diction and delivery. There is no grandiloquent exposition that would require the literary strengths of a Melville or Faulkner, and would require a poetic translator. If you are interested in a spirited and expertly argued debate about the translation, google Michelle Wood’s review of Sadlon’s edition in Jacket Magazine (Jacket2. org), and then make sure you read Sadlon’s robust rebuttal (which is linked at the top of Wood’s review).

As I stand, at halfway through the four books of the Sadlon edition of Svejk’s story, what I’ve read is an amusing, shocking and poignant snapshot of a country at war and on the precipice of its own independence. It’s a compelling story, not only for following the adventures of Svejk and his beaming countenance, but I became invested enough, that I want to see how this turns out for him and his country.

I will add more thoughts when I finish the novel.

(Apologies to everyone who hates the name, "Czechia"...)