Hailed as “one of the greatest works of 20th century literature” (Boston Globe) and frequently compared to Catch-22, Jaroslav Hasek’s comic masterpiece follows a WWI soldier’s quixotic journey to the front lines— now available from Harper Perennial Modern Classics

“Continues to have an astonishing afterlife. ... The Good Soldier Svejk is commonly cited as an ancestor of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and many other anti-war novels. ... The novel’s continued resonance suggests how deep a nerve Hasek touched. His comic hero highlights the illogic of war so brilliantly that Svejk’s character has been absorbed into Western culture, speaking to many generations and their different wars.”— New York Times

“Rich and ranging, endlessly inventive. … The predicaments of Svejk in an absurd world still continue. And the laughter echoes.”

The Good Soldier Svejk follows Josef Svejk (“one of the great characters of 20th century literature”—New Republic), a boisterous and sometimes bumbling (or brilliantly subversive?) Czech soldier, through the trials of World War I. Beginning with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914, we follow one of the great comic heroes of the 20th century on a wild trip through war-ravaged Europe, as he fakes illnesses, is captured by his own men, and embarks on various quixotic quests, always with a bizarre—and often hilarious—anecdote at the ready. Predating countercultural American classics like Catch-22 (whose defining paradox about the insanity of anyone who would volunteer for war is liberally adapted from Svejk’s own invocation “The best thing you can do… is pretend to be an idiot”) by a generation, The Good Soldier Svejk was one of the first anti-war satires, and still one of the finest ever written.

Featuring Cecil Parrott’s lively, unabridged translation, as well as the book’s original illustrations, this will be the definitive publication of Hasek’s masterpiece for years to come.