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Famous Like Me > Writer > H > Jaroslav Hasek

Profile of Jaroslav Hasek on Famous Like Me

 
Name: Jaroslav Hasek  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 30th April 1883
   
Place of Birth: Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary. [now Czech Republic]
   
Profession: Writer
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia

Jaroslav Hašek (April 30, 1883 – January 3, 1923) was a Czech humorist and satirist who became well-known mainly for his world-famous novel The Good Soldier Švejk, an unfinished collection of farcical incidents about a soldier in World War I which has been translated into sixty languages. He also wrote some 1,500 other stories. He was a journalist, bohemian, and practical joker. His short life had many odd parallels with another Prague contemporary, the Jewish writer Franz Kafka (1883–1924).

Life and work

Jaroslav Hašek

Hašek was born in Prague, Austria-Hungary (now in the Czech Republic), the son of middle-school math teacher Josef Hašek and his wife Kateřina. Poverty forced the family, with three children — another son Bohuslav, three years Hašek's younger, and an orphan cousin Maria — to move often, more than ten times during his infancy. He never knew a real home, and this rootlessness clearly influenced his life of wanderlust. When he was thirteen, Hašek's father died, and his mother was unable to raise him firmly. The teenage boy dropped out of high school at the age of 15 to become a druggist, but eventually graduated from business school. He worked briefly as a bank officer and also as a dog salesman, but preferred the liberated profession of a writer and journalist.

In 1906 he joined the anarchist movement, having taken part in the 1897 anti-German riots in Prague as a schoolboy. He gave regular lectures to groups of proletarian worker and, in 1907, became the editor of the anarchist journal Komuna. As a prominant anarchist, his movements were closely monitored by the police and he was arrested, and imprisoned, on a regular basis; his offences include numerous cases of vandalism and at least one case of assaulting a police officer, for which he spent a month in prison.

Hašek met Jarmila Mayerová in 1907, and fell madly in love with her. However, due to his lifestyle her parents found him an unsuitable match for their daughter. In response to this Hašek attempted to back away from anarchism and get a settled job as a writer. When he was arrested for desecrating a flag in Prague, Mayerová's parents took her into the country, in hope that this would end their relationship. This move was unsuccessful in that it failed to end the affair, but it did result in Hašek final withdrawal from anarchism and a renewed focus in writing. In 1909 he had sixty-four short stories published, over twice as many as in any previous year, and he was also named as the editor of the journal The Animal World. Although this job did not last long, he was dismissed for publishing articles about imaginary animals which he had dreamed up.

In 1910 he married Jarmila Mayerova. However the marriage was to prove an unhappy one, and lasted little more than three years. Mayerova went back to live with her parents in 1913 after he was caught trying to fake his own death. At the outbreak of World War I he joined the army, many of the characters in Åœvejk are based on people he met during the war. He did not spend long fighting in the front line, being captured by the Russians in 1915. He had a relatively easy time in the Russian concentration camps, in which the Czechs were often more harshly treated than any other prisoners, he was assigned to the camp's commander as a secretary. He was allowed to leave the camp in 1916 to join the newly formed Czech Legion as a propaganda writer.

After the Russian revolution he remained in Russia as a member of the Bolshevik party, during this time he also remarried (although he was still technically married to Jarmila). He eventually returned again to Prague in 1919 in the hope of finishing The Good Soldier Åœvejk. However, he was not a popular figure upon his return, being branded a traitor and a bigamist, and struggled to find a publisher for his works.

Before the war, in 1911, he wrote his first stories about Švejk, but it was only after the war in his glorious novel that Švejk was to become a sancta simplicitas, a cheerful idiot who joked about the war as if it were a tavern brawl. By this time Hašek had become gravely ill and dangerously overweight. He no longer wrote, but dictated the chapters of Švejk from his bedroom in the town of Lipnice, where he unexpectly died in 1923, not yet 40 years old.

Hašek made fun of everyone and everything, including himself. He cared nothing for style or schools of literature — he considered his work a job, not art — and wrote spontaneously. He made jokes not only on paper, but also in real life, angering many who considered him lazy, irresponsible, a vagabond, a drunkard, etc.

Since his death, many of Hašek's short stories have been collected and published.

Bibliography

  • The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War, translated by Cecil Parrott, with original illustrations by Josef Lada
  • The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Svejk During the World War, Book One, translated by Zenny K. Sadlon
  • The Red Commissar: Including further adventures of the good soldier Svejk and other stories
  • Bachura Scandal and Other Stories and Sketches, translated by Alan Menhenett

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Jaroslav Hasek