The Secret History of my Sojourn in Russia

By Jaroslav Hašek

Jaroslav Hašek is known by readers around the world as the author of The Good Soldier Švejk, one of the greatest comic novels of all time. Not all of his fans are aware of his six year anabasis in Russia, however, which began with his capture on the front lines of Galicia during the First World War. The Secret History of My Sojourn in Russia, translated by Charles S. Kraszewski, brings that fascinating period in Hašek's life to the attention of the English reader. Comprised of fifty-two short stories and other writings from Hašek's stay in Sovietising Russia, The Secret History collects the Bugulma stories, in which Hašek trains his satirical eye on the infant communist utopia, as well as non-fiction works by Hašek, who played a not insignificant role in the progress of the Soviet Revolution in Siberia, before his return to his native Czechoslovakia in the early 1920s. These include propagandistic pamphlets and newspaper articles, letters, and official scripts dating from his agitation as a communist operative among Austro-Hungarian citizens stranded in the Soviet Union, all of which provide a fascinating context for his good-humoured fiction, which rivals his great novel in rollicking fun.

The Secret History of My Sojourn in Russia presents the reader with 52 of the most entertaining, and chilling, examples of his Russian period, containing both humorous fiction and deadly serious propaganda.

Translation of this book was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic. Translated by Charles S. Kraszewski. Introduction and notes by Charles S. Kraszewski.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Glagoslav Publications
• Release date: Dec 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781911414681

Jaroslav Hašek

Jaroslav Hašek (1883-1923) war ein tschechischer Schriftsteller und Satiriker. Mit seinem Schwejk schuf er einen der bekanntesten Figuren der Literaturgeschichte. Hasek war ein scharfzüngiger Redakteur, Satiriker und Herausgeber. Er arbeitete für verschiedene Prager Zeitungen. Leider verstarb er mit knapp 40 Jahren viel zu früh an den Folgen seines Alkoholkonsums.

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propaganda.

Introduction

The Enigma of Jaroslav Hašek. Is He Serious, or Is He Joking?

At a certain point in his story, an incarcerated Josef Švejk finds himself before a committee of physicians. Tauglich! he cries in a happy voice upon entering the room. Already eyebrows are raised. More than one Czech recruit will seek even to maim himself, so as to avoid the glory of falling on the battlefield on behalf of Emperor Franz Josef, and here comes a moon-faced fellow shouting Fit for service! When the physical examination begins, and a doctor tells him to take five steps forward, and then five backward, Švejk takes ten. I said five steps! the doctor growls. Ehh! I can gladly spare you a few more, Švejk replies. After a few minutes of song (Švejk good naturedly complies with their request to sing by running through the first couple of strophes of all the songs he knows, from folk chestnuts to hymns to the national anthem):

Both doctors exchanged glances, and one of them asked Švejk, Was your mental condition ever assessed?

In the army, Švejk replied, gloriously and proudly, The military doctors officially classified me as a notorious idiot.

It seems to me that you’re faking, the other doctor shouted at Švejk.

I, sirs, Švejk hastened to defend his honour, am no faker. I am a true blue idiot. You can check it out for yourselves in the office files of the 91st Regiment in České Budějovice, or at the replacement headquarters in Karlína.

And he will proudly defend his categorisation as mentally incompetent to all comers. As he relates later on in the book:

They ran about, circling me like dogs, barking at me, and I just stood there silently. I didn’t say a word, just stood there, saluting, my left hand on the seam of my pants leg. After consulting for about a half an hour, the colonel runs up to me and growls, Are you an idiot, or not? "I beg to report, sir, I am an idiot."

Notoriously feebleminded, or wickedly intelligent? Is Švejk a complete dolt, who through the grace of God or dumb luck, constantly lands on his feet? Or is he the ultimate trickster, who plays the fool so as to flummox any and all who wish to use him in a manner that could lead him into harm’s way? This is the ontological question at the heart of Jaroslav Hašek’s best work, Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války [The Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk in the Great War, 1921/23]. It torments his officers, it tickles his readers, and it simply cannot be answered. We’ll never know if Švejk is brilliant and manipulative, or merely stupid and very, very lucky.

The same thing can be said for his creator, Jaroslav Hašek, especially the Hašek we come across in the pages of this book. Who is he, really? The good soldier who was recommended for the Silver Medal for Bravery for his role in capturing three hundred Russian soldiers, before his own captivity, or the swindler and deceiver castigated in the assessment of the officers of the 91st Regiment, for doing his utmost to avoid front-line service? Is he the skulker of Most nad Litavou, sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for desertion, or the hero who showed courage when, during the retreat, he guided the whole battalion to safety across the river Igla, having learned from local inhabitants where there was a ford, for which act those three years were remitted? Finally, is he the hero of the Battle of Zborów, the defining battle of the Czech Legions, formed from Russian prisoners of war to fight on the side of the Allies, for which he did indeed receive the Medal of St. George, or is he the traitor who dirtied himself with Communism, deserting the ranks of the Legions so that he was forced to escape from the Czech Army, who had sworn out a warrant of arrest against him?

Even those who knew him personally could never be sure. In his book of anecdotes concerning Hašek, Radko Pytlík quotes one of the writer’s comrades from the political division of the Fifth (Soviet) Army, where Hašek operated for a time during his Russian sojourn: When the discussion turned to politics, one was never sure if he were speaking seriously, or joking.

The reason that neither we nor his intimates can ever really know when he is being serious, and when he is pulling our legs, is his delight in digging a camouflaged trap and hunching behind the shrubbery, giggling, to see who falls in. Jaroslav Hašek is the proverbial boy who cried wolf, or, more precisely, werewolf. One of his jobs before the war was on the editorial staff of the journal Animal World. This was a popular-science publication, beloved for its articles and vignettes concerning the environment and its furry denizens. Of course, lover of animals though he was, Hašek could not be satisfied with lions and giraffes. He spent his time thinking up fantastic creatures — for example, the sulphur-bellied whale or the man-eating horrid gulper who is assumed to be the only species of ichthyosaur to have survived to our day and age. His crowning achievement (for which he was quickly sacked) was his detailed instructions on the proper breeding of werewolves, which he described as very pleasant animals, faithful, good on leads and watchful guardians, who can in all ways replace the dog. His description of the werewolf, which he took pains to sub-categorise into Siberian Werewolves with a silvery coat, and Manchurian Werewolves, with a golden sheen, was so convincing, that a woman showed up in person at the Animal World offices wishing to buy two Siberians (as the magazine also acted as a middleman in the sale of pets). According to Hašek himself, a professor of natural history was so taken in by his inventions that he not only took out a subscription, but declared to the editors that he planned to unceasingly promote your journal, as it has uncovered to my eyes ever new horizons in the field of zoology.

This cavalier attitude to the truth seems to have been endemic to Jaroslav Hašek. Sir Cecil Parrott, his greatest English translator, biographer, and promoter, tells us that Hašek’s habits of embroidery carried over to other jobs, such as working as a correspondent for various Prague newspapers:

In Prague bars he used to sell his news stories to other correspondents at two glasses of beer apiece. The general opinion was, however, that he invented many of them and they were not worth a great deal. According to Hašek, if there were not enough suicides, accidents etc. one simply had to invent stories to entertain the readers.

One is reminded of Charles Foster Kane’s advice to his correspondent in Havana, when the latter complained complained to his editor that the war he was sent to cover simply was not happening. All he could offer him were prose poems in praise of the tropical paradise. You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war… If it were not for the fact that our ears are assaulted so frequently these days with cries of fake news! one might almost chuckle at the Czech rogue…

The reader coming across Hašek for the first time might well be shocked at his talents of deception. If he or she is interested enough by the Hašek of the Russian stories to move on to Hašek’s masterwork Švejk, he will be even more shocked to discover that his tendency to lie drew him into criminal activity. For Hašek, like his best beloved character, supplemented his livelihood by setting up kennels, exaggeratedly named the Cynological Institute [Kynologický ústav] where, along with his partner Ladislav Čižek, he trimmed and dyed mutts to sell them as purebreeds to gullible dog lovers. As Parrott tells us, an actual pedigree forged by Čížek is still preserved.

The person of Jaroslav Hašek is so incomprehensible, and yet so incomprehensibly entertaining and fascinating, that it is hard to pull oneself away from anecdotes. Most of these, as above, concern his unreliability, or his shrewdly deceptive nature; the Navajo trickster Coyote has nothing on him! We learn of him as a young man on a walking tour of that deeply religious country Slovakia, literally living off the fat of the land without spending a cent. This he achieved by knocking on the rectory door of the Catholic parish with a sob story of being turned away by the Lutheran pastor, and then, with a full belly and after a good night’s sleep, spending one more night in town by knocking at the parsonage door and complaining there of having received the same treatment at the hands of the priest. As a newspaperman, not only did he make up stories, but he had no political convictions. He wrote for whatever paper, whatever party, would pay for his pen. Indeed, he once wrote concurrently for two rival papers, one the organ of the Social Democrats and the other representing the (Czech) National Socialists — and that’s not all: he polemicised with his alter ego.

This is all very entertaining, and perhaps even endearing, at a distance. It wasn’t always so, to the people who knew — and the small number who loved — Jaroslav Hašek. Speaking of the latter, there is Jarmila, whom he married after forging an official ecclesiastical form declaring him to be a Catholic in good standing. Not only did she have a Purgatory on earth while he was in Prague; he committed bigamy by marrying a co-worker, Shura L’vova, while he was in Russia, whom he brought back with him to Czechoslovakia after the war was over. Nor were these the only hearts this improbable ladies’ man with the smooth, round face and fat, babyish body broke. In his memoirs, František Beneš speaks of that dramatic period in Hašek’s life, when he had to hide from his compatriots in central Russia after his desertion from the Czechoslovak Legions. Although the rumours in Moscow were that he had been killed, he was living in a Tatar village with some older, wiser, Tatar woman. Of course, he abandoned her immediately, as soon as the opportunity of joining the Red Army presented itself. Although at first the Bolsheviks didn’t really trust him…

Can you blame them? Who would?

Hašek spun around more often than a weathervane in March. Sir Cecil Parrott is perhaps too kind to his beloved author when he assesses his ideological infidelities in The Bad Bohemian thus: Always too impulsive to be consistent, he would throw himself passionately into what he believed in at the moment, only to change course with equal zest. If he can be said to have been capable of belief in anything! Even more generous is the assessment of Hašek’s old chum Rudolf Medek, writing in the organ of the Czechoslovak Legion in April 1918 about the turncoat humorist, who wrote harsh polemics about his former comrades after he had gone over to the Bolsheviks:

Don’t salt the soup for us, which you haven’t cooked and which you won’t partake of with us. — Go on doing what you please, what you know, and what your abilities permit you to do. If you create something wise, our heartfelt wishes for your success will go out to you. If you are an honest man, you will follow your own road to a good end. We will experience only pleasant joy from your achievements, if you become more successful than we. It seems to us that you are either a dreamer, who has learned nothing at all from life, or that you have quite a different agenda, of which we’d rather not speak…

He did speak of it in another place, calling Hašek as sentimental as old prostitutes are, a description of biting insight, for Hašek truly did have a soft heart and could weep at a moment’s notice, although the metaphor of the prostitute seems even more fitting. Whether it was the almost pathological passion, with which he threw himself into whatever interested him at the moment (as Parrott suggests), or mere cynicism (as those single-handed polemics in the Prague newspapers incline us to believe), it is true that Hašek sold out so many times it’s a wonder that, in the end, he had anything left to sell. Hašek’s greatest partisans strove, in heroically dialectical fashion, to reconcile this most characteristic trait of his to the exigencies of the integrity we expect of one another. Arnošt Kolman tries to convince us that the contradiction between the irresponsible bohemian and the serious revolutionary only seemed to be contradictory; in reality, these were two sides of the same coin. Parrott, despite his fondness for Hašek, is closer to the truth in showing us a coin with more than just two sides, if such a thing can be imagined, or, at least, arguing that the one side, the irresponsible side, is the one that most often falls face up:

And so from being a bitter opponent of the Habsburgs, he became for a short time a partisan of the Romanovs; from being an eager recruiting sergeant for the Czech Legion, he turned almost overnight into an enthusiastic propagandist for Bolshevism; while yearning to see his wife again and be taken back by her, he ruined all his chances by marrying another woman whom he certainly did not love; and finally, having seen the light and abandoned alcohol after some seventeen years of it, he went back to his old vice and let it kill him.

Jan Beneš is not sentimental at all when it comes to summing up Hašek’s character. While stating that today, a determination of the objective truth about Jaroslav Hašek is almost impossible, the preponderance of evidence leads him to a conclusion that is difficult to dispute:

It is an unpleasant truth that must be told, that […] he betrayed and wounded every person who allowed him to get close to him. […] Jaroslav Hašek simply proved himself to be so utterly independent of any sort of morality, and distanced himself from any sort of measuring stick of any sort of character, that one can speak, in his case, of an absolute absence of morality.

There’s not much more to add to that. But if there is any one unchanging fact in the kaleidoscopic life of Jaroslav Hašek, it is his great talent for writing, humorous writing, which culminated in The Good Soldier Švejk, one of the greatest novels of all time. Whatever we come to think of him after reading through the pages which follow this introduction — and in the propagandistic writings that make up the second part of the book, there is more to shiver at than to chuckle at — this one fact, that without Hašek there would be no Švejk, is justification enough to explore The Secret History of [his] Sojourn in Russia.

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Jaroslav Hašek in Russia

Hašek was born in Prague to middle-class parents on 30 April 1883, and baptised a few days later at sv. Štěpán (St. Stephen’s) church. His father was to die when Hašek was thirteen years old. In 1893, he began attending the c.k. Vyšší gymnázium (higher school) on Žitné St. One of the teachers at this school was Alois Jirásek (1851—1930), whose five-volume patriotic novel F.L. Věk attempts to tell the story of the Czech národní obrození (national revival) of the late eighteenth — early nineteenth century through the life history of its eponymous hero (whose name, not coincidentally, means century or age). The anonymous author of Hašek’s biography on the website referaty-seminarki.sk tells us that Jirásek was head-teacher of Hašek’s class for the second half of his first year. Seeing as the two writers couldn’t be more different, one wonders how many pranks the young Hašek played on the four-time Nobel Prize candidate…

During his youthful years in Prague, before he began to make his living as a journalist, Hašek was apprenticed to a chemist, and attended the Českoslovanská obchodní akademie (Czecho-Slavic Business Academy). He also started to get involved in the sometimes riotous activities of young Czech nationalists protesting the Austro-Hungarian government, and the favoured status of German speakers in Bohemia. He was only fifteen when he first came to the notice of the police authorities in Prague, for his role in an anti-German incident involving arson. If he had any political convictions at this time, they leaned towards Anarchism. But even here one must be careful when using the words Hašek and convictions in the same sentence. Sir Cecil Parrott sums up the situation beautifully:

Not that he had any deep-seated radical convictions: he was quite happy to offer his stories and feuilletons to a leading bourgeois daily like the National Newspaper or to the journals of the Otto publishing house and try to extort advances from their cashiers. It was just that he was ‘agin the government’ — opposed to authority, whatever form it took, and instinctively up in arms against those who tried to discipline him, whether they were his employers, superiors, teachers, the bureaucracy or the police.

The only political action taken by Hašek before his admittance to the Bolshevik party in Russia was the creation of the Party of Moderate Progress within the Bounds of the Law (Stranu mírného pokroku v mezích zákona) — the very name of which pokes fun at the perceived timidity of Austro-Slav politics, seeking a greater accommodation for the Slavic majority nations in Austria-Hungary. Although Hašek actively campaigned in the Imperial parliamentary elections of 1911, standing as an actual candidate from Královské Vinohrady, the activities of the Party tended towards cabaret performances, and led to a book of humorous short sketches by Hašek. It was this sort of activity — comic acting and publishing — which became Hašek’s great vocation. Even Josef Švejk, who was to bring his creator a never-diminishing fame, has his beginnings in this pre-war period in Prague, when he began to appear in short stories as the idiot in the company (blbec u kompanie).

Unlike Švejk, Hašek did not share in the anti-Serbian euphoria of his country gearing up for war at the assassination of Grand Duke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914. He donned the feldgrau of the Austrian Army when he was called up in February of the following year (and assigned to the 91st Infantry Regiment in České Budějovice, the same regiment that Švejk was to make famous in the novel). Still, there was no mistaking where his true sympathies lay. In November 1914, he was arrested in Prague for impersonating a citizen of Russia, a nation with which Austro-Hungary was then at war. Zdeněk Hoření provides an interesting police report of the incident, drawn up by Prague Police Commissar Slavíček (whom Hašek was later to satirise in one of the stories included in this book):

In going over the lists of foreigners for 24 November, it was ascertained that Jaroslav Hašek was registered at the U Valšů inn, pretending to have been born in Kiev, having arrived from Moscow. He was officially summoned to appear before us, and it was established that the person in question was indeed the well-known writer and journalist Jaroslav Hašek. During interrogation he claimed to have wanted to test whether the police were actively and effectively monitoring the evidences of foreign nationals in wartime; for this reason, he stated, he had entered false data on the registry form.

Again the clowning, again the thumb-nosing buffoonery. Cecil Parrott notes that this was not an isolated incident, for at this time Hašek was wont to frequent the bars and cafés of Prague, speaking only the (elementary) Russian he had begun to learn at the Commercial Academy. When asked why, he would reply with rather risky statements of the type Well, we’ll all be speaking it soon enough.

It is not hard to detect, beneath all the smirks and giggles, an authentic sympathy for the brother Slavic nation in the East, an affection which has its roots in the Pan-Slavism symptomatic of many generations of Czech nationalists. The Germanising policies implemented in Bohemia following the Habsburg victory at White Mountain (1620), aimed at suppressing the Slavic ethnic identity of the Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia. naturally turned the more conscious element of the nation toward dreams of some sort of union, whether spiritual or political, with the one autonomous Slavic power in the world, Russia. Germanisation was so thorough in the Czech lands that, by the early nineteenth century, the Czech language had almost died out. The modern language was saved from oblivion — almost literally — by philologists and writers of the národní obrození like Fr. Josef Dubrovský (1753—1829) and Josef Jungmann (1773—1847) who reconstructed it on the basis of the speech of the peasantry and with generous loan-words from the kindred Russian and Polish tongues.

Of course, most things are much prettier from a distance. The one Slavic nation least affected by Pan-Slavism was Poland, a great portion of which had been subjugated by the Tsarist Empire since 1795. And those Czech Pan-Slavs who had the occasion to experience Russia at first hand, like Hašek’s predecessor in absurd humour, the journalist and poet Karel Havlíček-Borovský (1821-1856) soon returned home disabused of their uncritical crush on Saint Petersburg, having come to understand why the Poles rose in rebellion three times against Russia, in an unsuccessful effort to extricate themselves from the enforced union. Yet Hašek’s generation had unlearnt, or never had learnt, such lessons. Because of Vienna’s attitude to the constituent non-German nations of the Empire, which was changing only so very, very slowly, the (again, mostly uncritical) adulation of Russia, and the hopes that the war on the horizon in 1914 would lead to the Austrian Slavs’ extrication from Vienna, was widespread. Milan Getting, the editor of the American periodical Slovenský Sokol (Slovak Falcon), thus described