US Edition It's 90 years today since bohemian writer Jaroslav Hašek died of heart failure, overweight and aged just 39, in the village of Lipnice.
His legacy remains because of a 1923 novel, The Adventures Of The Good Soldier Švejk, which is a comic masterpiece.
The Czech writer Arnošt Lustig said that Joseph Heller once told him at a New York party for Milos Forman in the late 1960s that he couldn not have written Catch-22 without first reading Hašek’s unfinished World War One satire. In Hašek’s bitterly funny tale, a crazy state bureaucracy traps a hapless soldier - in much the same way Heller's hero Yossarian is trapped.
The Good Soldier Švejk was a provocative, mickey-taking book and was removed from Czechoslovak army libraries in 1925, the Polish translation was confiscated in 1928 and it was suppressed in Bulgaria. The German translation burned on Nazi bonfires in 1933.
The power of Švejk to subvert continued long after the author's death. Gustáv Husák, the General Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party who replaced Prague Spring reformer Alexander Dubček in 1968, told the people in the late 1970s to "stop Svejking!".
In the book, Švejk always had a reason for his mishaps, such as joining the enemy by mistake. He undermines the authority of the Austrian monarchy through his feigned stupidity. "Great times call for great men," was Hašek's ironic comment about Švejk.
Since his death, Hašek's 1,200 short stories have been published in Czech, and there was an annual festival of satire, Haškova Lipnice, in the author's home village. Asteroid 7896 Švejk was named after the anti-hero, and there have been film adaptations, an opera, a musical and a play written by Bertolt Brecht based on the book. Peter Sellers used quotes from Švejk in his movie A Shot in the Dark.
Hašek's books remain in print and there is a whole group of academics and enthusiasts, called Švejkologists, who still study his remarkable work. Time for a re-read, perhaps. Mad times call for great books.