The novel is set in the times of World War I in Austria-Hungary, a country which, as someone put it, was a figment of bureaucratic imagination, with borders constructed by political compromise and military conquest and which held in subjection numerous nationalities, with different languages and cultures, for 300 years. The multiethnic, and in this respect modern Empire, was full of long-standing grievances and tensions. The book's central character, Josef ?vejk, is a Czech veteran of the Austro-Hungarian army, as we learn in the first sentence of the Czech original of the novel. After the outbreak of World War One, he is drafted back into the army as cannon fodder to die for an Emperor he despises. In both civilian and military life, Josef ?vejk 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. The method, commonly known as "?vejking" ['shvey-king], has been analyzed and commented upon by countless number of people. One fact is undeniable: the method has been so popular and successful that political, military, and intellectual leaders at times feel the need to openly decry it and those who are suspected of employing it. The novel was banned from the Czechoslovak army in 1925, the Polish translation was confiscated in 1928, the Bulgarian translation was suppressed in 1935, and the German translation burned on Nazi bonfires in 1933. Gustáv Husák, the General Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party who replaced the Prague Spring reformer Alexander Dub?ek in that post after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia, and assumed the Presidency as well, exhorted the population in a speech during the 1970's period of the so-called "normalization" to STOP ?VEJKING!!! As one fan of the original Czech book wrote in 2011: "The ruling classes, the governing classes and the officer classes will all reject ?vejk. They cannot control or predict his behaviour. He is not a sheep to be led to the slaughter. He plays with them rather than they play with all of us." It appears that we still believe, as Jaroslav Ha?ek wrote in his Introduction to Book One, that "Great times demand great people." Once again we "can run into a shabby man in the streets... who himself has no idea of the significance he actually has in the history of the great new era." The difference is that nowadays it might be the streets of any city anywhere on this planet, not only Prague, and the new era is not that of nation states rising out of the ashes of the decrepit monarchies after the Great War to End All Wars, but the new age of globalism. "The Good Soldier Svejk" is a picaresque series of tales about an ordinary man's successful quest to survive, and to enjoy life in the face of the endless absurdities imposed on him by the effects of the complex institutions of modern society that magnify the rational and moral shortcomings of individuals in direct proportion to their positions in the hierarchies they are a part of. The novel is not about Josef ?vejk but about the situations he gets into. He is merely a device through which the reader experiences these situations. The reader lends his own experiences to provide the famously missing "inner life" to ?vejk. The reader will view the World of ?vejk through his own experiences and awareness. The novel is a virtual reality and the character of Josef ?vejk is the port through which the reader gets there. And, as Chicago author Don DeGrazia wrote, the novel "will forever have everyday people doubled-up with the painful laughter of recognition".

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• Publication Date: December 27, 2010
• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 272 Pages
• File Size: 15 KB