SOURCE: Menhennet, Alan. Introduction to The Bachura Scandal, and Other Stories and Sketches, by Jaroslav Hašek, pp. 7-12. London: Angel Books, 1991.

In the following essay, Menhennet profiles Hašek's life and career and elucidates the defining characteristics of his short fiction.

Jaroslav Hašek was born in Prague on 30 April 1883. The inexorable but absurd logic that governs the lives of so many of his characters presided over his birth as well, for he was born both a Czech and an Austrian and lived for the greater part of his life under the authority of the strange two-headed beast that was the Habsburg Empire. Prague was the Czech capital, but it was a “provincial Austrian city”¹ and its administration was that of the strictly “Austrian” (that is, spiritually if not necessarily linguistically “German”) part of the Austro-Hungarian state. During the course of the nineteenth century, the Czechs had...