"Take that idiotic expression off your face." "I can't help it," Švejk replied solemnly. "I was discharged from the army for idiocy and officially certified by a special commission as an idiot. I'm an official idiot."

When WWI kicked off, Hašek was drafted. Following capture by the Russians, he eventually joined a military volunteer unit, consisting of Czechs and Slovaks willing to fight against the Austro Hungarian Empire. After the Russian Revolution, he moved to Moscow to join the Red Army, eventually becoming a deputy commandant and placed in charge of the village of Bulgama. One of the tales in the book of collected stories The Red Commissar deals with his time there and is hilarity underscored with terrifying brutality, two central themes of Hašek's output. According to his story (which may or may not be true), he ended up accused of counter-revolutionary activities by a drunken colonel stationed in the region. Three commissars were dispatched from Moscow to try him, and if necessary, order his execution. The description of this Marxist kangaroo court is astonishingly far-sighted, the insane bureaucracy that we came to associate with the Soviet Union there to see in embryonic form. Although Hašek had dried out during his time in the Soviet Union, he was never likely to stay there, indeed, he doubtless would have ended up shot. And so he returned to the freshly created state of Czechoslovakia. Not receiving an exactly warm welcome in his homeland, he returned to the booze and began to write The Good Soldier Švejk, originally planned as a six-volume work. He scribbled and drank, until the third of January 1923, when he died, with four volumes completed.

The chief protagonist of The Good Soldier Švejk, Josef Švejk, is not an overt anarchist, or even expressly political. Discharged from the army for imbecility, the portly middle-aged anti-hero makes a living selling "monstrous dogs", cheerfully and creatively forging their breeds. However, when Franz Ferdinand is shot, the good soldier is called up again and rises to the challenge. This takes him through prison, a lunatic asylum, back to prison again, a brief interlude as batman to a drunken atheist chaplain follows, finally ending up assigned to the debonair figure of Lieutenant Lukas, who Švejk proceeds to torment and shame with his utterly idiotic behaviour. Or not so idiotic. A central interpretation of the character is that his imbecility is a way to get away with shockingly piss-poor soldierly behaviour and by acting in this fashion, to also show up the absurdity of the war, the army and by extension, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Švejk's great pride in his status as a soldier adds a further sheen of irony.

The continually flowing stories are offered by this debauched Holy Fool as amusement, balm, subversion and most importantly, deflection. This last point issues the rich underlying vein of sadness in the book. Švejk is living in a brutal police state, with the greatest war ever known raging throughout Europe. Although the picaresque crawl across Eastern Europe by Švejk and his battalion never reaches the front line, there are multiple horrors described by Hašek, from the cholera hospital, to the casual violence and murder ingrained within the state organs of repression, the police, army and church.

When reading Cecil Parrot's "The Bad Bohemian", a biography of Hašek, I was struck, not just how much Hašek had achieved in his short life, in the areas of politics, literature and journalism, a situation unknown to many anarchists, who these days can simply find no meaningful method of praxis, but how well he negotiated the tightrope of caring for the world and not caring. Political beliefs of his nature require feeling for fellow humans, but too much of it will drive anybody mad. Therefore armour of a sort was required, especially considering the times he lived through. Thus a cheerfully cynical attitude towards the follies of humanity is deeply rooted. But although Josef Švejk shares this, often to a shocking degree, there is a certain type of warmth within the man, leading to the knowledge that if we cannot help being pitched into insanity, we must preserve our own, through a careful calibration and application of distance and engagement. This philosophy, if you can call it that, is imbued throughout The Good Soldier Švek, providing a sort of intellectual comfort food for hard-bitten left-wingers of all stripes. Like coarse wine and greasy food, the long-term benefits of this diet of bolshie flippancy may have a less than desirable outcome to one's thinking and soul, but as Hašek himself pointed out, "Life is no finishing school for young ladies".