Novels Deep Read · Jaroslav Hašek · No.61
Four books, the fourth left unfinished · Jaroslav Hašek · 1921–1923
A rented room in Prague. The charwoman, Mrs. Müller, comes in with the coffee and delivers the news: they have killed our Ferdinand.
The man on the bed is rubbing ointment into his knees. He thinks about it and asks which Ferdinand she means — the errand boy at the chemist's who drank a bottle of hair oil by mistake, or the Ferdinand who goes around collecting dog dung?
The Archduke, says Mrs. Müller. At Sarajevo. In his car.
The man on the bed nods, offers a remark to the effect that he had seen something like this coming, and goes back to his knees. Four years later, this piece of neighbourhood gossip that passed by his bedside will have killed more than ten million people.
A Prague dog-dealer who makes his living forging pedigrees for mongrels, and who was formally certified an idiot by an army medical board before the war, is called up again by Austria-Hungary; he never refuses, never complains, and simply carries out every order to its literal limit until it turns absurd — thereby wrecking, in turn, a police station, a lunatic asylum, a garrison hospital, a chaplain, a lieutenant, a colonel and a substantial stretch of the imperial railway system; over eight hundred pages he crosses half of Europe and is finally arrested by his own army as a Russian spy while wearing a Russian uniform he found by a pond. He never fights in a single battle. Hašek died partway through Book Four, so this novel about never reaching the war never reaches the war.
Jaroslav Hašek (1883–1923) was a professional troublemaker from the Prague pubs: author of something like a thousand newspaper sketches, one-time editor of a magazine called The Animal World, and, in 1911, co-founder of the Party of Moderate Progress Within the Bounds of the Law, which really did stand in parliamentary elections, purely as a joke. During the war he was conscripted into the 91st Infantry Regiment at Budějovice — Švejk's regiment — was taken prisoner by the Russians on the eastern front, joined the Czechoslovak Legion, then went over to the Bolsheviks and did political work in the Red Army before returning to Prague in 1920. The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War began appearing in instalments in 1921; Hašek died on 3 January 1923, not yet forty, leaving Book Four broken off. The round-faced, pipe-smoking, faintly smiling Švejk drawn by Josef Lada has been the character's official face ever since.
Its place in literary history is a peculiar one: a book sold for decades as a collection of pub jokes, later recognised as one of the twentieth century's essential anti-war novels. Hašek writes no trenches, no charges, no wounds. He writes the rear: hospitals, guardrooms, offices, troop trains, paperwork. All Quiet on the Western Front shows how a war destroys a generation; Catch-22 shows how the logic of war contradicts itself. Švejk came earlier and works on a nastier principle: it does not accuse war of cruelty, it convicts war of stupidity. And stupidity is the harder charge to shake off — cruelty can always be called necessary, while stupidity buys nothing at all.
First, who Švejk is. He lives in Prague by dealing in dogs, his principal line of business being forged pedigrees for mongrels: the buyer wants a purebred, so Švejk produces a purebred document, and the dog stays exactly the dog it was.seed ① He also carries a more consequential piece of paper: years earlier an army medical board formally certified him an idiot and discharged him from service.seed ②
On the afternoon of the assassination he goes to The Chalice.seed ③ Palivec, the landlord, is in the middle of explaining why he took the Emperor's portrait off the wall and put it up in the attic: the flies kept relieving themselves on it. In the corner sits a plain-clothes police agent, Bretschneider, steering the conversation sentence by sentence towards politics. Švejk obliges him at length, with enormous enthusiasm and no discretion whatever. Both men are taken away, and Palivec draws ten years for his honest remark about the flies. This is the book's first and fiercest joke: an empire that really will imprison a man for a decade over fly droppings is about to conduct a world war.
Bretschneider does not give up. He starts calling on Švejk to buy dogs, one after another, hoping the transactions will yield some evidence.seed ④ A while later the narrator disposes of the agent in a single aside: the dogs he had bought ate him.payoff ④ ↑ What makes the stroke beautiful is that it is not divine retribution but an industrial accident: a man who lived by entrapment is digested by his own props. Hašek never puts informers on trial; he has them disappear ridiculously.
Then comes the conveyor belt of institutions: police station, examining magistrate, asylum. Švejk's verdict on the madhouse is one of the most quoted judgements in the book — there you may claim to be anybody at all, you may go about with no clothes on, the food is decent, and nobody arrests you for what you say: it was the freest place he ever lived in. He is eventually thrown out, on the grounds that the doctors have decided he is not mad but faking.
Mobilisation is declared. At which point the empire stops caring about the certificate of idiocy it issued itself, because now it needs everybody.payoff ② ↑ The document is not torn up; it is simply stepped over. And the identity it granted him does not expire: from here on, every preposterous thing Švejk does hangs on a mind that an official document has certified. The empire handed him an indulgence with its own signature on it, and then conscripted him.
Švejk has rheumatism and cannot walk. Hence the scene: he has Mrs. Müller hire a wheelchair, installs himself in it with his crutches held aloft, and is pushed through the streets of Prague towards the recruiting office, shouting all the way that they should go to Belgrade. The crowd swells, somebody hands him flowers, the newspapers write him up as a model patriot, and he is wheeled straight into the recruiting office.
In the garrison hospital he falls into the hands of Dr. Grünstein, whose professional conviction is that every patient is malingering. His treatment therefore does not distinguish between conditions: stomach pump, enema, starvation diet, aspirin, quinine. Run the course, and the malingerers get up and demand to be sent to the front; so, more or less, do the genuinely sick. This is the first place in the book where the laugh dies: in this system, curing a man and breaking a man are done with the same instruments.
Discharged from hospital, Švejk is assigned as servant to the army chaplain Otto Katz, one of the funniest figures in the novel: a baptised Jew, a gambler, a debtor, a spectacular drinker who preaches on alcohol and improvisation. He and Švejk form an odd harmony — one of them does not believe a word he says, the other does exactly as he is told.
The famous set piece is the drumhead mass. A folding field altar is set up on open ground; Švejk carries the props, hands over the cup, and makes the responses at the right moments. The chaplain, drunk, loses the thread halfway through, calls the assembled men a herd of swine who will be forgiven on the battlefield, and works in a few of his own debts along the way. And the men, who are about to be loaded onto trains for the front, weep.
Shortly after this, Katz loses Švejk at cards to an infantry lieutenant named Lukáš. A human being changing hands as part of a gambling debt causes no discomfort to anyone in the novel, including the human being.
Lieutenant Lukáš is the only character in the book with a full interior life, and the only one Švejk genuinely destroys. He is professionally competent, vain about appearances, maintaining several affairs, and wants above all to live decently. Once Švejk becomes his batman, the textbook loyalty begins: the lieutenant's canary and angora cat are introduced to each other on Švejk's initiative, and the cat eats the bird; one of the lieutenant's discreet liaisons is exposed by Švejk's impeccable execution of an instruction. And every time, Švejk has said nothing untrue and disobeyed no order.
Then the dog. Lukáš wants a decent dog, and Švejk returns to his old trade.payoff ① ↑ The little business in forged pedigrees from the opening pages becomes, here, the mechanical pivot of the entire novel: Švejk procures a purebred pinscher, stolen of course — from Colonel Kraus von Zillergut, an elderly officer with a passion for explaining to subordinates such facts as that a road with ditches on both sides is called a highway. Days later the colonel sees Lukáš in the street walking his dog. The disposition of the case: Lieutenant Lukáš and his servant are transferred to the 91st regiment at Budějovice — that is, in the direction of the front.
On the train to Budějovice, Švejk first loses the lieutenant's luggage, then pulls the emergency brake out of sheer helpfulness, is fined, and is put off at Tábor. He has no money for the next leg, so he decides to rejoin his unit on foot.
He walks in the wrong direction — and not slightly wrong: he walks in circles, wandering the countryside for days, taken by the villages he passes for a deserter and a Russian spy, arrested by gendarmes, written up in a long report by a sergeant who hopes the case will advance his career. Švejk's manner throughout is excellent; he explains his route honestly and in full; nobody believes a word of it. Hašek names this stretch, with great ceremony, the Budějovice anabasis, borrowing Xenophon's word for the long march home of a Greek army. The one epic march a soldier undertakes in this world war is a series of loops in the opposite direction from the fighting.
Once he rejoins, the regiment is moved to Bruck an der Leitha, and two new figures appear. One is Marek, the one-year volunteer, who before the war edited The Animal World and whose working method was to invent animals — supplying readers with creatures that do not exist, complete with habitats and habits, until he was dismissed for it.seed ⑤ The other is Vodička the sapper, an old soldier for whom beating up Hungarians constitutes a way of life.
Lieutenant Lukáš writes a love letter to Mrs. Kákonyi, the wife of a local Hungarian shopkeeper, and sends Švejk to deliver it. Švejk delivers it — into the hands of her husband. What follows is a brawl (Vodička enjoys himself greatly), police, detention, a military inquiry, newspaper coverage, and the total ruin of the lieutenant's dignity. Švejk's defence never varies: the order was to take the letter to that house, and he took it there.
When the detention ends and the two men part, Vodička and Švejk fix a time and place to meet again:
"At six o'clock after the war, at The Chalice."— Vodička and Švejk's arrangement, end of Book Two (wording varies between translations)payoff ③ ↑
It is the heaviest line in the novel and it is delivered as lightly as small talk. The reader has seen that pub: the first scene of the book takes place there, and its landlord — ten years for the flies and the Emperor's portrait — is in prison at this moment. Two men about to be loaded onto a train for Galicia set their reunion in a pub that no longer has a landlord, at a time on the far side of a war with no visible end. Hašek never writes pathos. He simply leaves the appointment standing there and lets you work out its odds yourself.
The march battalion is formed, loaded onto a troop train, and sent east through Hungary towards Galicia. This book takes place almost entirely on railways and at stations, and it is the finest bureaucratic comedy in the novel.
One of its leads is Cadet Biegler, a self-taught military genius: he has read the whole of military history, built a cabinet of index cards, and intends one day to write up all the great battles of this war. He really has studied the army's cipher system in earnest — and the regiment has issued the wrong volume of the cipher key, so that a whole batch of telegrams is indecipherable and the only man who genuinely understands the ciphers becomes the most inconvenient person present. Biegler's fate is the book's cruellest treatment of the soldierly dream: he eats something that disagrees with him on the train, fills his trousers, is quarantined as a suspected cholera case and shipped away; and on the way he dreams that he has become a great general and is riding his horse up to heaven. A man preparing to spend his life on the study of war is discharged from it by his own bowels.
Then there is Lieutenant Dub, a schoolmaster in civilian life: loyal, self-important, in constant need of confirmation that he has authority. His catchphrase is to ask whether you know him, and then answer himself — you don't know me yet, but when you do know me, you'll cry. The line recurs over hundreds of pages, and after every recurrence the man crying is never Švejk: it is Dub who is repeatedly drunk, repeatedly humiliated, repeatedly carried home. Hašek's method with authority is never to expose it, but to let it repeat itself until the repetition is the joke.
The battalion comes with a fine set of minor parts: Quartermaster Sergeant-Major Vaněk, who does everything by the ledger and reduces every crisis to a remark about having seen this sort of thing before; Jurajda the cook, an occultist in civilian life, quoting eastern scripture while stirring the goulash; and Baloun, the lieutenant's new batman, a miller so hungry he eats his officer's rations. Švejk becomes company orderly here — a post that licenses him to wander about and interrupt.
And Marek receives the assignment of his life: battalion historian. His method is precisely the old Animal World craft — he writes up the battalion's heroic deaths in advance: who falls in which engagement, what his last words were, how his comrades recovered the body, each account composed to be deeply moving, and waiting only for real men to be entered into it.payoff ⑤ ↑ This is the book's most economical and most savage recovery: the same man, the same trade, first inventing animals that do not exist and then inventing heroes that do not exist — and the second commission comes officially from the army. Hašek says nothing whatsoever about propaganda. He simply gives the war history to a journalist who fabricates.
The unit detrains in Galicia and marches towards the front, through villages burnt to shells, requisitioned chickens, people in flight. The war finally shows itself, and the form it takes is an unbroken stretch of logistics and rubble rather than combat.
Then the last great set piece. Near a village, Švejk finds clothes lying by a pond — the uniform a Russian deserter took off to bathe. He puts it on out of curiosity, is picked up by his own side's patrol, taken for a Russian, and marched off as part of a column of prisoners. He explains all the way that he is Czech, that he belongs to the 91st; nobody listens. He comes close to being executed as a spy, with a general already contemplating a rope. What saves him is not the truth but bureaucratic procedure: the paperwork runs its course and he is returned to his unit.
And then the novel stops. Hašek died on 3 January 1923, and Book Four breaks off mid-course. The result is a war novel of more than eight hundred pages whose hero never fires a shot, never fights an action, and makes his last formal appearance inside his own army's column of prisoners. This is of course an accident of the author's early death and not a design; but it fits the book's logic so exactly that hardly anyone has since felt that something is missing.
Work out the causal chain across the five acts and you find that nothing in this book is decided by anybody important. The real fuse is a stolen dog. If Švejk had not stolen the colonel's pinscher for his lieutenant, Lukáš would not have been transferred to Budějovice, Švejk would not have boarded that train, and there would be no anabasis, no letter at Bruck, no troop train, no Russian uniform. And the dog was stolen because a servant wanted to please his master — the engine of this novel is not hatred but loyalty. The assassination at Sarajevo enters the book only as a line of gossip from a charwoman; what actually drives the plot is a policeman's dog purchases, a wrong volume of a cipher key, a dog. This is Hašek's theory of history: history is not moved by decisions but by trivia, paperwork and misunderstanding — and it kills people just the same.
The craft here lies entirely in the level of narration. The novel's first sentence is not a historical event but a charwoman's relay of the news; the second is Švejk getting the wrong man — there are two Ferdinands in his head, the chemist's boy who drank the hair oil and the one who collects dog dung.
The joke is not there to show that he is stupid; it is a proposition about history: for the overwhelming majority of people, a world-altering event arrives the first time as exactly this — a piece of spoken news with the wrong name attached. Hašek writes the outbreak of the war as street gossip in order to revoke, on page one, the special status of Great Events. Technically the crueller decision is that he adds no commentary: not one line of "nobody then could know what this would mean." The register is set here — this book never looks down on its characters, and never does the reader's feeling for them.
Almost all the detail in this scene is hardware: how the folding altar is assembled, where the communion wine came from (on credit), at which point Švejk must ring and respond. Hašek transcribes a rite entirely into logistics, and the content of the rite collapses on its own — once you have seen that the altar folds, you can never see the altar again.
But the sharpest stroke is the last one: the men weep. Had Hašek let them laugh at the mass, the scene would be satire; by letting them cry, he makes it a tragedy. They are not moved by the chaplain. They are moved by what they already know: tomorrow they board the train, and this is the last time anyone will say anything to them about forgiveness, even if the man saying it is drunk. Putting the ridiculous and the frightening into the same scene at the same time is the hardest thing a writer does.
Švejk is not a personality; he is a device, and it runs on three rules:
The third rule is Hašek's key technical decision: the device is powered by a hollow centre that is never explained.
The matching weapon is his mouth. Whenever a scene reaches its point of maximum tension, he begins on some old Prague business entirely unconnected to the matter at hand, and bleeds the pressure out of the room — the rituals of power require continuity, and chatter destroys continuity. It is also this book's largest structural cost; see the criticism section below.
The combined effect was already demonstrated by the wheelchair: if his legs won't carry him he is wheeled to the recruiting office, and if slogans are wanted he shouts them the whole way — he does everything the state asks of him, and then some, to the letter's furthest limit. Meanwhile a bureaucracy's disciplinary code contains exactly one offence: disobedience. For "obeyed too thoroughly" there is no charge on the books. Hence this novel's most important invention: an irony that leaves no evidence. You cannot prove that Švejk is mocking you, because every single thing he does is what you told him to do.
The mechanism itself holds up. In the real world it has a name: work-to-rule — the classic tactic of striking railway workers, nurses and customs officers, who break no regulation and miss no shift, but simply perform every single procedure in full, at which point the system seizes. Švejk is the literary prototype of that tactic, and it works for the same reason it works in the novel: a bureaucracy's soft spot is its own rulebook — the finer the rules, the more destructive literal compliance becomes.
Švejk's indestructibility. A real army shoots this man — the novel stages that once (the Russian uniform, the general and his rope) and then pulls back at the last moment. This is not a miscalculation on Hašek's part but a choice: the book needs a living Švejk to run the whole machine from one end to the other. Had Švejk been hanged in Book Two we would have a truer, shorter novel that proved nothing at all. To be honest about it: Švejk's immunity is a device of the fiction, not a report from history.
The thing the reader most wants to know is the thing the novel withholds: is Švejk genuinely an idiot, or an enormously gifted actor? Both readings have complete evidence behind them, and either settled answer would make the book smaller — if he is a genius, this is a comedy about a clever man fooling fools; if he is an imbecile, it is a novel about luck. Only while the question stays open is Švejk a mirror: what each official and each institution does in front of him measures the intelligence of that institution, not his. Everyone in the book is engaged in the same activity — prising him open: the police agent wants his politics, the doctors want to know whether he is mad or faking, the court wants a confession. Nothing is ever handed over, and that is the book's deepest act of non-cooperation with power.
Take the "no" side first, because Švejk's charm usually buries it. He never refused anything. He put the uniform on, boarded the train, carried what he was given to carry. The Austro-Hungarian war machine did not lose a division, a gun or a day's progress on his account. The people who actually stopped that machine were the ones who deserted, mutinied, went to prison, were shot — and set beside them, Švejk is a survival strategy that posterity has promoted to a politics. The harder point is this: he converts humiliation into a joke, and a joke makes humiliation bearable, and what is bearable can be sustained indefinitely. A man who makes the machine look stupid while keeping it running is that machine's ideal subject.
Now the "yes" side at full strength. For a Czech conscript in 1915, the entire content of the alternative was: one heroic refusal, one firing squad, one line in a file. Švejk's method is the only one still available to a person with no power whatsoever, and the damage it does is quite specific — it takes away the machine's dignity. A system that cannot be respected has lost the one resource it cannot manufacture for itself: voluntary belief. And the damage is even quantifiable, because what Švejk consumes is time — reports, hearings, escorts, inquiries, paperwork. Armies are made of time.
Bring it back to your own life: inside a company or an agency you cannot change, "doing it strictly by the book" is close to the only leverage left — break no rule, just run the whole process. It works; you have probably tried it. And then comes the uncomfortable part of the question: how do you tell whether you are using it to resist, or using it to make the situation endurable? From outside the two look identical, and they lead in opposite directions.
For laughter: gravity is recyclable. Nobility, sacrifice, honour, dying for one's country — a recruiting office can use every one of those words, and the pain of a book like All Quiet on the Western Front can, once it has passed, even turn into a kind of beauty, and beauty mobilises people again. Only laughter cannot be recycled: no state has ever sent men to the front on the strength of a joke. What Hašek strips away is the one nutrient war runs on, which is solemnity. That is an anti-war position structurally incapable of being requisitioned — far harder to digest than any accusation.
Against: laughter has a side effect called comfort. In eight hundred pages not one death will break your heart, because death in this book is part of the logistics. You will finish it remembering the chaplain, Dub, and the state of Biegler's trousers, and not one of the men who actually died. And a war that is enjoyable to read becomes, in memory, a war one is allowed to enjoy. The sharpest evidence is the book's own afterlife: whole generations of readers have taken Švejk for a lovable national self-portrait — and "lovable" is one of the things Hašek spent his life mocking.
The dilemma is currently sitting in your phone: the default treatment of catastrophic news is the joke and the meme. It genuinely does make things endurable. It also genuinely does ensure nothing gets done. These are not alternatives; they happen together, which is precisely the trouble.
This is Lieutenant Lukáš's situation, and his is the only pain in the novel that is written to be felt. He can never find grounds to punish Švejk, because every disaster originates in an order he gave himself.
First the case that the fault lies with Lukáš and with the system: an organisation that stays intact only because subordinates silently supply the parts nobody said out loud has a broken process to begin with. Švejk executed the literal instruction every time; the failures occurred exactly at the places covered by "you know what I mean." Any command system that runs on tacit understanding is quietly transferring liability to the person with the least power — and when something goes wrong, the one holding the bag is always the executing end.
Now the case that the fault is Švejk's, which is just as strong: tacit understanding is not laziness, it is division of labour. The entire efficiency of human cooperation rests on not having to say everything; say everything and nobody can issue any order at all. A man who insists on executing only the literal text is in effect levying a specification tax on everyone around him — and somebody else pays it. He has broken no rule. He has merely shifted the cost.
You have probably met both kinds of subordinate: the one who thinks of what you failed to say, and the one who does precisely and only what you said. The first makes you dependent on him; the second makes you unable to blame him. The book does not tell you which to want. It leaves a sharper question: which of the two are you, when you are the one obeying?
Line up his life's work and the same manoeuvre appears over and over: take a perfectly respectable form, load it with content that does not hold up at all, and wait for the form to give way on its own.
In 1911 he and his friends really did found a political party, the Party of Moderate Progress Within the Bounds of the Law; it really did contest an election with campaign speeches in pubs, and he later wrote the episode up as a book. The name is the whole joke: moderate, progressive, within the bounds of the law — every ingratiating word packed in, and as a result nothing asserted whatsoever. Which is Švejk's method exactly: don't oppose, just fill your form up until it buckles.
He really did edit The Animal World, really did invent animals, and really was sacked for it; later he handed the craft to Marek untouched and had the army put it on the payroll. He wrote something like a thousand newspaper pieces, mostly in pubs, and Švejk's language comes straight out of that: this is oral literature, its unit is the anecdote rather than the sentence, its structure digression rather than plot. He had written the character before, too — there is a soldier called Švejk in his pre-war short stories from around 1911. The world war merely supplied him with a machine big enough to be worth his while.
And the obsession he keeps returning to: every institution in his hands wears the same face. The church, the police, the courts, medicine, the press, the army — change the uniform and the movements are identical: announce something that may not be questioned, then act on it, and let nobody dare call the result absurd. The ambition of Švejk is to run all six machines against a single man in turn, and to find that they react exactly alike.
① The first line is a charwoman relaying gossip; the hero's last formal appearance is in his own army's column of prisoners wearing an enemy uniform; in between, eight hundred pages and not one shot fired. That is Hašek's entire arrangement of the World War.
② Švejk's weapon is not refusal but agreement: he carries an order to its literal limit and lets the man who gave it see what the order actually was.
③ A bureaucracy can punish disobedience and has no charge for excessive obedience — that gap is the engine of the whole book.
④ Whether he is a genuine idiot or a performer is never answered, and that hollow centre is exactly why the mirror works.
⑤ The real fuse is not two shots at Sarajevo but a stolen dog — and the dog was stolen because a servant wanted to please his master.
⑥ A journalist who fabricated animals is later officially commissioned to compose the battalion's heroic deaths in advance: on propaganda, Hašek offers not one word of comment.
⑦ "At six o'clock after the war, at The Chalice" is the heaviest line in the novel and lands like small talk; the landlord of that pub is serving ten years as it is spoken.
⑧ The point of the drumhead mass is not that the chaplain is drunk but that the men cry. Holding the ridiculous and the frightening in one scene is this book's highest technique.
⑨ Writing catastrophe as comedy lets people endure it and lets people put it down — and this book is the best exhibit of that dilemma there is.
⑩ Whether "Švejkism" is a survival art or an alibi, the Czechs have argued for a century without finishing. A book still being argued over is a book still alive.