Hasek's comic masterpiece, unfinished at the time of his early death, reflects its author's own boozy, disorganized life. Born in Prague, Hasek was a journalist there before the First World War but his drinking and his independent spirit meant that he rarely held a job for any length of time. He worked on an anarchist newspaper but was sacked for stealing the office bicycle. For a while he edited a magazine called Animal World but was again shown the door when it was discovered that he had been inventing animals, otherwise unknown to zoology, and writing articles about them. His most famous character, Svejk, made his first appearance in print in 1912 but it was the Great War that provided the opportunity for both character and author to flourish. Hasek's anti-hero is a clueless conscript into the Austrian army whose farcical career the novel follows. Svejk is no rebel or revolutionary. His only interest is in the basic comforts of life - food, drink and somewhere to rest his head at the end of the day. He is, if anything, over-eager to please. Give him an order and he follows it with unswerving literalness. His lack of initiative and unthinking willingness to obey any instruction, no matter how fatuous it might be, leads to far more disorder than the most reckless of rebels could possibly instigate. Sleepwalking through war and revolution and the mindless bureaucracy of the army, immune to calls to patriotism and military glory and determined only to survive, Svejk leaves a trail of chaos in his wake. Drawing on his own anarchic spirit and his own experiences in the First World War (he fought in the front line and was captured by the Russians), Hasek produced one of the great comic novels of the 20th century, an epic and very funny chronicle of one bumbling man's progress through the insanity of war.

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