Švejk: A Hero For Our Time
“In both civilian and military life, Josef Švejk lives by his wits. His chief ploy is to appear witless to those in authority. In fact, he is fond of pointing out that he has been certified to be an imbecile by an official military medical commission, a fact also included in the first sentence of the novel. Consequently, he reasons, he cannot be held responsible for his questionable actions because he’s a certified nitwit! His method of subverting the Austrian Empire is to carry out his orders to an absurd conclusion.”
” “Unlike K., fellow Czech Franz Kafka’s stunted stand-in for modern intellectual man, the rascal Švejk belongs to the men and women of the workaday world — the bartenders, cleaning women, gamekeepers, petty larcenists, lathe operators, janitors, drunkards, office workers, shopkeepers, undertakers, adulterers, nightclub bouncers, butchers, farmers, cab drivers and others who populate Hasek’s imagination as they stumble through the lunacies of the first World War.”
Let me assure you: all those people and many like them populate our world today. The increasing number and burden of absurdities they deal with is putting them in a position to relate to and viscerally understand Švejk, i.e. the book, the character, and the method. Untold hundreds of thousands and perhaps even millions of Americans experience and operate in “švejkárna”. This is a relatively new, younger derivation of the original term “švejking”. “Švejking” is the method for surviving “švejkárna”, which is a situation or institution of systemic absurdity requiring the employment of “švejking” for one to survive and remain untouched by it.
Švejk is indeed an ascending hero for our time. Not because we desire it or prefer it on the basis of some intellectual abstraction, a result of scientific endeavor, or any other sublime exercise of reason. It is a matter of survival in the inhospitable circumstances of the ever more complex and absurd entanglements of the postmodern society we have become. Survival, after all, is not sufficient, but the first necessary condition for realizing other, higher order goals, lofty or otherwise. And Švejk represents one of the most unique survival strategies ever conceived by man. “
NYPL’s list of 100 most important books of the 20th Century contains this modern classic which most Americans haven’t heard of, let alone read: Commonly known as The Good Soldier Svejk its full title is The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War. It is the most famous, beloved and reviled Czech book.
This Chicago
woman believes you
won’t be able to put
the book down, and
here she tells you
why: http://www.zenny.com/svejk/Ruth Cooper.mp3
I thought you might be interested in these Švejk-related projects:
1) a new English translation at http://zenny.com
2) the SVEJK CENTRAL at http://SvejkCentral
3) a GENUINE ŠVEJK’S FACEBOOK PAGE at http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Good-Soldier-Svejk/133349009873
4) Jarda Šeráks tri-lingual web site at http://www.serak.cz/Svejk/b1_en.htm and
5) Jomar Hønsi’s Google Maps application http://honsi.org/literature/svejk/?page=7&lang=nn charting Švejk’s progress which you can find at his Norwegian language sitehttp://honsi.org/literature/svejk/