The writer Yaroslav Hasek lived an amazing life, rich in the most unexpected turns, both pleasant and not so. Over the years, he managed to travel pretty well, simultaneously becoming an ardent anti-militarist. In Soviet times, Hasek’s work was very popular, and his name is familiar to most people who grew up in the USSR.
The writer was a Czech, and it was in the Czech Republic that he became most famous. At the same time, he was born in Austria-Hungary, but he never connected himself with this country. In his work, Yarosalv Hasek used more than a hundred pseudonyms, constantly inventing new ones. He generally loved hoaxes, and often composed various fables about himself, actively distributing them. That is why there are not so many reliable facts about Hasek’s biography that it’s not easy to distinguish truth from fiction. During his travels in Europe, Yaroslav Hasek mastered more than ten languages. When the future writer was his teenager, he was nearly shot when the patrolmen detained him on the street and found stones in his pockets. Times were turbulent then, and the patrol decided that Hasek was involved in the riots. In fact, he collected stones for the collection.
During his life, Yaroslav Hasek wrote more than one and a half thousand works. Most of them were small – notes, feuilletons, stories. But his most famous work, of course, is a book about the adventures of the brave soldier Schweik. Yaroslav Hasek took an active part in the Ilindensky uprising on the side of the rebels – Macedonians and Bulgarians. The Austrian government declared Hasek a traitor after he published some of his stories about the First World War. The writer was never distinguished by a calm character. Numerous evidence has been preserved, in particular, the detention protocols, according to which he was arrested more than once for fights and participation in unrest.
At one time in Prague, Yaroslav Hasek served as editor-in-chief of the animal magazine. But he was bored, and he sent articles to the publication about supposedly just discovered, but actually made-up animals, like idiotic dinosaurs. When this prank of his was revealed, the writer was immediately fired. Yaroslav Hasek possessed absolute memory. He never forgot anything that caught his eye. He had been expecting weddings with his beloved woman for a long thirteen years. Neither he nor his chosen one had the money to arrange a celebration, so they had to wait so long. The first work of Yaroslav Hasek in his life was the post of a henchman in a pharmacy. He was arranged there at the request of his mother, but the future writer did not appreciate this help, quit his job and went on foot to travel around Europe. The first published work of Hasek was a story written by him at the age of seventeen.
Throughout his life, Yaroslav Hasek has not achieved financial prosperity. Despite the fact that he rarely had money, he easily parted with them and willingly helped all his friends and acquaintances. The book about the brave soldier Schweik was never completed. The writer was married twice, and they even wanted to judge him for bigamy, since he married in the RSFSR for the second time, without officially terminating his first marriage, concluded in Czechoslovakia. But thanks to the complexity of international law, Yaroslav Hasek still managed to avoid a lawsuit. The writer, in his own words, had never read his own novel about the soldier Schweik. Despite the fact that most of his life, Yaroslav Hasek was an ardent anarchist, in adulthood he became a communist. Actually, this is partly why it was circulated in the USSR so actively. Throughout his life, Hasek lived here and there, constantly renting housing. He acquired his first and only home only a year before his death. The writer could not boast of good health, since he drank a lot of alcohol and ate mainly from various eateries. Most of the works of Yaroslav Hasek was written by him in a variety of taverns and taverns. Due to his 5-year stay in the USSR and rapprochement with the Communists, after returning to Czechoslovakia, Hasek was ostracized. He was called a traitor, and even people who were once close to him did not want to deal with him. For his activities as an agitator of the Red Army in Czechoslovakia, the writer was sentenced to death, but he managed to escape and make his way to the Soviet Union. The idea to become a writer came to Yaroslav Hasek when he discovered that he could finance his travels in Europe by selling his travel notes to publishers. For the first time in Russia, then back in the Russian Empire, Hasek was in 1915, when he was captured during the hostilities. During his stay in Russia, he mastered two new languages for him, Bashkir and Russian.
