Jaroslav Hašek

Jaroslav Hašek (; 30 April 1883 – 3 January 1923) was a Czech writer, humorist, satirist, journalist, bohemian, first anarchist and then communist, and commissar of the Red Army against the Czechoslovak Legion. He is best known for his novel The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, an unfinished novel about a soldier in World War I and a satire on the ineptitude of authority figures. The novel has been translated into about 60 languages, making it the most translated novel in Czech literature.

Life

Jaroslav Hašek's paternal ancestors were farmers rooted in Mydlovary in South Bohemia. Hašek's grandfather from his father's side, František Hašek, was a member of the Czech Landtag and later also the so-called Kromeriz convention. He was also involved in barricade fights in Prague in 1848. According to some rumors, he worked with Mikhail Bakunin during his stay in Bohemia in 1849. 

thumb|upright|Monument to Jaroslav Hašek in [[Lipnice nad Sázavou]]

thumb|upright|[[Statue of Jaroslav Hašek in Žižkov, near the pubs where he wrote some of his works]]

The family of his mother, Katherine, née Jarešová, was also from South Bohemia. His grandfather Antonín Jareš and his great-grandfather Matěj Jareš were pond-keepers of the Schwarzenberg princes in Krč village No. 32.

His father, Josef Hašek, a deeply religious mathematics teacher, died early of alcohol intoxication. He put an end to himself due to pain caused by cancer. Poverty then forced his mother Kateřina with three children to move more than fifteen times.

At the age of four, the doctor diagnosed a heart defect and "stunted thyroid gland" in little Jaroslav. Because of this, he spent a lot of time in the country, with his grandfather from his mother's side, in the so-called Ražice dam-house, especially with his younger brother Bohuslav. In his childhood, Jaroslav was jealous of Bohuslav and even tried several times to hurt him as a baby. Later they had an extremely strong relationship and traveled together a lot on foot. Bohuslav drank himself to death one year after Jaroslav's death.

Hašek's childhood was ordinary, boyish, imbued with adventures with peers and reading Karl May and Jules Verne. However, this changed when Hašek was eleven: the retired sailor Němeček moved to Lipová Street, where the Hašeks lived at that time. Němeček wrapped the teenage Hašek around his little finger, pilfered the money that Hašek had stolen at home, and began to lead him into bars, including the infamous Jedová chýše (Poison Hut) on Apolinářská Street, where he taught him to drink alcohol. In addition, he intentionally had sex with his girlfriend in front of the boy. It was traumatic for Hašek. He later remembered these experiences with disgust and remorse. It probably influenced Hašek's relationship with women. In his discussions with his comrades in the Russian legions, it is said that he said the following about women:<blockquote>"Can there be anything worse in the world than such a human pig? I didn't know anything about these things, and yet I felt such disgust and revulsion that it was enough to poison my whole life. I could never look at the woman again, and I have also been afraid of women since then."

Shortly after Hašek began his studies at the grammar school in Ječná Street, his father died. In 1897, he was present at anti-German riots in Prague as a student. He was arrested and the gymnasium teachers forced him to "voluntarily" leave the institution. He then trained as a druggist in Kokoška's drugstore on the corner of Perštýn and Martinská Street, but eventually graduated from the Czech-Slavonic Business Academy in Resslova Street.

At the academy, he made friends with Ladislav Hájek, and in 1903 they together wrote and released a parody of the lyrical poetry of May Shouts, in which Hašek first laughed at pathos and entered the field of humorous literature.

After graduating in 1902, he was employed by the Slavia Bank; however, he was dismissed on May 28, 1903, for being absent without permission.

Thereafter, he began to earn his living exclusively in journalism and literature. At that time, he also met Czech anarchists. He began to lead a bohemian and vagrant life. Together with his brother Bohuslav, he walked through, among other places, Slovakia and western Galicia (now in Poland). Jaroslav Hašek published stories from these trips in Národní listy.

In 1907, he became editor of the anarchist magazine Komuna and was briefly imprisoned for his work.

In the same year, he fell in love with but, because of his bohemian life, her parents did not consider him a suitable partner for their daughter. When he was arrested for desecrating the Austro-Hungarian flag in Prague, Mayerová's parents took her to the countryside in the hope that it would help end their relationship. In response, Hašek tried to back out of his radical politics and get permanent work as a writer. In 1908 he edited the Women's Horizon. In 1909 he had sixty-four published short stories.

In February 1909, he was appointed editor of Svět zvířat (The Animal World), a popular bi-weekly magazine that focused on animals and animal breeding. Hašek's engagement with the magazine was only the second time in his life that he had been permanently employed, and now he kept the job longer than he had at Banka Slavia, probably around 20 months.

Obtaining permanent employment at The Animal World was instrumental in overcoming Jarmila Mayerová's parents' resistance to her marrying Hašek, and the wedding took place on 23 May 1910. In October 1910, Hašek was dismissed as editor of "The Animal World" and in November, he and his wife set up his own dog trading business named "Cynological Institute", an undertaking that failed after a few months. After a year of marriage, Jarmila returned to her parents after Hašek was detained after trying to feign his own death. According to other sources, however, this was a serious attempt at suicide, motivated by the understanding that he was unable to live a marital life. After this attempt, he was briefly hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital.

From 1911, he contributed to the Czech Word, then to the Torch, Humorist Letters, Nettle, Cartoons, and for some time led the Institute of Cynology,

In February 1915, Hašek was called up to the replacement battalion of the 91st Infantry Regiment of the Austro-Hungarian Army in České Budějovice. With the Regiment's 12th March Battalion, he was in early July transported to the Eastern front in Galicia (now Ukraine). He served on the front until 24 September 1915 when he was captured by the Russians and sent to the Totskoye camp in Orenburg Governorate. Here he joined the Czechoslovak Legion in 1916. Then he was drafted into the 1st Regiment, where he worked as a scribe, emissary of the recruitment committee and gunner. Then he was transferred to the connecting section, machine-gun section (in which he participated in the Battle of Zborov against the Austrians) and the office of the 1st Regiment. From July 1916 to February 1918 he published in the journal Čechoslovan and Cs. soldier, and was the author of a number of anti-Bolshevik articles.

thumb|left|upright=0.8|Jaroslav Hašek in 1920.

At the end of February 1918, he joined the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Workers' Party (forerunner of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, 1921–1992). What led Hašek to abandon anarchism and to accept socialist ideals has nowhere been clarified. In March, the Czechoslovak legions embarked on their well-known retreat, with the aim of joining the Western Front via Vladivostok. Hašek disagreed with this and went to Moscow, where he began to cooperate with the Bolsheviks. In April he transferred from the legions to the Red Army. He was sent to Samara and the following year he was director of the army printer in Ufa, chief of the department for work with foreigners, etc. At the end of 1918 he served as commander of the Chuvash troops in the Red Army and as deputy military commander of the Bugulma district. He then worked in Siberia, where he published several magazines. One of them was also the first magazine in the Buryat language, Jur (Dawn).

thumbnail|upright=1|Jaroslav Hašek in 1921

In 1920, he was wounded in an assassination attempt in Irkutsk, where he served as a member of the city soviet. He was also a relatively skilled soldier. In 1918 he distinguished himself as a courageous commander of the Czechoslovak Red Army troops in the defense of Samara. Samara was at that time threatened from the direction of Lipyagi station by the Czechoslovak legions, which were fighting alongside the White troops to restore the imperial regime, although the legionnaires tried to maintain essential neutrality and fight against the Bolsheviks only when inevitable. On 8 June 1918, Samara was conquered by the legions. It is possible that at this time, Jaroslav Hašek met with Czech "brothers" and may have encouraged them to leave the White-Russian party. After the fall of Samara, he was in hiding in a territory controlled by White troops (and Czechoslovak legions) for several months.

It is possible that in specific revolutionary Russian conditions, Hašek was given the opportunity to assert those aspects of his character that could not manifest themselves in stabilized and essentially small-town Czech conditions. It was also important that Hašek was banned by his Party organization from drinking alcohol. He was basically sent to Czechoslovakia with the aim of organizing the communist movement, which also supports the thesis that he had to be perceived as a responsible person and a capable organizer in Soviet Russia.

A subject of debate and speculation is how Hašek behaved in the Red Army, especially at a time when he was a Commissioner – and deputy commander – of Bugulma.

Hašek had close contact with a number of revolutionaries including Leon Trotsky. Hašek's closest collaborators in Russia – Nikolai Ivanovich Kochkurov ("Artem Vesely") or Vladimir Yakovlevich Zazubrin – later became victims of Stalin's repression.

There is also speculation about Hašek's mysterious mission to Mongolia, which he probably undertook in Soviet service. The writer Pavel Gan claims that he was there in conjunction with the Chinese revolutionary Chen Chang-Hai, alias Vanya Chang, and was going to go with him to China, for which reason he probably learned solid Chinese.

Works

Initially Hašek wrote mainly travel stories, features and humoresques, which he published in magazines. He wrote most of his works in Prague pubs.

His prose was based on his own real experiences, confusing investigation of his actual life, because it is not always clear what is true and what is only poetic hyperbole.

Hašek hated pretense, sentimentality, settled life, to which he ironically reacted in satiric verse. Another characteristic feature of his work is resistance to moral and literary conventions.

In his life, he wrote about 1,200 short stories. Most of his short prose is scattered throughout various magazines and newspapers. Over the years nearly all the stories have been collected and printed in book's form. Some texts may however have been lost, for example, the story "The History of the Ox."

His most famous text by far, the four-part humorous novel The Fate of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, has been translated into 58 languages and several times filmed and dramatized. Individual parts of the novel have the names: "In the Background (1921)", "At the Front (1922)", "Famous Spanking (1922)" and "Unfinished Continuation of the Famous Spanking" (1923). Hašek's most important work is associated by many people with congenial illustrations by Josef Lada. Hašek did not manage to complete the book. The completion of the work by Karel Vaněk is far from Hašek's original conception. Vanek's completion was based on the continuation of 1921, but was highly criticized (Viktor Dyk, Jaroslav Durych, F. X. Šalda etc.). At first, the work had few followers. Ivan Olbracht was probably the first to mark it as a major work in the cultural section of Rudé právo. "It is one of the best books ever written in the Czech Republic, and Svejk is quite a new type in world literature, equivalent to Don Quixote, Hamlet, Faust, Oblomov, Karamazov," Olbracht wrote. as did Devětsil theoretician Bedřich Václavek. Discussions on the value of the work continued in later years. For example, Václav Černý opposed Švejk, but a wide range of Czech literary theorists, artists, and intellectuals had other views – the philosopher Karel Kosík saw the novel as "an expression of the absurdity of the alienated world"; he described Švejk as the "tragic bard of European nihilism. The aesthetist Jan Grossman associated Švejk with existentialism; the literary theorist Jindřich Chalupecký described Švejk as the "tragic bard of European nihilism,"; and the writer Milan Kundera described the novel as "the pure irrationality of history.".

Švejk has been dramatized several times, Hašek himself performed the first dramatization for the Emil Artur Longen "Revolutionary Scene"; in 1928 Švejk turned into a theater performance of Hašek's friend Max Brod, in 1963 by Pavel Kohout. The international adaptation was achieved by the adaptation of Schweik in the Second World War by the German playwright and director Bertold Brecht.

Tributes

On 30 April 2013, Google celebrated Jaroslav Hasek's 130th Birthday with a doodle.

References

External links

Jomar Hønsi's exhaustive site dedicated to Jaroslav Hašek and The Good Soldier Švejk
The first ever website dedicated to Švejk: Švejk Central

Virtuální muzeum Jaroslava Haška a Josefa Švejka (Czech)
A comprehensive site, mostly in Czech, but also partly in English
Jaroslav Hasek – essays, biographies, memoirs, gallery of images (Russian)
Radio Pytlik, biographer of Jaroslav Hašek, interview (Czech)
Tales from Jaroslav, a site publishing previously untranslated short stories by Jaroslav Hašek (English)
J. Hašek. Švejk Stands Against Italy (audio) (in English)