The Good Soldier Svejk

Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války #01-04

by

Paperback, 752 pages

English language

Published Dec. 27, 2005 by Penguin Classics.

ISBN:
9780140449914

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4 stars (1 review)

In The Good Soldier Švejk, celebrated Czech writer and anarchist Jaroslav Hašek combined dazzling wordplay and piercing satire in a hilariously subversive depiction of the futility of war.

Good-natured and garrulous, Švejk becomes the Austrian army's most loyal Czech soldier when he is called up on the outbreak of World War I -- although his bumbling attempts to get to the front serve only to prevent him from reaching it. Playing cards and getting drunk, he uses all his cunning and genial subterfuge to deal with the police, clergy, and officers who chivy him toward battle.

Cecil Parrott's vibrant translation conveys the brilliant irreverence of this classic about a hapless Everyman caught in a vast bureaucratic machine.

2 editions

reviewed The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hašek

The comical counterpart to Kafka's The Trial

4 stars

Both works written in a crumbling Austrian Empire, both showing us the absurd results of bureaucratization.
Just to give you an idea, these are the first lines: "Through the premises of the police headquarters was wafted the spirit of authority which had been ascertaining how far the people's enthusiasm for the war actually went. With the exception of a few persons who did not disavow the fact that they were sons of the nation which was destined to bleed on behalf of interests entirely alien to it, the police headquarters harboured a magnificent collection of bureaucratic beasts of prey, the scope of whose minds did not extend beyond the jail and the gallows with which they could protect the existence of the warped laws."
Well written, entertaining although a bit long.