بوهمی بد. زندگی فوق‌العادهٔ یاروسلاو هاچک، نویسندهٔ سرباز خوب شویک

The real-life creator of the anarchist classic The Good Soldier Švejk was the extremely Bad Bohemian Jaroslav Hašek. His life was, frankly, a disgrace.The son of an alcoholic Czech schoolmaster, Hašek made a bad start and got steadily worse. After spending much of his dissolute youth as a tramp, Hašek joined an anarchist group and destroyed even their crumpled faith in humanity by bartering the office bicycle for drink. He created chaos as editor of the respected magazine Animal World by inventing new animals and advertising for sale a pair of thoroughbred werewolves. He founded a spurious political party of the soft centre, and was saved from suicide by a theatrical hairdresser. After taking to drink he became a cabaret star, propagandist and bigamist. Hašek's bottle-strewn life was the raw material of his fiction; his remarkable biography makes riotous reading.'Sir Cecil coolly untangles Hašek from the coils of rumour, and manages, white performing this delicate scholarly opertation, to transmit the raucous glitter of the beer-gardens and night-dives and cafés-chantants which were Hašek's element. The result is a triumph, and -like all first-rate scholarship- enormously enjoyable.' – THE SUNDAY TIMES Jaroslav Hasek was the author of The Good Soldier Svejk, a twentieth-century masterpiece, and one of the funniest novels ever written. He was also, to quote Sir Cecil Parrott, a 'truant, rebel, vagabond, anarchist, play-actor, practical joker, bohemian (and Bohemian), alcoholic, traitor to the Czech legion, Bolshevik and bigamist.': in short a Bad Bohemian. Hasek's bottle-strewn life, as Sir Cecil makes clear, was the raw material of his fiction; this remarkable biography, the only one in the English language, makes for riotous reading. Sir Cecil Parrott as well as being the British Ambassador to Czechoslovakia in the 1960s was also the translator of The Good Soldier Svejk (his translation is definitive) and leading authority on Jaroslav Hasek. 'Sir Cecil coolly untangles Hasek from the coils of rumour, and manages, while performing this delicate scholarly operation, to transmit the raucous glitter of the beer-gardens and night-dives and cafs-chantants which were Hasek's element. The result is a triumph, and - like all first-rate scholarship - enormously enjoyable.' Sunday Times Famine in Ireland - 1916 - Black and Tans - Free state to Republic