The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War: The Classic Black Humor War Literature Comedy That Defined 20th Century Antiwar Satire

Discover "perhaps the funniest novel ever written"(The Guardian ), now lovingly reissued from Harper Perennial Modern Classics

“The classic comic novel of the First World War.” — The New Yorker • “A literary masterpiece.” — New York Review of Books • “One of the greatest works of 20th century literature.” — Boston Globe 

Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk follows the adventures of Josef Svejk, a boisterous and sometimes bumbling (or brilliantly subversive?) Czech soldier, as he navigates the trials of World War I. Thrust into the Austro-Hungarian Empire's army in 1914, Svejk, "one of the great characters of 20th century literature" (New Republic), embarks on a wild trip through war-ravaged Europe as he fakes illnesses, is captured by his own men, and takes on various quixotic quests to avoid arriving at the front lines, always with a bizarre—and often hilarious—anecdote at the ready. Predating countercultural American classics like Catch-22 by a generation, The Good Soldier Svejk was the first great antiwar satire, and still one of the finest ever written.