On this day in 1923 Jaroslav Hasek died, aged thirty-nine. Like Franz Kafka, his contemporary - both were born in 1883, and Kafka died at forty - Hasek lived in Prague and wrote of an absurdist nightmare, but the parallel doesn't go much further. Hasek was poorly educated, nomadic, unemployable, a practical joker happiest in a crowd or spotlight, and his father was the farthest thing from omnipresent. Nor did they write similarly: The Good Soldier Svejk, the satiric WWI novel that made Hasek famous, is rollicking and episodic, and few would argue that it is skillfully or even carefully written, or that it matters much that it was never finished ... FULL STORY »
