In the Library
The Good Soldier Švejk
Jaroslav Hašek, 1921
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 11 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Paul Selver (1930)
- Chapters
- Chapters 24
- Length
- Length 153k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
“So they’ve killed Ferdinand,” said the charwoman to Mr. Schweik
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque
Remarque shows the same war from the trench, stripped of any joke, and reading them together shows exactly what Svejk's laughter is holding back.
£1.99
Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol
Gogol's swindler travels through the same kind of bloated, self-important bureaucracy that swallows Svejk whole, decades earlier and in peacetime.
£1.99
About the book
A stout, mild-faced veteran is hauled before a military medical board in Prague and declared an idiot, which suits him admirably for service in the Austro-Hungarian army of 1914. Jaroslav Hasek, a Czech anarchist, hoaxer, and incorrigible drunk who had himself deserted to the Russians and later to the Bolsheviks, began publishing this satire in 1921 as a serial in cheap pamphlet form. Josef Svejk salutes every officer with cheerful imbecility, agrees enthusiastically with every order, and reduces the entire imperial war machine to farce by the simple expedient of obeying it too literally. Anabasis through Bohemia, court-martial, chaplain's batman, prisoner of his own side. Hasek died at thirty-nine with the fourth volume unfinished, and the empire he was mocking was already gone.