HAŠEK, Jaroslav

Nationality: Czech. Born: Prague, Bohemia, 30 April 1883. Education: St. Stephen's School, 1891-93; Imperial and Royal Junior Gymnasium, 1893-97, expelled; Czechoslavonic Commercial Academy, 1899-1902. Family: Married 1) Jarmila Mayerová in 1910 (separated 1912), one son; 2) bigamous marriage with Shura Lvova in 1920. Career: Worked for a chemist in late 1890s; wrote stories and sketches for several humorous and political magazines from 1901; also wrote and performed cabaret sketches; clerk, Insurance Bank of Slavie, 1902-03; jailed for anarchist rioting, 1907; editor, Sv?t zví?at (Animal World), 1909-10; assistant editor, Czech Word, 1911; conscripted, 1915; captured by the Russians: allowed to work for Czech forces in Russia, and staff member, ?echoslovan, Kiev, 1916-18; after a propaganda battle, 1917-18, left Czech group and entered political department of the Siberian Army: editor, Our Path (later Red Arrow), 1919, Red Europe, 1919, and other propaganda journals in Russia and Siberia; sent to Czechoslovakia to do propaganda work, 1920. Lived in Lipnice from 1921. Died: 3 January 1923.

Publications

Collections

Spisy [Works]. 16 vols., 1955-68.

Short Stories

Dobrý voják švejk a jiné podivné historky [The Good Soldier Švejk and Other Strange Stories]. 1912.

Trampoty pana Tenkráta [The Tribulations of Mr. That-Time]. 1912.

Pr?vod?í cizinc? a jiné satiry. 1913; as The Tourist Guide: Twenty-Six Stories, 1961.

M?j obchod se psy [My Trade with Dogs]. 1916.

Dobrý voják švejk v zajetí [The Good Soldier Švejk in Captivity](novella). 1917.

Pepí?ek Nový a jiné historky [Pepí?ek Nový and Other Sto-Mu Tr ries]. 1921.

T?i muzi se zralokem a jiné pou?né historky [Three Men and aShark and Other Instructive Stories]. 1921.

Mírová Konference [The Peace Conference]. 1922.

Idylky z pekla. 1974.

The Red Commissar, Including Further Adventures of the Good Soldier Svejk and Other Stories. 1981.

Povídky (selection). 2 vols., 1988.

The Bachura Scandal and Other Stories and Sketches. 1991.

Novel

Osudy dobrého vojáka švejk za svétové války [The Good SoldierŠvejk and His Fortunes in the World War]. 4 vols., 1921-23; as The Good Soldier Schweik, 1930; complete version, 1973.

Other

Malom?stský pitaval. 1978.

Lidsky profil Haška [Selected Letters]. 1979.

Zroutská historie. 1979.

Nejnov?jší ?eský galanthomue ?ili krasochovník. 1985.

Tajemstuí mého pobytu v Rusku [Essays Selected]. 1985.

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Critical Studies:

The Bad Bohemian: The Life of Hašek, 1978, and Hašek: A Study of Švejk and the Short Stories, 1982, both by Cecil Parrott; "The Language and Style of Hasek's Novel The Good Soldier Svejk from the Viewpoint of Translation" by Frantisek Danes, in Studies in Functional Stylistics, 1993; "Cynic Hero: Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk " by Peter Steiner, in Studies in Literature and Culture, 1994.

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Jaroslav Hašek is best known as the author of the most famous Czech book, the antiwar satire Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejk za svétové války (The Good Soldier Schweik). Hašek wrote his only novel in 1921 and 1922, and its four volumes were still only a fragment at the time of his death in 1923. The book, which has since then been translated into numerous foreign languages and which for many foreigners is the only book in Czech they have ever heard of, was at first dismissed by the literary establishment of the young Czech republic as unliterary and detrimental to the national spirit. It was banned in the armies of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary.

During the author's life and for long after his death, Hašek's writing was on the periphery of Czech literature, and he was not taken seriously as an artist. He was a heavy drinker who frequented many Prague pubs, known as a joker entertaining the public and an anarchist fighting against authority. Many of his pranks shocked the Prague petit-bourgeois and engaged the attention of the police, the most famous prank being Hašek's parliamentary candidacy for his own mock Party of Moderate Progress within the Limits of the Law.

Hašek's principal work, The Good Soldier Schweik, did not come out of nowhere. His 1, 300 short stories and feuilletons written before and during World War I are a preparation, in style and theme, for the masterpiece. Most of these have high merits of their own. Hand in hand with Hašek's bohemian existence goes a certain unliterariness of his style. Hašek wrote in the tradition of popular culture, the "culture of the street." His fiction is full of fascinating types placed in ludicrous situations. Having a gift for brief characterization, Hašek does not dwell on his characters' appearance but rather on their actions and manner of speech. He uses the humor and often the means of expression of the uncultured classes. The scope and variety of characters and their milieu are amazing, and so are Hašek's thorough knowledge of their idiom and his ingenuity in inventing comic plots. Hašek's creativity stems from an immediate idea and verbal improvisation. The short stories read more like anecdotes, often structurally crude and obviously hurriedly written. They are mostly very short—usually less than 1, 000 words—as they had to fit the space allotted a daily feuilleton in the newspaper. Brevity affects their style; each story is a condensed narrative telling a single episode, bare of descriptions and using simple sentences with no literary adornments. The very first sentences catch the reader's attention and introduce a comic accent. For example, one of Hašek's anticlerical stories, "The Struggle for the Soul" (1913), starts ironically, "Vicar Michalejc was a saintly man with an income of 3, 000 crowns a year, apart from other benefits derived from eight additional parishes attached to his own parishes" (translated by Cecil Parrott).

Hašek's humor is not kind. His tone is sarcastic, bitter, and often cynical to the point of crassness. This is part of Hašek's antibourgeois stance. His bohemian negation attacks the powerful authorities and institutions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of which Bohemia was then part, and the sacred symbols and myths of Czech national life. His satire targets the church, aristocracy, army, schools, parents, children, Germans, Czechs, politics and politicians, and the bureaucracy. Typical of most twentieth-century Czech and world satire, it is also a unmasking of the emptiness of language and an uncompromising attack on the meaninglessness of official bureaucratic phrases and stylistic clichés of the administration, which become identified with the absurdity of the political system. Ever-present irony discloses all remnants of obsolete ideas and shatters hypertrophic applications of moral norms.

Hašek's antiestablishment ideology is aimed against convention and the absurd alienation of humanity. In this Hašek has often been compared to his Prague contemporary Franz Kafka. Both inhabit a phantasmagoric, dehumanized world of bureaucracy. What distinguishes them is Hašek's liberating effect of humor and laughter. The absurdities of administrative practice and its red tape are parodied in some of Hašek's best stories, especially "The Official Zeal of Mr. Št?pán Brych, Toll Collector on a Bridge in Prague" (1911), in which the thoughtless execution of orders without consideration leads to fatal consequences.

Robert Pynsent has identified as one of the most common of Hašek's types the schlemazel, an awkward, clumsy fellow ridden with bad luck who serves as a vehicle for satire directed at an institution. Such are Lindiger, whose business ventures go wrong in "The Coffin-Dealer" (1914), and the burglar in "Šejba the Burglar Goes on a Job" (1913).

Most of Hašek's stories are based on true incidents in his life. Hašek really did run a pet shop that, just as in the story "The Cynological Institute" (1915), was essentially a dog-stealing business. "The Psychiatric Puzzle" (1911) is based on another real experience when Hašek was imprisoned for a purported suicide attempt.

Although best-known for an antimilitarist novel, Hašek did not concentrate on the army until World War I. Antimilitarist satire is relatively mild in Hašek's prewar stories; for example, "Infantryman Trunec's Cap" (1909) is more of a satire on army bureaucracy. "At the Barber's" (1911), a superbly written stream-of-consciousness tale, though dealing with the grotesqueness of war, is more of a satire on Czech petit-bourgeois national and racial prejudices. An antiwar stance is more apparent in the first five Švejk stories (1911) and the 1917 short novel Dobrý voják Švejk v zajetí (The Good Soldier Švejk in Captivity), forerunners of Hašek's final masterpiece.

Hašek wrote most of his stories before the war for Prague newspapers. During the war he wrote patriotic political pamphlets for the Czech Legion's newspaper in Kiev, but those have nearly no literary value. The cycle of tales that centered around the Siberian town of Bugulma, where Hašek was stationed as a Communist commissar after he had joined the Red Army, is considered by critics like Cecil Parrott to be his best. Autobiographical in character, these stories show commissar Gashek (the Russian alphabet has no h) trying to create order in the chaos of new revolutionary authorities.

Hašek has often been accused of misanthropy; his humor may have been sometimes vulgar and crass, his satire biting and bitter, but his outlook remains essentially optimistic. His contemporary Karel ?apek, another famous Czech writer, wrote: "In school we were taught that humor is a spice. Today it seems to me rather that humor is not an ingredient, but a basic formula which one must apply when observing the world. Hašek had humour. Hašek was a person who saw the world. Many others just write about it" (quoted from the introduction to Pr?vod?í cizinc? a jiné satiry [ The Tourist Guide ]). Hašek and his humor influenced many writers, including Brecht, Heller, Hrabal, and Škvorecký.

—So?a Nováková