Author: Jaroslav HasekPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 440
Book Description
The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, Book Two
Author: Jaroslav HašekPublisher: Good Soldier Švejk
ISBN: 1438916701
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 229
Book Description
A picaresque series of tales about an ordinary man's successful quest to survive, and a funny but unrelentingly savage assault on the very idea of bureaucratic officialdom as a human enterprise conferring benefits on those who live under its control, and on the various justifications bureaucracies offer for their own existence.
Behind the Lines
Author: Jaroslav Hašek Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
ISBN: 802463287X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 129
Book Description
The collection of short stories entitled Behind the Lines: Bulguma and Other Stories draws on Hašek’s experience from revolutionary Russia. In a manner similar to that employed in his caricatures of the pre-war monarchy, he satirically captures events of the Bolshevik revolution from the perspective of a Red commissar in a combination of grotesque humor and sarcasm. Historical events serve merely as part of the historical mystification. Hašek presents them as he perceived them as a man and participant in historical events. He depicts them primarily as simple and human, pushing his critical view into the background. On the border of a comic exaggeration and a realistic depiction, an amusing story about a forgotten Tartar town of Bugulma unfolds featuring the Soviet commander of the Tver Revolutionary Regiment, drunk Yerokhimov, and Comrade Gašek, the Commanding Officer of Bugulma. Employing humor and exaggeration, Hašek demonstrates the zealotry of the revolutionary period as well as the stupidity and simple human insecurity of authoritarians. The collection of short stories, Behind the Lines, also includes other sketches by Hašek, written at the same time.
Author: The Yid
Author: Paul GoldbergPublisher: Picador
ISBN: 1250079047
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
A DEBUT NOVEL OF DARING ORIGINALITY, THE YID GUARANTEES THAT YOU WILL NEVER THINK OF STALINIST RUSSIA, SHAKESPEARE, THEATER, YIDDISH, OR HISTORY THE SAME WAY AGAIN Moscow, February 1953. A week before Stalin's death, his final pogrom, "one that would forever rid the Motherland of the vermin," is in full swing. Three government goons arrive in the middle of the night to arrest Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an actor from the defunct State Jewish Theater. But Levinson, though an old man, is a veteran of past wars, and his shocking response to the intruders sets in motion a series of events both zany and deadly as he proceeds to assemble a ragtag group to help him enact a mad-brilliant plot: the assassination of a tyrant. While the setting is Soviet Russia, the backdrop is Shakespeare: A mad king has a diabolical plan to exterminate and deport his country's remaining Jews. Levinson's cast of unlikely heroes includes Aleksandr Kogan, a machine-gunner in Levinson's Red Army band who has since become one of Moscow's premier surgeons; Frederick Lewis, an African American who came to the USSR to build smelters and stayed to work as an engineer, learning Russian, Esperanto, and Yiddish; and Kima Petrova, an enigmatic young woman with a score to settle. And wandering through the narrative, like a crazy Soviet Ragtime, are such historical figures as Paul Robeson, Solomon Mikhoels, and Marc Chagall. As hilarious as it is moving, as intellectual as it is violent, Paul Goldberg's THE YID is a tragicomic masterpiece of historical fiction.
The Red Commissar
Author: Jaroslav HasekPublisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571310036
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Book Description
Jaroslav Hasek is best known for his satirical masterpiece The Good Soldier Svejk. That has been described as 'Perhaps the funniest novel ever written.' Although his life was short and chaotic, Hasek did however write more as this volume tellingly reveals. In his preface, Cecil Parrott, translator and biographer of Hasek, crisply defines its purpose.. 'All the world has heard of Svejk, but few are familiar with the countless other characters Hasek created in his stories and sketches, which together with his feuilletons and articles are though to number some twelve hundred. The best of these deserve to be made available to the Western public and are included in this volume.' The range is wide. There is a selection from his Bugulma stories (Hasek as Bolshevik and Red Commissar), some early Svejk stories, reminiscences of Hasek's apprenticeship days, and the hilariously funny speeches made by Hasek when promoting his political 'Party of Moderate Progress within the bounds of the Law'.
Author: Michael John NimchukAt Night All Blood Is Black
Author: David DiopPublisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374720479
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 160
Book Description
*WINNER OF THE 2021 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE* *ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2021* Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction Shortlisted for the 2022 DUBLIN Literary Award "Astonishingly good." —Lily Meyer, NPR "So incantatory and visceral I don’t think I’ll ever forget it." —Ali Smith, The Guardian | Best Books of 2020 One of The Wall Street Journal's 11 best books of the fall | One of The A.V. Club's fifteen best books of 2020 |A Sunday Times best book of the year Selected by students across France to win the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, David Diop’s English-language, historical fiction debut At Night All Blood is Black is a “powerful, hypnotic, and dark novel” (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the trenches of the First World War. Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called “Chocolat” soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man’s Land. Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa’s mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German’s severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa’s deeds with admiration, but soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isn’t a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend? Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop's At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man’s descent into madness.
The Good Soldier Svejk
Author: Jaroslav HašekPublisher: Penguin Classics
ISBN: 9780140449914
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
In The Good Soldier Svejk, celebrated Czech writer and anarchist Jaroslav Hasek combined dazzling wordplay and piercing satire in a hilariously subversive depiction of the futility of war. Good-natured and garrulous, Svejk becomes the Austrian army's most loyal Czech soldier when he is called up on the outbreak of World War I—although his bumbling attempts to get to the front serve only to prevent him from reaching it. Playing cards and getting drunk, he uses all his cunning and genial subterfuge to deal with the police, clergy, and officers who chivy him toward battle. Cecil Parrott's vibrant translation conveys the brilliant irreverence of this classic about a hapless Everyman caught in a vast bureaucratic machine. “Brilliant . . . Perhaps the funniest novel ever written.” —George Monbiot
The Good Soldier
Author: Ford Madox FordPublisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781727680195
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 176
Book Description
The Good Soldier A Tale of Passion by Ford Madox Ford At the fashionable German spa town Bad Nauheim, two wealthy, fin de siecle couples - one British, the other American - meet for their yearly assignation. As their story moves back and forth in time between 1902 and 1914, the fragile surface propriety of the pre - World War I society in which these four characters live is ruptured - revealing deceit, hatred, infidelity, and betrayal. "The Good Soldier" is Edward Ashburnham, who, as an adherent to the moral code of the English upper class, is nonetheless consumed by a passion for women younger than his wife - a stoic but fallible figure in what his American friend, John Dowell, calls "the saddest story I ever heard."
