Jaroslav Hašek

Jaroslav Hasek was a Czech writer, humorist, satirist and journalist, born in 1883 and died in 1923, remembered chiefly for his unfinished novel The Good Soldier Svejk, a satire on the ineptitude of authority figures set among soldiers in the First World War. Hasek led a colorful and unsettled life as a self-described bohemian and, in turn, an anarchist and then a communist, and he wrote the bulk of Svejk in the final years before his early death. The novel has since been translated into roughly sixty languages, making it the most translated work in Czech literature, and its title character's name has entered common usage as a byword for a shrewd, apparently foolish figure who subverts authority through feigned incompetence.