Jaroslav Hasek · 1923 · road

Jaroslav Hasek's unfinished satire. Svejk is called up, declared an imbecile, and does everything he is told with such enthusiasm that the Austro-Hungarian army cannot get him to the front. Sent south to Budejovice he misses every train and walks instead - a great wrong-way circle through southern Bohemia that Czech walkers still retrace, and which brings him back to the same village twice.

1. 1
   Prague

   A dealer in stolen dogs with certified pedigrees, discharged from the army for idiocy, hears about Sarajevo from his charwoman and goes down to the Chalice - and is arrested by a plain-clothes man before he has finished his beer.

2. 2
   Tabor

   Sent south to join the 91st at Budejovice, he is put off the train for pulling the communication cord, is fined at Tabor, drinks the fine money with a soldier he meets, and misses every subsequent train.

3. 3
   Milevsko

   He starts walking west instead of south, working through every marching song he knows - and Hasek gives the chapter its title here, invoking Xenophon: to keep going forward without a map, that is called an anabasis.

4. 4
   Kvetov

   West of Milevsko, out of songs and starting again from the beginning - and between here and Vraz he meets the kindly old woman who gives him bread and a set of confidently wrong directions.

5. 5
   Vraz

   The old woman's village, where her brother-in-law Melicharek is at Radomysl - and the point at which Svejk starts taking directions from strangers, which is how a two-day walk becomes a two-week circle.

6. 6
   Malcin

   He goes north to Malcin against the old woman's advice, drinks a brandy in a pub that is still standing, is invited by a drunk accordion player to hide in a pigsty at Horazdovice for the duration - and declines.

7. 7
   Cizova

   Back down to the crossroads at Kresice and straight on to Cizova - which the old woman had specifically told him to avoid, and where the accordion player has gone to report him to the gendarmes.

8. 8
   Sedlice

   South-west across country he has no business being in, further from Budejovice with every village - and Hasek keeps the tone exactly level, as though this were an ordinary way to reach your regiment.

9. 9
   Horazdovice

   The furthest west he gets, sixty kilometres wrong. Twenty-seven kilometres in a day through the Bohemian villages, fed and sheltered by people who assume he is a deserter and mostly approve.

10. 10
    Radomysl

    He calls on old Melicharek in the Dolejsi street behind Floriánek with greetings from his sister at Vraz, and is asked repeatedly for his papers - a suspicious man, much given to talk of brigands and thieves.

11. 11
    Putim

    He sleeps in a haystack, and the gendarmerie sergeant Flanderka decides he is a Russian spy - and writes the report drunk, in the passage that is the best thing in the novel about the Austrian state.

12. 12
    Steken

    Escorted onward and then loose again, still going in the wrong direction with total confidence - the round trip having by now taken in most of the Prachen region and none of the way to Budejovice.

13. 13
    Strakonice

    With the old shepherd's plan: get to Strakonice, Volyne and Dub, where people are honest enough to leave things unlocked, and find a civilian coat - which is precisely how deserters were caught.

14. 14
    Volyne

    South again into the Sumava foothills, and the pattern of the whole chapter: every village is somebody's home and none of them is his, and each one moves him further from the regiment he is trying to reach.

15. 15
    Dub

    A village of 529 people, all of them Czech-speaking - and past it the Schwarzenberg sheepfold where he shelters, and where a pond keeper tells him he is going entirely the wrong way.

16. 16
    Vodnany

    He sees a town to the south and skirts it neatly across the meadows, taking it for somewhere he should avoid - and the morning sun finds him in the snowy slopes above Protivin, still going.

17. 17
    Protivin

    Forward, he tells himself, duty calls, I have to get to Budejovice - and by unhappy chance, instead of turning south from Protivin toward Budejovice, his steps take him north toward Pisek.

18. 18
    Putim

    At noon he sees a village, comes down the hill, and reads the sign on the first house: Obec Putim. Christ, he sighs, I am back in Putim, where I slept in the haystack - which is the joke the whole chapter is built for.

19. 19
    Pisek

    Marched in to Captain Konig, who reads Flanderka's report, dismisses it as drunken rambling, and puts him on a train to Budejovice under escort - which is the only way Svejk was ever going to arrive.

20. 20
    Ceske Budejovice

    The regiment at last, and Lieutenant Lukas, who acquires him as a batman and spends the rest of the novel being destroyed by his devoted and entirely literal obedience.

21. 21
    Kiralyhida

    Bruck an der Leitha on the Austro-Hungarian border, where a letter Svejk delivers to a Hungarian's wife starts a street fight - and Colonel Schroder concludes the real problem is Hungarians, and lets them off.

22. 22
    Raab

    The march battalion moves east by train through Hungary in cattle trucks, at the speed of the empire's administration - which is the pace of the second half of the book, and the joke it keeps making.

23. 23
    Humenne

    Into Slovakia and the country the war has already been through, where the Hungarian soldiery are hanging people on suspicion - and where there is a statue of Svejk at the railway station today, by the well.

24. 24
    Sanok

    Galicia, and the closer they get to the front the less anybody knows where the front is - a battalion advancing on foot behind a staff whose maps and orders contradict each other daily.

25. 25
    Felsztyn

    Sent ahead to find billets, Svejk finds a Russian uniform by a pond, tries it on, and is arrested by his own side as a prisoner of war - and Hasek died with him still in the column, and the book stops mid-sentence.