The Good Soldier Svejk: And His Fortunes in the World War » (Reprint)

Jaroslav Hasek (1883—1923) wrote, in addition to this masterpiece, more than 2,000 short works, stories, glosses, and sketches, mostly under various pen names. Born in Bohemia, he spent several years in Russian prison camps, and died at Lipnice in Czechoslovakia.
Cecil Parrott was Hasek's biographer as well as the best-known translator of his work.
Josef Lada was an artist and illustrator and friend of Hasek's from 1907.

In The Good Soldier Svejk, celebrated Czech writer and anarchist Jaroslav Hasek combined dazzling wordplay and piercing satire in a hilariously subversive depiction of the futility of war.

Good-natured and garrulous, Svejk becomes the Austrian army's most loyal Czech soldier when he is called up on the outbreak of World War I—although his bumbling attempts to get to the front serve only to prevent him from reaching it. Playing cards and getting drunk, he uses all his cunning and genial subterfuge to deal with the police, clergy, and officers who chivy him toward battle. Cecil Parrott's vibrant translation conveys the brilliant irreverence of this classic about a hapless Everyman caught in a vast bureaucratic machine.
“Brilliant . . . Perhaps the funniest novel ever written.”
—George Monbiot