“Great times call for great men,” wrote Jaroslav Hasek in his preface to The Good Soldier Svejk. And so it is appropriate that the antihero of his great antiwar novel is a certified idiot, Josef Svejk.
This week marks the 100th anniversary of the end of the tragic idiocy that was World War I, a good time to take a look at one of the best antiwar novels to come out of that or any other war. What Catch-22 is to World War II and MASH is to Korea and Vietnam, Hasek’s cheerfully satiric The Good Soldier Svejk was to WWI and remains today.
Svejk is the quintessential soldier, a survivor who has no interest in politics and the disputes of the Great Powers. He understands that if allowed, Great Powers eventually will destroy everything; but with a little help maybe they will just destroy themselves first. He cheerfully acquiesces to everything that is asked of him. In a world in which the crazy, the incompetent and the selfish are in charge, there is nothing more subversive than to let them have what they want.
Everysoldier
Three (and part of the fourth) of six projected parts of The Good Soldier Svejk were published by Hasek from 1921 to 1923 in Czechoslovakia and eventually translated into more than 50 languages. In the United States it is a cult classic, but in his home country Svejk is a byword for cunning simple-mindedness and passive resistance.
Svejk is an old soldier happily making his living as a dog thief in Prague after being discharged from the army as an imbecile. At the outbreak of WWI he is quickly arrested, hospitalized and re-enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Despite his enthusiasm, nothing goes quite right with him, and he spends much of his time under arrest, trying to find his company, and explaining his innocent mistakes to his superiors.
He becomes an assistant to an army chaplain who drinks the communion wine and conducts his services while drunk. When the chaplain loses him in a card game, he becomes orderly to Lt. Lukas, an easy-going womanizer. Despite his efforts to please, Svejk is a millstone around the lieutenant’s neck, threatening to destroy his career as the regiment makes its way to the front.
Through it all, Svejk remains undismayed and maintains a cheerful contempt for the monarchy, the army and the war. “It’s only human nature that a chap should go on making mistakes until he dies,” he says.
The book ends abruptly, with the death not of Svejk but of his author. This is a shame. I would gladly go on reading of Svejk’s adventures over the next three years of the war, but I am grateful for the 800 pages that Hasek finished.
The author
Hasek, a Bohemian in both senses of the word, was a colorful character who put more than a little of himself into his work. An anarchist who despised the Hapsburg monarchy and enjoyed pubs, he supported himself at various times by selling dogs (as did Svejk) and as editor of a nature magazine from which he was fired for making up animals (like the volunteer Marek in the book). Despite his foibles, he became a successful journalist and short story writer.
Like Svejk, Hasek served in the 91st Regiment during the Great War, and drew heavily on that experience. He was captured in Russia in 1915 and joined the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Moving back to his native Prague in 1920, he spent the next three years writing his masterpiece before dying of tuberculosis in 1923.
There are three English translations of the book, and for my money the best (and probably easiest to find) is that of Cecil Parrott.
The first English translation was by Paul Selver in 1930. Reportedly it was a good one except that the book was abridged and bowdlerized. Selver probably is best known today for his translation of Karel Capek’s play Rossoum’s Universal Robots, which introduced the word “robot.” His version of Svejk is still available, but it is expensive and some 300 pages shorter than the full version.
The most recent translation is from Zdenek “Zenny” Sadlon, published in three volumes. It uses more modern American language. I find that trying to make translated classics more accessible to modern readers generally makes them less interesting.
Cecil Parrott was the British ambassador to Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and was an academic who wrote a biography of Hasek and a study of Svejk. His translation, published in 1973, has been criticized by some as too literal. But I like the slightly formal sound of it—it reminds me that the characters are not speaking in modern English, but in Czech (and German, etc.) of a century ago.
Whatever edition you read, make sure to get one with the original Josef Lada illustrations. Lada’s comic drawings define Svejk and his companions and are as much fun to look at as the book is to read. Get a copy of The Good Soldier Svejk at your local library or bookstore for Nov. 11. And maybe we can stop making new “heroes” to honor every Veterans’ Day.