The Good Soldier Švejk

The Good Soldier Svejk, fully titled The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Svejk During the World War, is an unfinished satirical novel by the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek, published in four volumes between 1921 and 1923; Hašek died before he could complete it. Written in Czech, it follows Svejk, an ordinary, seemingly simple minded and endlessly good humored man who is called up to serve Austria-Hungary in the First World War, and uses his encounters with military bureaucracy and discipline to mount a broad satire of war and of the empire's institutions. It became the most translated work of Czech literature, rendered into more than fifty languages, and its central character left a mark on the Czech language itself, giving rise to the verb svejkovat, to Svejk, meaning to resist authority through feigned incompetence. Bertolt Brecht named it as one of three works he expected to endure as world literature.