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Like Diogenes, Švejk lingers at the margins of an unfriendly society against which he is defending his independent existence. "Švejking" is the method for surviving "švejkárna", which is a situation or institution of systemic absurdity requiring the employment of "švejking" for one to survive and remain untouched by it.
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Kafka v. Hašek
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"Unlike K., fellow Czech Franz Kafka's stunted stand-in for modern intellectual man, the rascal Švejk belongs to the men and women of the workaday world -- the bartenders, cleaning women, gamekeepers, petty larcenists, lathe operators, janitors, drunkards, office workers, shopkeepers, undertakers, adulterers, nightclub bouncers, butchers, farmers, cab drivers and others who populate Hasek's imagination as they stumble through the lunacies
of the first World War."
By Bob Hicks
THE OREGONIAN
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"In Prague of the 1920s, there were two equally good but very different writers, an alienated and abstract Jew, Frantz Kafka and an earthly Czech Communist Jaroslav Hašek. Both are good, both are necessary for the development of mankind, but the genius of Kafka is more palatable for Jews.
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As there are many more Jewish professors of literature and newspaper editors than the Czech ones, it is but natural that Kafka is universally known and recognised, while Hašek’s name remains in Bohemia. More writers imitate Kafka than so much as consider Hašek.
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As a result, mankind, not only America, turns more and more ‘Jewish’. As writers know, they must write in a way palatable to the Jewish editors and professors. Otherwise they can expect only a parochial success."
Israel Shamir
( In "A Yiddishe Medina")
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