The Czechs in a Nutshell

However, the most unique and fantastic Czech surnames are those created from verbs. In other words, they describe an action. Take, for instance the common surname Vyskočil, which literally means jumped out. It’s hard to say who jumped out of what, but Moldanová the onomatologist believes it originated when the first Vyskočil jumped out of a window during a brawl in the local hospoda. The stories behind surnames such as Dupal (Stamped his feet), Navrátil (He who returned), Stejskal (He who grumbled), Pospíšil (He who was in a hurry), or Stojespal (He who slept standing on his feet) are less clear.

Logically, when people received surnames because of something they did, they could also perfectly well receive surnames because of something they didn’t do, as, for instance, Nesnídal (He who didn’t eat breakfast) and Netušil (He who didn’t suspect anything).

The imaginativeness and keen humour of Czech surnames is simply unique. Nobody has expressed the magic of Czech surnames better and more precisely than Pavel Eisner, who knew Czech culture as thoroughly as its German and Jewish counterparts:

“The Czech nation’s history manifests its tragedy by forcing tragic situations and experiences on a people whom nature has equipped with a large, mental supply of tragedy. Therefore, they are far more than other nations susceptible to life’s bright sides, to smile and laughter, and to mockery and ridicule.”

Švejk, The Good Soldier

The Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy once said that a place in world literature only is available to those countries that can boast at least one work with such reputation that it bulldozes the way for others. Where Czech literature is concerned, there can be no discussion that Jaroslav Hašek’s four books about the Soldier Švejk represent such a bulldozer. Since their publication in the early 1920s, the Švejk books have been translated into more than 50 languages, and the slack-jawed and boozing anti-hero is still considered to be one of the Czechs’ largest contributions to world literature.

This, however, does not mean that the Czechs themselves regard Jaroslav Hašek as a brilliant writer and Švejk as a national treasure. Just like two other writers with roots in Bohemia and Moravia — Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera — Hašek and his Good Soldier also generate more controversy than praise. But unlike German-writing Kafka or now French-writing Kundera, the controversy is not because Hašek doesn’t fill the requirements to be called a proper Czech. The problem is, as the historian Jan P. Kučera points out, that he is linked more closely to the Czechs and Czech culture than most people find pleasant.

The objections against Hašek and his literary hero can be sorted roughly into two groups — those related to the author, and those linked to Švejk’s morality (or rather his astonishing lack of it).

Admittedly, Hašek’s personal biography would be a nightmare to any good burgher anxious about his country’s good image. During his 40-year life — coincidentally, he was born in 1883, the same year as Franz Kafka, and died only a year earlier — Hašek held a fixed job for only six months, when he worked as a clerk at Slavia Bank. For the rest of his turbulent life, he existed on the very fringe of society, earning a living as a freelance writer based in Prague’s hospodas.

Besides being a well-known drunkard, hooligan jailbird, anarchist and provocateur (typically, The Party for Moderate Progress within the Framework of the Law, which he established, struggled to promote nationwide alcoholism), Hašek was a bigamist — during the First World War he married a Russian woman without having been divorced from his Czech wife — while his real sexual orientation was very likely homosexual.

Just to complicate his personality, he suffered from manic depression, which explains his desperate alcoholism (Kučera quotes him saying that his brain didn’t work without booze) and his premature death in 1923. In Hašek’s lifetime, Švejk was published in flimsy booklets, which were sold at local hospodas. His international breakthrough, largely facilitated by Kafka’s friend Max Brod (see: Germans) took place only several years after Hašek had left this world.

Now, one might rightfully object that an author’s biography, however shocking, shouldn’t have any relevance to his literary work. The problem, however, is that most Czechs find too many similarities between Hašek and his hero Švejk to distinguish between them.