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Again picking up Jaroslav Hašek's The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War / Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války / Los destinos del buen soldado Švejk durante la guerra mundial / Les Aventures du brave soldat Švejk pendant la Grande Guerre / aka The Good Soldier Švejk / (1921-1923), let's dive into Book Three, shall we?
Poor Cadet Biegler had gotten so drunk that he was mistakenly sent to the cholera ward. The next figure of fun is Lieutenant Dub of the Third Company, another ultra-conservative buffoon. He is always proclaiming loyalty to the idea of Making Austria Great Again, and blathering such trumpety tripe: "And the little idiot Dub ceremonially added: 'Blood and life for the Habsburg! For Austria, whole, united, great!'"
~~ Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, Books Three & Four. The Samizdat edition of the new English rendition, translated by Zdeněk "Zenny" Sadloň, AuthorHouse, 2009, page 64.
As a character, I love Dub! The good soldier Švejk has his hands full with him, though.
"'When there is 'attention,' then you must be bugging your eyes out like a tomcat does when he is shitting into chopped straw. . .'"
"Lieutenant Dub directed an upset look into the carefree face of the good soldier Švejk and asked him angrily:
'Do you know me?'
'I do know you, Lieutenant, Sir. . .'
"I'm telling you that you don't know me yet.'
Švejk replied again with that carefree calm, as if giving a report: 'I do know you, Lieutenant, Sir, you are, I dutifully report, from our march battalion.'
'You don't know me yet,' Lieutenant Dub was screaming once again. 'You know me perhaps from the good side, but wait until you get to know me from the bad side. I am mean,* don't think to yourself otherwise, I'll drive everyone to tears. So, do you know me or don't you know me?'
I do, Lieutenant, Sir.' . . .
~~ Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, Books Three & Four. The Samizdat edition of the new English rendition, translated by Zdeněk "Zenny" Sadloň, AuthorHouse, 2009, page 70.
*"nasty" in the Cecil Parrott translation.
Today's Rune: Journey.
Evald Schorm's Návrat ztraceného syna / Return of the Prodigal Son (1967). Stars Jana Brejchová (who played Princess Bianca in Karel Zeman's Baron Prášil / The Fabulous Baron Munchausen / The Outrageous Baron Munchausen, 1962) and Jan Kacer.
Jan, a sensitive engineer (and architect?), has tried to commit suicide. The film explores the aftermath of his suicide attempt and its impact at his psychiatric facility and on hearth and home. All of the main characters are restless. Jan's wife Jana retains Jiří (Jiří Menzel, director of Academy Award-winning Closely Watched Trains / Ostře sledované vlaky, 1966) as a paramour in plain sight, while the therapist's wife has a sweet tooth for Jan.
"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy." ~ Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942).
Still from Evald Schorm's Návrat ztraceného syna / Return of the Prodigal Son (1967)
A case of mistaken identity forces Jan to run for his life. This scene reminds me of ones taking place when the tables have been turned, and the oppressors are hunted down by the formerly oppressed. However, Jan is mostly depressed, and now he's come alive -- if only out of a primal response to being pursued by several women with pitchforks.
The Good Doctor and the Good Wife -- more or less. Kafka meets Jaroslav Hašek. Prague Spring is just around the corner, to be followed by a violent crackdown.
RIP, Kate Spade (December 24, 1962-June 5, 2018) and Anthony Bourdain (June 25, 1956-June 8, 2018).
Today's Rune: Breakthrough.
Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War / Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války / Los destinos del buen soldado Švejk durante la guerra mundial / Les Aventures du brave soldat Švejk pendant la Grande Guerre / aka The Good Soldier Švejk / (1921-1923).
"During the whole time since Senior Lieutenant Lukáš first became commander of the Eleventh march-gang, he found himself in a state called syncretism, that is in a philosophy of striving to equalize the conceptual contradictions with the help of compromising all the way to a commingling of views."
~~ Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, Book Two. The Samizdat edition of the new English rendition, translated by Zdeněk "Zenny" Sadloň, AuthorHouse, 2009, page 196.
I understand where Oberleutnant Lukáš is coming from. Living in the world, I find myself occasionally (often) having to "equalize . . . conceptual contradictions with the help of compromising all the way to a commingling of views." Another word for this is diplomacy. And, melding. Or grokking.
An example of cultural syncretism follows. Hard to believe, but I first wrote this in the year 2006 -- twelve years ago!
Saint Lucy / Santa Lucia /Sankta Lucia presents an excellent example of syncretism. A dual saint to both Catholics and Nordic Protestants and also to some Eastern Orthodox communities, St. Lucia (traditional dates 283-304 A.D.) was a Greek Sicilian martyr killed during the reign of Roman Emperor Diocletian. Some versions of her death have her stabbed through the throat; others have her eyes gouged out (she is, among other things, Patron Saint of the Blind).
So how on Earth did Santa Lucia become a Swedish / Nordic saint?
In Viking days, the Norsemen traveled, raided, and created outposts all over Europe and, to the West, in Greenland and even in what is now Canada. They sailed into the Mediterranean and landed in Sicily, among other places, where they mingled with natives and absorbed local traditions, including that of Santa Lucia, who in Swedish became Sankta Lucia. The Swedes adopted Catholicism along the way, and remained Catholic until the Protestant Reformation and the infiltration of Lutheran beliefs. Sankta Lucia's feast day survived, rather miraculously, this second conversion.
Under the Julian calendar, Lucy's feast day was commemorated during the winter solstice (December 21-22), syncretized wherever celebrated with non-Christian belief systems. As with Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, "everybody be happy." Much later, during the Gregorian calendar reforms, St. Lucy's feast day was moved from the solstice to December 13th, where it has remained on the calendar for the past three to four hundred years.
In addition to being Patron Saint of the Blind, Saint Lucy of Sicily is also a patron saint for writers, salesmen, and stained glass workers.
Today's Rune: Initiation.
Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War / Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války / Los destinos del buen soldado Švejk durante la guerra mundial / Les Aventures du brave soldat Švejk pendant la Grande Guerre / aka The Good Soldier Švejk / (1921-1923).
Hašek conveys meaning by contrasting the absurdities of treatment based on rank, social class and ethnicity. The distinctions of rank are well epitomized in this brief passage:
"The silence of the night was reigning over the military camp in Most. In the barracks for the troops the soldiers were shivering from the cold and in the officers' barracks they were opening the windows, because it was overheated in there."
~~ Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, Book Two. The Samizdat edition of the new English rendition, translated by Zdeněk "Zenny" Sadloň, AuthorHouse, 2009, page 122.
Colonel Schröder is bonkers, but because he's in charge, everyone has to endure his ravings. In this, Colonel Schröder is a stand-in for every madcap, idiotic control-freaking boss anyone has ever had to suffer through. Furthermore, an amazing truth is not the alternating prevalence of SNAFU and FUBAR within any bureaucracy, but that anything functions at all.
"He was making no sense, mixing things five after nine, talking about how two months ago the front down below and in the east too had halted, about the importance of exact connection between individual detachments, about toxic gases, about shooting at the enemy airplanes, about supplying the troops in the field, and then he transitioned to the internal situation in the military . . . The majority of the officers was thinking at the same time, 'when is the old geezer going to stop driveling,' but Colonel Schröder was babbling on about new tasks of new march battalions, about the fallen officers of the regiment, about zeppelins, Spanish riders, the oath . . ."
~~ Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, Book Two. The Samizdat edition of the new English rendition, translated by Zdeněk "Zenny" Sadloň, AuthorHouse, 2009, page 186.
Today's Rune: Gateway.
Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War / Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války / Los destinos del buen soldado Švejk durante la guerra mundial / Les Aventures du brave soldat Švejk pendant la Grande Guerre / aka The Good Soldier Švejk / (1921-1923).
Sometimes, even in a morass of bureaucracy, a soldier lucks out. Not everything turns into a Kafkaesque nightmare, right? Take the case of "the hoodlum Marek" at his military sentencing.
"'One-year volunteer Marek is being sentenced to 21 days intensified regimen and, after having served out the sentence, into the kitchen with him, to peel potatoes.'"
"And the hoodlum Marek stood next to Švejk and was wearing a countenance of total satisfaction. It could not have turned out better for him. It is decidedly better to be peeling potatoes in the kitchen, sculpting bilbouny, idiot-size fruit dumplings and picking a rib than to be hollering, with the pants full, under the tornado of enemy's fire: 'Single file! Attach bayonets!'"
~~ Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, Book Two. The Samizdat edition of the new English rendition, translated by Zdeněk "Zenny" Sadloň, AuthorHouse, 2009, page 81.
The military train carrying Švejk and comrades arrives in Vienna. War weariness has set in after the initial excitement. Hašek renders a heartbreaking panoramic view of the scene, all the more bittersweet for its satirical flashes. A short sampling of the longer description:
". . . it wasn't like the beginning of the war anymore, when soldiers on the way to the front overstuffed themselves at every railroad station and where they were being welcomed by bridesmaids in stupid white dresses and even dumber faces and . . . an even sillier speech of some dame whose husband now acted the tremendous patriot and republican."
"The welcome in Vienna [now] consisted of three female members of an Austrian Red Cross association and two female members of some war association of Viennese matrons and young ladies, one official representative of the Viennese magistrate, and a military representative."
"In all those faces one could see fatigue. The trains with the troops were running day and night, the ambulances with the wounded were passing through every hour, they were switching cars loaded with prisoners of war . . . It went on one day after another and the original enthusiasm was changing into yawning . . . from the cattle cars were peeking out soldiers with an expression of hopelessness such as seen on those who are going to the gallows."
~~ Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, Book Two. The Samizdat edition of the new English rendition, translated by Zdeněk "Zenny" Sadloň, AuthorHouse, 2009, pages 120-121.
Today's Rune: Defense.
Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War / Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války / Los destinos del buen soldado Švejk durante la guerra mundial / aka The Good Soldier Švejk / (1921-1923).
Eventually, the good soldier Švejk must ride the rails toward the Galician front. At one station, a "good man" helps him out. "When he was leaving, he told Švejk in confidence: 'So, soldier boy, take it from me, I'm telling you, if you end up a prisoner of war in Russia, pass on my greetings to Zeman, the brewer in Zdolbunov. After all, you've got my name written down. Just be smart so that you will not be at the front long.'
'Don't worry about that,' said Švejk, 'it is always interesting to see some foreign lands for free.'"
Satire from Hašek. But his flourishes are often darker and more biting. For example, later on the very same page:
"Mostly there were soldiers from various regiments, formations, and of the most varied nationalities whom the wisdom of war had blown into the field hospitals, and who were now departing again into the field for new injuries, maiming, pain, and who were taking off to earn a simple wooden cross for above their graves on which there would still [be] years later in the sad plains of eastern Galicia in the wind and the rain a sun-bleached military cap with a rusted "Frankie" pin on it,* upon which from time to time would perch a sad raven, grown old and tired, remembering the fat-filled feast of years ago when there used to be set for him an endless table of tasty human corpses and horse carcasses, when just under such a cap that he's sitting on, there would be a bite of the most tasty morsel -- human eyes."
~~ Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, Book Two. The Samizdat edition of the new English rendition, translated by Zdeněk "Zenny" Sadloň and Emmett M. Joyce, 1st Books Library, 2009, page 11.
*"Rusty imperial badge" in the Cecil Parrott translation.
Today's Rune: Breakthrough. Map from Rooted in Eastern Europe. Link here.
Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War / Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války / aka The Good Soldier Švejk (1921-1923).
In wars large and small, there are volunteers and draftees, conscripts and nationalized militia. So things have gone around the globe since the Napoleonic Wars or longer. Aside from volunteers, it's understandable that there are many who do not want to be sucked into the death machine and therefore try to avoid the front lines. Hašek provides plenty of examples of these folks in his sprawling novel.
To wit: "The last refuge of people who didn't want to go to war was the garrison prison. I knew a substitute math teacher who didn't want to shoot at others with the artillery. He stole a watch from a lieutenant just to get locked up in the garrison prison. He did so with deliberate forethought. The war neither impressed nor enchanted him. Shooting shrapnel and grenades at the enemy and killing equally unlucky substitute teachers and mathematicians on the other side, he viewed as idiocy."
~~ Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, Book One. The Samizdat edition of the new English rendition, translated by Zdeněk "Zenny" Sadloň and Emmett M. Joyce, 1st Books Library, 2000, page 81.
The scale of the First World War (1914-1918) is reflected in its staggering casualties. The Austro-Hungarian Empire suffered about 1.5 million military and half a million civilian deaths. By comparison, Germany lost four million dead, the Russian Empire, four to five million dead. The Americans, who came late to the bloodbath, lost "only" 117,000 dead (about six percent of the Austro-Hungarian total) -- not including the Great Spanish Influenza Epidemic.
Today's Rune: Harvest.
Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War / Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války / aka The Good Soldier Švejk (1921-1923).
Told largely from the perspective of Švejk, a Czech soldier in the service of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the Great War of 1914-1918, Hašek shows The War to be a stupid squander and Life to be Absurd. In the words of a certain Sex Pistols song, "God save this mad parade!"
I read the Penguin Books translation years ago, but last night finished the newer translation by Zdeněk "Zenny" Sadloň (entire set, 2000-2009) and Emmett M. Joyce (Book One only), which I thoroughly enjoyed.
Švejk (rhymes with Bake) falls in and out of trouble constantly. About a third of the way into Book One, he's examined by a panel of military doctors. Is he an idiot or "a scoundrel . . . mak[ing] light of the military service?"
Does Švejk think for himself or not, the Command Chief Physician* wants to know. Not, Švejk answers. Why not?
Švejk's answer: "I dutifully report that . . . it is forbidden for soldiers in the military to think. When I was with the 91st Regiment years ago, our captain would always say, 'A soldier must not think on his own. His superiors think for him. As soon as a soldier starts thinking, then he's not a soldier anymore, but some kind of mangy civilian. Thinking doesn't lead . . ."
~~ Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, Book One. The Samizdat edition of the new English rendition, translated by Zdeněk "Zenny" Sadloň and Emmett M. Joyce, 1st Books Library, 2000, page 78.
Little does the officer corps realize that the entire empire will collapse by war's end, and that meanwhile, nearly all they think and do is ridiculous.
Today's Rune: Movement.
*Senior staff doctor in the Cecil Parrott translation.
