You're safe here! Over the past few decades Americans have been subjected to some of the same social, political, economic, and moral phenomena that Europeans have endured for ages and which are the backdrop to this iconoclastic and soul probing epic. Now more than ever before, Americans will be able to relate to the story and its main character. And they will enjoy doing it.

The Centennial English Edition of The Good Soldier Švejk

The translation project by Zenny K. Sadlon is hosted at svejk.zenny.com.

[Booksellers or fund raisers, for wholesale orders of The Centennial Edition  One, contact publisher directly by email!]


"I kept thinking: Nobody can be this smart or this stupid. I've gotta decide which way this man is going." - Ruth Cooper
 


Enter the world of Švejk [shvake]!
Austrian troops entering the town of Przemyśl
during World War I


 


Joseph Heller said

that if it weren’t for his having read
The Good Soldier Švejk
he would never had written his American novel Catch-22.

The Good Soldier Švejk  

Enter the world of Švejk [shvake]!
Karel Stroff's 1911 drawing for the precursor story of Švejk.

Enter the world of Švejk [shvake] at SvejkCentral!
Cover of the original 1921 issue of the serialized book The Fateful Adventures Of The Good Soldier Švejk, drawn by Josef Lada.
is a truly great satire (perhaps the greatest of them all) on the most central feature of social life in the past century and a half (at least) in most modern industrialized countries—the ubiquitous presence of huge, labyrinthine bureaucratic structures ostensibly set in place to make modern society more efficient, equal, and fair, but, in fact, reducing life for those who have to deal with them to what often amounts to an incomprehensible and out-of-control game whose major players never tire of announcing in noble-sounding prose and stirring poetry the importance of the structure and its alleged purpose but who, in their daily practice, show no signs of any significant humanity in dealing with subordinates or those whom the bureaucracy is supposed to serve. That target is something we all understand (because we have to deal with it, no matter where we live), and thus the impact of this satire extends well beyond the particular social and political realities of the world it depicts.- Ian Johnston


 

The original 'Chicago version'

English Translation in three volumes,

plus The Centennial Edition:


 
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"... which translation you read will give you a different experience with the titular character, and the story in general. In short, the Sadlon translation gives the reader a novel with extraordinarily more depth and layers than the Parrot translation. ...  Parrot’s vernacular obscures the subtleties and nuances that make a huge difference in what Hašek was communicating to the reader. I can’t state this enough, the Sadlon edition is a much different book that unmasks a significantly more intricate picture ..."

- Corto's review Part 1 and Part 2 on Goodreads
"Let things have been as they have been,
nonetheless they've been somehow;
So far it has never been
that things would be nohow."



 Švejk represents
one of the most unique and successful
survival strategies
ever conceived by man.


This Chicago woman believes you won't be able to put the book down, and here she tells you why:





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