Jaroslav Hasek

Jaroslav Hašek
Jaroslav Hašek in his late years
Born	(1883-04-30)April 30, 1883 Prague, Austria-Hungary
Died	January 3, 1923(1923-01-03) (aged 39) Lipnice nad Sázavou, Czechoslovakia
Occupation	Novelist, humorist
Genre	historical satire
Notable works	The Good Soldier Švejk
Signature

Jaroslav Hašek (Czech: [ˈjaroslaf ˈɦaʃɛk]; April 30, 1883 – January 3, 1923) was a Czech writer, humorist, satirist, journalist, bohemian and anarchist. He is best known for his novel The Good Soldier Švejk, an unfinished collection of farcical incidents about a soldier in World War I and a satire on the ineptitude of authority figures. The novel has been translated into about sixty languages, making it the most translated novel in Czech literature.

Hašek was born in Prague, Bohemia (then within Austria-Hungary, now capital of the Czech Republic), the son of high-school maths teacher Josef Hašek and his wife Kateřina. Poverty forced the family, with three children – Jaroslav, another son Bohuslav, three years Hašek's junior, and an orphan cousin Maria – to move often: more than fifteen 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 from excessive alcohol intake, 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 clerk in 1903, before embarking on a career as a freelance writer and journalist. At the end of 1910/early 1911 he was also a dog salesman (an occupation he was to attribute to his hero Švejk and from which some of the improbable anecdotes told by Švejk are drawn).

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 workers and, in 1907, became the editor of the anarchist journal Komuna. As an anarchist in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his movements were closely monitored by the police and he was frequently arrested and imprisoned; 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. He satirised the lengths to which the Austrian police would go to entrap suspected political subversives in the opening chapters of The Good Soldier Švejk. In 1911 he founded the satirical political party The Party of Moderate Progress Within the Bounds of the Law.