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The Good Soldier Schweik Paperback – December 10, 2020
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- Print length373 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateDecember 10, 2020
- Dimensions7.44 x 0.84 x 9.68 inches
- ISBN-101774640759
- ISBN-13978-1774640753
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Product details
- Publisher : Dead Authors Society (December 10, 2020)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 373 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1774640759
- ISBN-13 : 978-1774640753
- Item Weight : 1.63 pounds
- Dimensions : 7.44 x 0.84 x 9.68 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #493,652 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author
Jaroslav Hašek (April 30, 1883 - January 3, 1923) was a Czech humorist and satirist who became well-known mainly for his voluminous novel The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk, translated by now into sixty languages. He had also wrritten some 1,500 other stories. He was a journalist, bohemian, and practical joker.
Hašek was born in Praha (Prague), Austria-Hungary (now in the Czech Republic), the son of middle-school math teacher Josef Hašek and his wife Kateřina. Poverty forced the family, with three children -- another son Bohuslav, three years Jaroslav's younger, and an orphan cousin Maria -- to move often, more than ten times during his infancy. He never knew a real home, and this rootlessness clearly influenced his life of wanderlust. When he was thirteen, Hašek's father died, and his mother was unable to raise him firmly. The teenage boy dropped out of high school at the age of 15 to become a druggist, but eventually graduated from business school. He worked briefly as a bank officer, but later preferred the liberated profession of a writer.
Hašek made fun of everyone and everything, including himself. He cared nothing for style or schools of literature -- he considered his work a job, not art -- and wrote spontaneously. He made jokes not only on paper, but also in real life, angering many who considered him lazy, irresponsible, a vagabond, a drunkard, etc.
In 1910 he married Jarmila Mayerová, herself an author. In 1911, he wrote his first stories about Švejk.
He was a keen observer of human affairs using his material as a newspaperman, entertainer, war correspondent, political outreach and propaganda writer (for ultimately irreconcilable parties to the WWI and Russian Civil War), among other things, and not an anarchist first and foremost. As for his military associations and exploits, during WWI Hašek was first a combatant of the Austro-Hungarian army. After crossing over to the other side on the Russian front (as did tens of thousands of Czechs), he spent seven months in the POW camp in Totskoye where he contracted typhus. Sent back to Kiev, he was a reporter for the Čechoslovan magazine as a member of the Czecho-Slovak Legions there and participated in the famous battle at Zborov.
After the collapse of the Russian Provisional Government's summer offensive in Ukraine, disagreeing with the Legions leadership's decision to transport the troops to France by going to Vladivostok in the east, he joined the retreating Russian Corps of Colonel Mikhail Artemyevich Muravyov who wanted to continue the war and push west with the help of the Czecho-Slovak Legions after coming to support them at Zborov. Muravyov ultimately sided with the Social Revolutionaries and Anarchists who also opposed Lenin's Brest-Litovsk peace treaty. When he was named the commander of the eastern front, his Corps were expected to fight the Czecho-Slovak Legions in the Volga region.
In early July of 1918, while Hašek was his courier communicating with the Czecho-Slovak Legions in Bugulma, Muravyov left the front open to join the Left SRs and Anarchists in the ill-fated attempt to tople the Bolsheviks in Moscow. When Muravyov returned to Simbirsk in the Free Volga Soviet Republic -- that was controled by the SRs and Anarchists -- as the Supreme Commander of its Army, he was shot resisting arrest in a setup by the Bolsheviks. The Civil War began in earnest.
Two weeks later the Czecho-Slovak Legions issued an arrest warrant for Jaroslav Hašek. The following events would make for a grand Hollywood "eastern" movie. On August 6, 1918 the Legions captured the Tzar's treasure in the battle for Kazan, while Trotsky's armored train rushed to the region from Moscow. The Legions took the treasure on ships to Samara. In mid-August Hašek was ordered by Trotsky's reconnaissance troops leader, Larisa Reisner, to keep an eye on the treasure and report via the Bolshevik underground.
With the SRs and Anarchist defeated at the hands of the Bolsheviks, eradicating the vanquished with whom he's been working on one hand, and the Legions seeking his arrest and aiming for Vladivostok instead of going west on the other hand, Hašek didn't have much choice. He was given another chance by the Bolsheviks and made the best of it. Due to his literacy and knowledge of languages, he was quickly put to work cranking out propaganda for the Fifth Army of the Red Army among the Bashkir, Mordvin, Chinese, Volga Germans and other ethnic groups. He even became a Deputy Military Commander of the town of Bugulma and the Chief of the 5th Army's International Section of its Political Department. His multilingual propaganda work for the Communists during the Russian Civil War lasted almost three years. In December 1920 he returned to Prague to be shunned by his former friends and associates. He started working on his masterpiece, which is a result of unusually rich, varied and uncommon life experiences. [The last five paragraphs have been gleaned from the novel Osudy humoristy Jaroslava Haška v říši carů a komisařů i doma v Čechách (The Fateful Adventures of Jaroslav Hasek in the Empire of the Czars and Commissars And Even at Home in the Czechlands) by Pavel Gan who based it on a number of his contextual studies about Jaroslav Hašek.]
In August of 1921 Hašek arrived in Lipnice nad Sázavou where he wrote Books Two, Three, and the unfinished Book Four. Toward the end he was dangerously overweight. Before the New Year's eve of 1922 he became gravely ill. In the end he no longer wrote, but dictated the chapters of Švejk from his bedroom at Invald's pub. On January 3rd, 1923, he died in the cottage he bought shortly before that across the street from the pub where he worked on his masterpiece. He is buried around the corner, at the Lipnice Old Cemetery.
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"Humbly report sir, " said the Schweik, "in Vlasim there was a dean who had a chart woman, when his old housekeeper ran away from him with a boy and the money. And this dean in his declining years began to study St. Augustine, who is said to be one of holy Fathers and he read there that whoever believes in Antipodes will be damned. So he called his charwoman and said to her: "Listen you once told me that your son was a fitter and he went to Australia. That would be in the Antipodes and according to St. Augustine's instructions everyone who believes in Antipodes is damned."
"Reverend Sir, " the woman answered..."after all my son sends me letters and money from Australia."
"That's a snare of a devil, " replied the dean. According to St. Augustine Australia does not exist at all and you are just being seduced by Anti Christ."
On Sunday he anathematized her publicly and shouted out that Australia does not exist. So they took him straight out of church into the lunatic asylum. More people like him ought to be put there.
In the Covent of sisters of St. Ursula they have bottle of Holy Virgin milk with which she suckled the baby Jesus, and in the orphanage in Benesov after they brought them the water from Lourdes, the orphans got diarrhea the like of which the world has never seen.
Who decides what is in books anyway...not my translation...just another edition...but I believe this part of Schweik is very important...in many ways...
This e-edition, however, is terrible. First of all, whenever there is supposed to be a dash in the text -- and Hasek seems to use a lot of them -- the dash is left out and the words on either side of it are run together. In addition, there are hard page breaks that don't correspond with the page breaks you get on the Kindle. As a result, a footnote number may appear on one page, but the footnote itself will be found floating in the middle of the next page, or even the one after that. It's quite frustrating.
The Good Soldier Schweik deserves a much better e-edition, and Amazon ought to provide it for free to anyone who made the mistake of buying this one!
Literally this is what you’d get if you gave a stoned teenager at Kinko’s a library copy of “Schweik” and five bucks and asked him to reprint it. It’s printed left-justified with inconsistent line wrapping on (A4?) paper taking up only about 55% of each page. Great for your margin notes! But actually defective as a book: this would not be recognized by one in the trade as merchantable or fit for purpose.
Anyhow. This is a worse reading experience than when I used to use FTP to get txt files from the Gutenberg Project and print them on my dot matrix printer.
Good book though. Shamefully lazy “publisher.”
is the translation ( tradutore-traditore), as any satire it lost a lot when you read in other than no slavonic lenguage. If you
read in chex or russian you can soil yourself with laughter. This book is not only about satire, is about humanity with any
of its cualities and evils, is about you and me; you can see in its pages your personality pros and fails. Almost unknown
by the so-called western culture it is a compulsory reading for any person with a minimun of culture.
I am a Latin-american citizen, born , educated in Central America but I feel this opus as a mine. It is universal.
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My rating has no bearing on the actual story itself as I have not read the book yet.
Reviewed in Canada on June 11, 2023
My rating has no bearing on the actual story itself as I have not read the book yet.
It's a wonderful book, albeit with some short sections that don't quite live up to the inspiration of the whole. I also have slight reservations around the translation which just occasionally clunks a bit.
Overall, however, a wonderful read and a glorious and quite unfettered condemnation of imperial arrogance and military stupidity at their joint worst. The empire they represent may have disappeared, the characters certainly haven't, even if they pontificate from political platforms today more often than on the parade ground. As for Schweik himself: the world could do with more like him.
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