The Good Soldier Švejk analyses the predicament of a human being, caught within the wheels of an impersonal, totalitarian bureaucratic system, which negates natural reality and destroys individuality. Most Czech critics refused to regard Švejk as a serious piece literature well until after the Second World War. The Good Soldier Švejk originally achieved international reknown through the medium of German.
For Hašek's compatriots, Švejk was unacceptably subversive. In 1918, a new, democratic state, Czechoslovakia, was created after the collapse of Austria-Hungary. The Czechs became independent after three centuries of foreign domination. Mainstream commentators were offended by Švejk's negative attitude to officialdom. The founders and supporters of the new Czechoslovak state saw it as an assault on the new Czechoslovak statehood. One Czech poet for instance worried that Hašek's Švejk "anarchy" could paralyse the military capability of the Czechoslovak army to defend the country. Švejk was banned from the Czechoslovak army in 1925, the Polish translation was confiscated in 1928, the Bulgarian translation was suppressed in 1935 and the German translation burned on the Nazi bonfire in 1933. Perhaps the most important inter-war Czech literary historian, Arne Novák, totally misunderstood Švejk, describing him as a "scoundrel and a pleasure-seeking cynic".
Švejk is an ambigous character, an "empty shell", a centre from which the author develops his extraordinarily dynamic narrative in countless directions. Švejk has mythical dimensions. As a mythical character, he is indesctructible. Hence he is imperturbable.
Švejk's typical features are a benign smile, a trusting look of his blue eyes, calmness and indifference. The character is left deliberately incomplete. Švejk is a "man without qualities", prefiguring the heroes of the novels by Kafka and Musil. Švejk is a popular "Everyman", an ordinary person, called up at the beginning of the First World War. The war was for the Czechs, who were in 1914 citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, absurd and alien. They were required to lay down their lives for for a foreign power which dominated their nation.
The Good Soldier Švejk is a rambling, picaresque work, in which the author follows the wanderings of his antihero through the impersonal, idiotic and destructive machinery of the Austrian army. Švejk's pronouncements are complex, varied and contradictory. There are only two areas in which Švejk is allowed to exist: the area of compulsion and the area of prohibition. This is a direct assault on his identity: Švejk's freedom to act, his individuality and his humanity is negated. If he tried to escape, he would be punished, very probably by death.
Švejk applies an imaginative method to his predicament. He chooses to play games for his own amusement and the amusement of those around him. The games are primarily verbal, but he also play-acts, especially in the company of superiors. By game-playing, he is able to negate the destructive, bureaucratic machinery, overwhelming it with exhuberant and unputdownable vitality. Whatever happens, Švejk dominates the situation with an endless, unstoppable stream of anecdotes.
The authorities assume that Švejk is an idiot: on most occasions he fulfils orders to the letter and with exemplary ardour. Mayhem ensues as a result. Pretending to be an idiot to the totalitarian authorities has in the twentieth century proved to be the only reliable method of avoiding their manipulation and domination. At the same time, it is never clear when Švejk is acting as a true idiot or when he is pretending to be one.
The life of the author of Švejk, Jaroslav Hašek (1883 - 1923) is highly relevant to the structure and the thematic content of the novel. Hašek was relatively well regarded in Prague before the First World War for his talents as a humourist. He wrote countless humourous stories which he published in magazines. On a personal level, Hašek had a controversial reputation. It has been said that he was probably a homosexual who found it difficult to come to terms with life within the staid Czech society. At one stage of his life, Hašek sympathised with the anarchists. He frequently wandered through Bohemia, as a vagrant, without a permanent job.
Hašek was a master of parody and mystification. As an assistant in the editorial offices of an obscure magazine The Life of Animals, he wrote and published allegedly scholarly articles about animals which he invented. At another time, he started a fierce polemic between two different periodicals, under two separate pseudonyms, arguing with himself so fiercely that the editors of the two periodicals feared the matter would end up in court. During the 1911 election campaign, Hašek parodied political life by founding his own "Party for Moderate Progress within the Limits of the Law" and later published its Political and Social History, a satirical account of the times.
After being drafted into an Austrian army, Hašek became a Russian prisoner of war in 1915. He took part in the Russian revolution on the side of the Bolsheviks, but returned to Czechoslovakia in 1921 probably because his life was threatened in Russia due to his critical attitude towards some Bolshevik practices. The Good Soldier Švejk and his Fortunes in the World War was published by Hašek and his friend Franta Sauer in instalments and sold in pubs.
The basis of Hašek's humour is everyday banality, which is subverted by being placed in an ironic and parodic context. In the literary texts based on experiences from his early wanderings through the Czech countryside, Hašek created folksy, ordinary characters, filled with natural feelings and a naive matter-of factness. This was contrasted with the hypocrisy of the more sophisticated classes. Hašek found a living source of inspiration in the popular art of story telling, as it occurs in pubs.
He seems to argue in The Good Soldier Švejk that the horrors of the First World War amounted to a total collapse of all values associated with the European pre-First World War civilisation. After experiencing the War, one could only return to elementary self-defence and to the most basic values of life. After the trauma of the Great War, new sources of humanity could only be found in ordinary, plebeian characters. These are, in Hašek's view, always naturally indifferent to higher values of society. Hence they had not been corrupted by the spiritual crisis of the collapsing era. Simplicity was for Hašek the saving grace.
The Good Soldier Švejk uses documentary material which is enlivened by the author's exceptional narrative talent. The documentary evidence, based on vivid detail, is systematically parodied. The essence of Hašek's humour resides in the ambiguity of Švejk's statements. In the most dramatic, existential situations when all values are being destroyed, the only attitude possible is Švejk's idiotically indifferent smile. The only value which Švejk defends is bare human existence. Nevertheless, he probably does retain his inner personal integrity even under the overwhelming impersonal bureaucratic pressure.
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©Dr Jan Culik, 1999