Bookatlas
1883–1923Russia & Eastern Europe
Portrait of Jaroslav Hašek

Jaroslav Hašek

Czechoslovakia

Loose, anecdotal, and pub-loud, one digressive tall tale spilling into the next, idiocy delivered so cheerfully it becomes the sharpest weapon in the book.

Born in Prague in 1883, Hašek lived a wild youth of vagabondage and hoaxes: a brief stint as a bank clerk, work editing an anarchist journal, and a mock political party he founded purely as satire, running invented candidates and elaborate practical jokes for the sport of it.

Conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War, he was captured by the Russians, joined the Czechoslovak Legion fighting alongside the Allies, then defected again to the Bolsheviks, serving as a Red Army political commissar during the Russian Civil War and, controversially, marrying a Russian woman while still legally married to his wife back in Prague.

He returned to Czechoslovakia in 1920 and began dictating The Good Soldier Švejk the following year, reportedly composing much of it aloud in pubs to a secretary while drinking heavily. He died of heart failure in 1923 in the village of Lipnice nad Sázavou, leaving the novel unfinished.

Mitteleuropa

Their books in the atlas

  1. 1923
    Cover of The Good Soldier Švejk
    The Good Soldier Švejk
    Lvl 3satire

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