阅读罗斯拉夫·哈谢克 Jaroslav Hasek在小说之家的作品!!! |
商业学校辍学后,哈谢克没有进银行去当职员,却选择了写作的道路。读书期间,他就经常为《人民报》写稿,一九○七年当上了《公社》的主编。他经常到内地对矿工及纺织工人演讲,不断受到奥匈帝国特务的监视,曾因反抗警察坐过一个月的牢。一九○八年他两次为警察局传讯,一次是由于他试图扯下挂在温塞斯拉斯广场上的奥匈帝国国旗,另一次控告他的罪名是“扰乱治安”。一九一○年他主编《动物世界》,次年,由于他编造了一些虚构的动物形象,被出版商弗克斯解雇了。
一九○三年他一度参加过无政府主义组织,一九○七年就断然同他们决裂。
哈谢克是一位辛勤的作家。一九○○至一九○八年间,他写过一百八十五篇讽刺小品。一九○九年开始写短篇小说,最初登在约塞夫·拉达(1887~1957,即为本书作插图的那位画家)所主编的《漫画报》上。他生平爱好徒步旅行,并喜欢深入布拉格下层社会。他在十五年的文学生涯中,写了不下一千篇短篇小说,对自己所观察到的社会上种种丑恶现象,进行了无情的鞭答。《好兵帅克》最初也是以一组短篇小说的形式问世的。此外,他写的剧本也曾上演过。
正像他所创造的帅克这个人物一样,哈谢克本人在现实生活中也干过不少令奥匈帝国当局瞋目切齿的妙举。一九一一年,当奥匈帝国大搞议会选举时,哈谢克组织了一个所谓“在合法范围内主张温和及和平的政党”,并在一家下等酒馆里发表“竞选”演说,对奥匈帝国的政治社会制度进行了猛烈抨击。事后他告诉人说,这是为了替那家酒馆招徕主顾。另一回发生在第一次世界大战初期。他住进布拉格一家旅馆,在旅客登记簿“国籍”栏填上与奥匈帝国相敌对的“俄罗斯”,又在“来此何事”栏填上“窥探奥地利参谋部的活动”。于是,蠢猪般的警察局立即派人把该旅馆密密匝匝地包围起来,以为这下可抓到了一名重要间谍。及至真相大白后,警察严厉责问他为什么在战争期间开这种玩笑,哈谢克带着一副真诚神情回答说,他对奥地利警察的效率不大放心,是想考验一下他们警惕性如何。警方哭笑不得,罚他坐了五天牢。一九一五年——即第一次世界大战爆发后的第二年,哈谢克应征入伍,参加第九十一步兵团,也就是帅克所属的那个部队。起初他们驻扎在捷斯凯—布迪尤维斯。
当年九月,俄军突破防线,切断了哈谢克所属部队同奥匈帝国主力军之间的联系。
哈谢克终于被俄军俘虏。被俘后,哈谢克先在基辅,后来又转移到乌拉尔山南端的托兹克伊。在俘虏营里,他也没有间断文学活动。他当上了在基辅出版的一家捷克文杂志《捷克斯洛伐克》的记者,并继续从事《好兵帅克》的写作。一九一七年,这家杂志社出版了《好兵帅克》的单行本。他还模仿英国作家狄更斯的《匹克威克分传》,写了《匹克威克俱乐部》,内容也都是对奥匈帝国统治者昏庸腐败的讽刺。
当时俄军在俘虏中间组织了一支捷克兵团与奥匈帝国作战,由于哈谢克一时认识不清,他就报名参加了。但是后来当这个兵团变质为俄国* 白卫军的盟友——即臭名昭著的捷克斯洛伐克师团,并开往马拉河去反对布尔什维克时,哈谢克逃走了。他躲在萨马拉县沃尔霍河流域的摩尔维诺。一九一八年,哈谢克在基辅毅然参加了红军,一个月后,成为布尔什维克党员。那个反动师团宣布他为“卖国贼”,并下令通缉。据说有一次他赴萨马拉为红军办事时,曾为该师团所俘。但他又成功地逃掉了。他积极参加宣传工作,动员在俄国的捷克士兵支援十月革命。他曾在辛比尔斯克参加著名的红军第五军,并成为军队和党的干队,后任布古尔马市的部队副司令员。一九一九年他被委任为乌发市外国共产党员委员会的书记,同年任红箭印刷厂的党委书记。一九二○年任红军第五军政治部国际组组长。哈谢克在伊尔库兹克时,担任过德文杂志《狂飙》、匈文杂志《进攻》和布里亚特蒙古文杂志《曙光》的领导工作。哈谢克在一封信中曾谈到他在伊尔库兹克时结识一位参加十月革命的中国将军。哈谢克跟那位将军学习中文,同时教他捷克文。他十分遗憾地写道,在八万六千个中国方块字中间,他只认得八十个。据说当时红军革命军事委员会还曾请哈谢克主编一种中文刊物。
一九二○年,捷克社会民主党派了个访苏代表团,他们请哈谢克回国工作。他立即同意了。同年十二月,他回到布拉格,并为社会民主党左翼的机关报《红色权力报》写文章。当时捷克是个新建立的共和国。不久,哈谢克被政敌诬蔑为“奸细”。
但他继续不屈不挠地从事《好兵帅克》的写作。由于找不到出版者,一九二一年在朋友们的资助下,自费把第一卷刊印成书,并且同友人上街去叫卖,结果大为成功。他本计划共写成四卷。开始写第四卷时,他得了疟疾。在病榻上,他用口述的方式继续创作。一九二三年,刚写完第三章,他就因心脏麻痹和肺炎溘然与世长辞。时年还不满四十。对捷克,对欧洲,对人类进步的文学事业,他的夭折都是莫大的损失!后来他的朋友卡尔·万尼克把全书续完,但因文笔有显著差别,近年来的版本多删去不用了。
捷克著名画家约塞夫·拉达为《好兵帅克》所画的插图是与原书齐名的不朽之作。事实上,哈谢克生前并没看到这些跟他的作品知此相得益彰的插图。他仅仅在一九二一年请拉达为此书画过一幅封面。一九二四年,也即是哈谢克逝世的次年,拉达才应《捷克日报》星期日特辑的编者之约,为《好兵帅克》作了五四○幅插图,在该刊上连载,每幅插图下面并由画家从原著中选摘一段作为说明。据统计,拉达先后曾为哈谢克的全部作品画过一三三九幅速写,其中仅《好兵帅克》他就画了九○九幅,每幅都是这么道劲有力,轮廓分明,疏疏几笔,就能攫住书中人物——尤其是主人公帅克——的灵魂,在书籍插图史上,别树一格。
拉达出生于一个穷鞋匠的家庭,自幼就喜欢绘画。他早期受捷克现实主义画家密克拉士·阿烈士(1852~1913)的影响颇深。十四岁在一家装订作坊当学徒,因而接触到许多附有插图的名著。从那时起,他就开始利用工余作画。一九○四年,五月出版社第一次印行了他的四幅画。
拉达还喜欢研究民间装束,搜集童谣。他的绘画的独创性是同捷克丰富的民族传统紧密结合的。他的线条朴素自然,色彩鲜明活泼,笔下充满着民间生活的诗意。
拉达最初为好几部童话作过插图,又编绘《我的字母》、《愉快的生物学》等启蒙性读物。一九二五到一九三五年间,他主编过儿童刊物《小花儿》、漫画杂志《动物世界》,为《红色权力报》作过画,并替另一讽刺作家哈沃里契克·勃鲁斯基的作品画过插图。但是拉达主要是以为《好兵帅克》所作的这批插图而闻名的。
像帅克那样一个普通的人,一向就是拉达画作中的主要题材。他从来不画没有人物的风景,在他的画面上活跃着的总是手工业工人、泥水匠、农民、磨坊工人、看林人、老太婆或小孩。他对哈谢克这部作品有深湛的体会,在插图风格上与原作达到高度的和谐,这是因为他们二人从一九○七年就结下深挚的友谊,这种友谊是建立在他们共同对人民炽烈的热爱和对反动统治者深切的痛恨上。在哈谢克创作这部小说的年月里,他们一直密切交往,一度还一道生活过。对哈谢克作品中所表达的思想感情,拉达了解得最为透彻。一九四七年,捷克政府曾颁给他以“人民艺术家”的光辉称号。
Life and work
Hašek was born in Prague, Bohemia (then within Austria-Hungary, now the Czech Republic), the son of high school math teacher Josef Hašek and his wife Kateřina. Poverty forced the family, with three children—another son Bohuslav, three years Hašek's younger, and an orphan cousin Maria—to move often, more than ten times during his infancy. He never knew a real home, and this rootlessness clearly influenced his life of wanderlust. When he was thirteen, Hašek's father died from excessive alcohol intake, and his mother was unable to raise him firmly. The teenage boy dropped out of high school at the age of 15 to become a druggist, but eventually graduated from business school. He worked briefly as a bank officer and also as a dog salesman (a profession he was to attribute to his hero Švejk and from which many of the improbable anecdotes told by Švejk are drawn). He preferred, however, the liberated profession of a writer and journalist, though he had entered into the circles of gipsies and vagabonds, taking up many bad habits and becoming unruly and hard to track down.
In 1906 he joined the anarchist movement, having taken part in the 1897 anti-German riots in Prague as a schoolboy. He gave regular lectures to groups of proletarian workers and, in 1907, became the editor of the anarchist journal Komuna. As an anarchist in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his movements were closely monitored by the police and he was arrested and imprisoned on a regular basis; his offenses include numerous cases of vandalism and at least one case of assaulting a police officer, for which he spent a month in prison. He satirised the lengths to which the Austro-Hungarian police would go to entrap suspected political subversives in the opening chapters of The Good Soldier Svejk.
Hašek met Jarmila Mayerová in 1907, and fell in love with her. However, due to his bohemian lifestyle, her parents found him an unsuitable match for their daughter. In response to this, Hašek attempted to back away from his radical politics and get a settled job as a writer. When he was arrested for desecrating a flag in Prague, Mayerová's parents took her into the country, in hope that this would end their relationship. This move was unsuccessful in that it failed to end the affair, but it did result in Hašek's renewed focus in writing. By 1909, he had sixty-four short stories published, over twice as many as in any previous year, and he was also named as the editor of the journal The Animal World. This job did not last long, however, as he was soon dismissed for publishing articles about imaginary animals which he had dreamed up (though this furnished further material for Švejk).
In 1910, he married Jarmila Mayerová. However the marriage was to prove an unhappy one, and lasted little more than three years. Mayerová went back to live with her parents in 1913 after he was caught trying to fake his own death. At the outbreak of World War I, Hašek lived spasmodically[clarification needed] with cartoonist Josef Lada, who later illustrated the Good Soldier Švejk. Eventually he was drafted and joined the army; many of the characters in Švejk are based on people he met during the war. He did not spend long fighting in the front line, being captured by the Russians in 1915. He had a relatively easy time in the Russian POW camps, he was assigned to the camp's commander as a secretary. He was allowed to leave the camp in 1916 to join the newly formed Czech Legion as a propagandist.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, he remained in Russia as a member of the Bolshevik party. He joined the Red Army and became an rmy unit commissar. During this time he also remarried (although he was still married to Jarmila). He eventually returned again to Prague in 1920 in the hope of finishing The Good Soldier Švejk. However, in some circles he was not a popular figure, being branded a traitor and a bigamist, and struggled to find a publisher for his works.
Before the war, in 1912, he published the book The Good Soldier Švejk and other strange stories (Dobrý voják Švejk a jiné podivné historky) where the figure of Švejk appeared for the first time but it was only after the war in his famous novel that Švejk became a sancta simplicitas, a cheerful idiot who joked about the war as if it were a tavern brawl. By this time, Hašek had become gravely ill and dangerously overweight. He no longer wrote, but dictated the chapters of Švejk from his bedroom in village Lipnice, where he unexpectedly died in 1923, at age 39, of tuberculosis contracted during the war.
Legacy
Since his death, all of Hašek's short stories have been collected and published in the Czech language.
For decades (until 2000) a Festival of humor and satire "Haškova Lipnice" had been held in Lipnice.
Namesakes
Asteroid 2734 Hašek was named after Jaroslav Hašek.
Asteroid 7896 Švejk was named after the main character of his most famous novel.
A EuroCity class train on the route Prague - Bratislava - Budapest operated by České dráhy bears the name Jaroslav Hašek.
Bibliography
The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War, translated by Cecil Parrott, with original illustrations by Josef Lada
The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, translated by Zenny K. Sadlon
The Red Commissar: Including further adventures of the good soldier Švejk and other stories
Bachura Scandal and Other Stories and Sketches, translated by Alan Menhenett
Biography by Cecil Parrott, The Bad Bohemian (ISBN 0-349-12698-4).