Жараслав Гашек: Әдеби сатирик және «Жақсы солдат Швейк» авторы

Czech humorist, satirist, writer and anarchist

Jaroslav Hašek (; 1883–1923) 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 Fate of the Good Soldier Švejk during the World War, an unfinished collection of farcical incidents 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.

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.

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