SOURCE: Review of The Red Commissar, by Jaroslav Hašek. Publishers Weekly 220, no. 13 (25 September 1981): 76.

In the following review, the anonymous critic provides a positive assessment of The Red Commissar.

It was in 1911 that Hašek first got the idea of the anti-hero who later became the central character in that classic multivolume satirical novel The Good Soldier Svejk. In this collection of stories appearing in English for the first time [The Red Commissar], there are five early Svejk tales in which the sad-sack Czech soldier makes the Austrian military bureaucracy act like fools. In 1918, Hašek found himself in Russia as a Bolshevik commissar in the village of Bugulma; and during the two years he served there he observed Soviet bureaucracy in action. However, in the nine Bugulma stories in this collection, the satire is less savage than in the Svejk tales. Hašek was prolific, and his...