The Red Commissar: Including Further Adventures of the Good Soldier Svejk and Other Stories

Jaroslav Hasek's one novel, The Good Soldier Svejk, is an 'immortal' classic of humor, easily the most widely-read book by any Czech writer ever. Unfortunately, it was published near the end of Hasek's forty year lifespan of buffoonery, bigamy, debauchery, and rebellion against any kind of authority. 'Promises Not Kept, Promise Unfulfilled' would be an apt epitaph for the vagabond anarchist/communist who was one of the founders in 1911 of The Party for Moderate Progress Within the Bounds of Law, effectively a precursor of radical street theater. The annals and reports of this mock political party are included in "The Red Commisar"; Hasek was a good deal funnier than Al Franken, and he never had to shut up and serve in any legislature. Another portion of "The Red Commisar" consists of the nine satirical sketches Hasek wrote about his real-life service as a Soviet Commissar in rural Russia. Slavophilia was perhaps Hasek's most consistent ideology; his brief tour of duty in Bolshevik Russia was enough to make him one of the heroes in the literary pantheon of the later USSR, but his irrepressible eccentricity and irregularity would almost certainly have gotten him 'expunged' if he hadn't scampered back to Czech territory in time. These sketches, and most of the other anecdotes collected here, were published in various 'fugitive' journals of the underground and bohemian press. Hasek wrote at least 1200 such ephemeral pieces before committing himself seriously to his single novel. Translator Cecil Parrott has offered us a chosen few. The similarity of Hasek's short stories and sketches to those of Anton Chekhov should be no surprise. Same era, same cultural galaxy. Chekhov's sketches are more graceful, Hasek's are funnier, but they are of the same ephemeral genre. More surprising is how much Hasek's tossed-off anecdotes remind me of the informal scraps of writing by the American Mark Twain. The biographies of the two humorists could hardly be more different, but they display the same sardonic sense of humor. If you enjoy Twain's minor sketches and scraps of journalism, you'll be delighted by Hasek's just as much. Remember Twain's response to his own premature obituary? Hasek had just the same experience; a rival writer heard a rumor that Hasek had been killed in a brawl in Russia, and rushed to publish a defamatory obituary. Hasek's revenge was a practical joke, described in the sketch "How I Met the Author of my Obituary". Only rarely does Hasek's satire fall flat, and that perhaps can be blamed on time and translation. This is a fun little collection of bits and pieces rescued from the bottomless literary wastebasket -- nothing great, but highly amusing.