Beyond Švejk: Jaroslav Hašek’s serious comedic tales
by Anthony Hennen
Jaroslav Hašek’s enduring success as a writer, thanks to his novel The Good Soldier Švejk, left him in an unwarranted one-hit wonder conundrum. A raucous satire about a soldier strongarmed into the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, the book has been translated into dozens of languages. It remains in the zeitgeist of European literature.
However, the writer’s short stories have had less reach beyond Czech (and occasionally German) readers.
Now, at long last, the situation is changing. A new translation of The Man Without a Transit Pass and Other Tales by Dustin Stalnaker published by Paradise Editions is a valiant effort to deliver Hašek recognition beyond Švejk. In the sixteen stories, Hašek writes of the early 20th-century Czechs beset with problems and annoyances that are still relevant today.
His stories include portraits of a land of scoundrels and grifters, of buffoonish police and uncaring bureaucrats, of inconsiderate guests and anxiety-ridden office workers. The self-importance of government officials may have gone digital, but fate can still hang on their decisions.
In “Successfully Saving the Suicidal,” readers follow Prague officials who don’t forget to preserve order and frugality while preventing river-jumpers from drowning. Residents can “point with pride to our municipal infrastructure” for an “eminently sensible process,” Hašek notes. That process, created after a series of meetings by a task force, is to set life preservers along the river under lock and key, with the keys supplied to the police.
While the city council debated whether to create an office of “Highest Municipal Rescuer” to manage any rescuers (and, of course, formalize an apprentice system), a few dozen suicidal Praguers wasted no time. Wishing not to be foiled, they leaped to their deaths.
When the narrator’s amphibian-loving aunt lost her eight beloved salamanders, tragedy struck close to home (“Yet human happiness rarely endures. The same goes for salamanders,” Hašek reminds the reader).
Despite the narrator painting himself black and yellow and splashing about in the water, his aunt’s melancholy remains. To rid herself of its burden, she casts herself into the Vltava River, and the narrator must rush off to find the nearest patrolman with the key to the life preserve.
However, city law requires residents to get a key from “the most proximate patrolman." Our narrator must rush from one officer to the next. They tell him to find another one by one, as they are no longer the closest to the river.
“Go and get the key from him, but swiftly—it is a matter of a human life!” the patrolman chides the narrator, but it is too late. His aunt drowns.
Though the content of the stories can get pretty dark, Hašek’s hyperbole, slapstick, and deadpan style keep it light. Even in translation, the comedy inherent to his work shines through.
“Where the devil can’t go himself, he sends a district official,” Hašek writes when the gaze of the state falls upon two grifters’ sideshow business.
In another act-or-death-shall-take-you story, one hiker searches for aid along the Galician/Hungarian border when his friend tumbles down a mountainside.
Beseeching a Hungarian gendarme, the soldier responds with helpless politeness.
“The wolves are devouring him, and if he runs into a bear, then he’s surely finished,” the Hungarian responds. The moment isn’t gone to waste, though: “I beg you most humbly for some money for a bit of tobacco. I shall pray for the departed.”
Not to break social custom, the hiker obliges with a tobacco grant.
In life-threatening or dramatic situations, many characters respond officiously or rotely. Though it’s formal, a staid, steadfast, docile empire, it is not. Boisterous characters abound and fear no limits when they sense an opportunity.
Hašek’s characters rarely self-delude about their nefarious schemes or what they’re up to. The search for schmucks sparks much of the writer’s humor.
The outlandish, too, makes regular appearances, as when a character tries to escape a naive family after fleecing them and promising to marry their daughter. He finally shakes the father after a marathon-long run when the father gets shanghaied in Albania by bandits (thanks to the unscrupulous narrator telling the ruffians that the father is wealthy).
Hašek’s anti-religious attitude rings through a number of the stories as well (though not without some qualified sympathy on occasion.). “The Beckov Monastery” features jovial Franciscans living upon fine wine, cigars, and plentiful meats while the melancholy peasants struggle to till the land. A violent priest “incited the entire region as far as Walachia” against two sacrilegious flea circus entrepreneurs on the make in “A Legitimate Business.”
As much as those stories carry a populist (and Bolshevist) sentiment, Hašek’s perspective on the public was paternal at best.
“If one is patient and enterprising, he will triumph over the stupidity of mankind,” the grifter Mestek opines in “A Legitimate Business.” “One need only cleverly go about things. It doesn’t matter if one paints a duck; what matters is convincing the spectator that it’s not a duck but rather a jaguar. Should that business prove unsuccessful, a second or a third such business will undoubtedly succeed.”
The world doesn’t simply belong to those who can hoodwink; conniving is a natural state, the mechanism by which society maintains itself.
“Everything is possible in this world,” Mestek says. “I would bet that more than half the Earth’s population earns a living from one form of fraud or another. Now it’s only a matter of us thinking up something new to present to the audience.”
Like his characters, Hašek was constantly bringing something new to the public, with 1,500 to his name (16 volumes by the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s estimate). Much of his posthumous audience has come to him through a translation of a translation. In this collection, Stalnaker’s translations come through the Austrian-Czech editor/writer Grete Reiner.
He said Stanaker was working on his revisions when he discovered that relay-translating Hašek was a bit of a tradition.
The first Russian translation came through a German translation before a Czech-to-Russian version appeared, and relay translations went beyond the Czech writer’s world.
“Despite (Sjevk) being beloved, as far as I can tell, in Turkey — so much that it has been translated by eight separate translators — actually, none of these translations into Turkish at this point has been translated from the Czech original,” Stalnaker said.
He argued that Hašek's international appeal comes from his satire being “a pure form of negation;” this lack of affirmation makes the Czech’s writing appeal to “all the fringes of the political spectrum.”
“He has a large following on the left — that can be tied to … his own biography of having been kind of an anarchist and prankster during his time living in Prague,” Stalnaker said.
Ambiguity, too, helps.
Hašek participated in the Bolshevik Revolution but left the Soviet Union under unclear circumstances: “It kind of infused the Hašek legend with a sort of uncertainty about where he ultimately stood at the end of his life,” Stalnaker said.
Thus, the writer can be employed for his anti-clericalism, anti-authority, or irreverence to suit the reader’s needs — a unifier of misfits.
Beyond politics, misfits fill his stories, and not only hucksters.
The awkward Mr. Havlik, in his quest so that no action “would result in my expulsion from respectable society,” finds catastrophe in Prague’s Vinohrady neighborhood in “The Story of a Respectable Person.” His slip on dog feces and his pressing demand for a constable to punish the dog owner leads to public shame and suicide.
Living up to the duties of society, real or perceived, brings woe upon Czechs in this volume at a higher rate than openly flouting convention. The put-upon and gracious hosts of an unknown visitor soon see their joy transform into tragedy, ruin, and infamy. Political, religious, or familial authorities dispense justice in equal measure to injustice.
The foolishness of it all, the gap between what’s expected and what happens on the next page, builds much of Hašek’s humor.
Referencing some academic research on humor, Stalknaker noted that “humor resulted from what they described as moral violations. Encounters with violations of morality — especially when that encounter occurs in a sort of safe setting, there’s not actually any sort of immediate danger being experienced.”
Hašek intertwined his comedy with his commentary and concerns of the world.
“The situations that Hašek describes are often very serious, and he’s capturing systems and behaviors that could be characterized as deeply immoral. I think one of his talents as a humorist and as a satirist is that he manages to create these situations in these brief stories that allow for such a broad-ranging set of different moral violations,” Stalnaker said. “[The protagonists are] sort of embedded in these very helpless, hopeless, inhuman circumstances — and it makes us laugh for some reason.”
The English premiere of these short stories is long overdue. They will not push aside the veneration of Svejk, but the tales present a fuller picture of Hašek’s ability to capture and preserve a place moving from empire to nation-state. Perhaps in the future, other batches of translations will give us a better understanding of a significant Czech writer of the 20th century.
Anthony Hennen is a reporter for The Center Square in Pennsylvania and managing editor of expatalachians, a journalism project about Appalachia.