by Zenny K. Sadlon
Introduction
For more than a century readers have continued asking a deceptively simple question: Who is Josef Švejk? The answers have been remarkably diverse. He has been described as an idiot, a malingerer, a holy fool, a cunning survivor, an existential antihero, a passive resistor, a national archetype, a linguistic construct, and, more recently, the possible bearer of a psychiatric syndrome. Each interpretation has illuminated genuine features of Jaroslav Hašek's The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War. Yet the extraordinary diversity of these explanations suggests that the central methodological question has never been fully resolved. Before deciding who Josef Švejk is, one must first ask how such a determination is to be made.
The present essay arose from an observation made while examining Anthony Tyrer and his colleagues' proposal that Josef Švejk exemplifies what they called the "Good Soldier Švejk syndrome." Jaroslav Blahoš subsequently challenged that diagnosis, arguing that Tyrer had mistaken a culturally specific strategy of survival for psychiatric pathology. Their disagreement remains important, but it also raises a more fundamental question. Before psychiatry can diagnose a literary character, what kind of evidence is it diagnosing? More generally, how does a literary character become the object of authoritative disciplinary knowledge?
This question extends well beyond psychiatry. Literary criticism, history, philosophy, cultural studies, and translation studies all approach literary works through disciplinary procedures designed to answer particular kinds of questions. Such procedures are both legitimate and indispensable. The difficulty arises only when the procedures themselves become invisible, so that disciplinary conclusions appear to arise directly from the literary work rather than from a sequence of interpretive decisions that first transformed narrative into disciplinary evidence.
Josef Švejk provides an unusually revealing case because Hašek himself carefully established the order in which his readers were to encounter the character. Before the military medical commission pronounces Švejk "definitely to be an imbecile," before the police, officers, judges, chaplains, or any other institution within the novel begins classifying him, Hašek introduces his protagonist directly. He presents him as "the old good soldier Švejk, heroic, valiant," a "modest, unrecognized hero" whose character deserves serious attention. He explicitly distinguishes him from "that moron Herostratus," and concludes his Introduction with the emphatic statement, "And that is enough."
That sequence deserves methodological attention.
The military medical commission is often treated as the beginning of the interpretive problem. In reality, it is only the beginning of the institutional proceedings against Josef Švejk. The author has already testified. The reader has already met the protagonist through the only voice that stands outside the institutions depicted in the novel. Whatever authority the commission subsequently possesses, it does not possess chronological priority.
The same structure reappears in Hašek's Afterword to Book One. Responding to the earliest reception of his novel, he records that he had already heard one man insulting another by saying, "You're as stupid as Švejk." Far from accepting this as evidence that readers had understood his intentions, Hašek writes that such usage "does not attest" that he had managed to express what he wanted. These remarks are not incidental. Together with the Introduction, they constitute the only places where Hašek speaks directly about his protagonist outside the fictional proceedings themselves. One text introduces the character before the institutions speak; the other documents the earliest public misunderstanding after they have begun speaking. Between them unfolds the novel.
Curiously, I have found no discussion of the question Who is Josef Švejk? that begins by treating Hašek's Introduction and Afterword as the primary evidence from which the inquiry should proceed. They are well known, frequently printed, and occasionally quoted, yet the discussion itself usually begins elsewhere—with the military medical commission's diagnosis or with one of the countless institutional judgments that follow. The consequence is subtle but significant. Institutional determination quietly assumes the position originally occupied by authorial testimony. The proceedings begin not with the creator of Josef Švejk but with the first institution that claims authority over him.
The present essay argues that this reversal has methodological consequences extending beyond Hašek scholarship. It proposes that discussions of literary characters should distinguish at least four different kinds of evidence: authorial testimony, narrative phenomena, institutional judgments within the fictional world, and subsequent disciplinary interpretations. These forms of evidence are related, but they are not interchangeable. Confusing them alters not only the interpretation of Josef Švejk but also the procedures by which literary works become evidence for disciplines far removed from literature itself.
Psychiatric diagnosis serves here as a case study rather than the principal subject of the essay. The broader concern is methodological. What is the proper order of evidence when scholarship attempts to determine the identity of a literary character? The answer proposed here is both simple and, in the case of Švejk, surprisingly neglected. Before the institutions speak, the author should be heard. Only then should the proceedings begin.
I. The Author Speaks Before the Institutions
The methodological problem addressed in this essay begins with a surprisingly simple observation. Before the military medical commission pronounces Josef Švejk "definitely to be an imbecile," Hašek has already introduced him. That fact is so obvious that its consequences have often gone unnoticed. The commission's diagnosis is commonly treated as the beginning of the interpretive problem, yet it is not the beginning of the novel's evidentiary sequence. It is the first institutional determination of a character whom the reader has already encountered through the author's own explicit testimony.
This distinction is more than chronological. It concerns the status of evidence itself.
Hašek's Introduction performs an unusual literary function. It is not merely a prefatory greeting or an ornamental preface. It establishes the terms upon which the reader is invited to encounter Josef Švejk. The opening sentences deliberately elevate rather than diminish their subject:
Great times demand great people. There are unrecognized heroes, unassuming, without the fame and history of Napoleon. The results of an analysis of their character would overshadow even the glory of Alexander the Great of Macedon.
The sentence is remarkable precisely because it does not prepare the reader for a comic fool. It prepares the reader for an inquiry. Hašek does not promise laughter alone. He promises that the careful analysis of an apparently insignificant individual may prove more revealing than the biographies of history's celebrated conquerors. Long before Švejk becomes an object of military administration, he becomes an object of literary attention.
Hašek then narrows the focus from history to an anonymous pedestrian walking through the streets of Prague:
Nowadays you can run into a shabby man in the streets of Prague, who himself doesn't even know what significance he actually has in the history of the new great era... If you were to ask him what his name was, he would answer you very simply and modestly: "I'm Švejk..."
The transition is characteristic of Hašek. The grandeur of "great times" suddenly contracts into the ordinariness of a shabby man whose appearance gives no indication of his historical importance. Yet the movement is not ironic in the sense of withdrawing the earlier claim. Rather, it insists that historical significance and outward appearance need not coincide. The reader is being instructed to look beyond first impressions before the narrative itself has even begun.
Hašek immediately reinforces that instruction:
And this quiet, unassuming, shabby man is indeed the old good soldier Švejk, heroic, valiant...
These adjectives deserve to be read carefully because they constitute the author's own characterization of his protagonist. They do not originate with another character. They are not presented as popular opinion or hearsay. They precede every institutional judgment that follows. Whatever readers may ultimately conclude about Josef Švejk, they cannot reasonably claim that Hašek himself remained silent about the man he had created.
The Introduction culminates in two statements whose methodological significance has, in my view, received less attention than they deserve.
The first is personal:
I very much like the good soldier Švejk, and presenting his fateful adventures during the World War, I am convinced that all of you will sympathize with this modest, unrecognized hero.
The second is evidential:
He did not torch the temple of the goddess in Ephesus, as did that moron Herostratus, to get himself into the newspapers and classroom readers.
The comparison with Herostratus is not incidental. It demonstrates that Hašek was perfectly capable of identifying a moron when he wished to do so. He does not apply the description to Josef Švejk. He applies it to Herostratus. The distinction may appear self-evident, yet it has important methodological consequences. Discussions devoted to determining whether Švejk is an idiot, an imbecile, a malingerer, or a psychiatric case have never, as far as I have been able to determine, paused over the fact that the author himself had already drawn a clear distinction between his protagonist and someone he explicitly regarded as a moron.
Hašek concludes simply:
And that is enough.
The brevity of the sentence gives it unusual force. The Introduction is complete. The author's testimony has been entered into the record. Only now does the narrative begin.
The importance of this sequence becomes apparent in the very first sentence of Chapter One. The reader is informed that Švejk had left military service years earlier because a military medical commission had pronounced him "definitely to be an imbecile." The contrast with the Introduction is immediate. The author has introduced one Josef Švejk; the military institution introduces another. The novel thus begins not with a mystery about the protagonist but with the coexistence of two incompatible descriptions issued by two different authorities.
This distinction should not be exaggerated. Hašek does not ask the reader simply to choose between the author's judgment and the commission's diagnosis. The novel is far more sophisticated than that. Instead, it invites the reader to observe what happens when institutions attempt to determine a man whom the author has already presented in very different terms. The military medical commission does not merely describe Josef Švejk. It performs an institutional act. Its diagnosis has administrative consequences. It classifies, records, and authorizes. In doing so, it also establishes a pattern that will recur throughout the novel. One institution after another will encounter Josef Švejk, subject him to its own procedures, and produce yet another official version of who he is.
That pattern is the true beginning of Hašek's satire.
The commission's diagnosis is therefore important not because it finally explains Josef Švejk, but because it inaugurates the novel's long series of institutional determinations. It is the first attempt by an authority to convert a complex human being into an administratively manageable category. Later institutions will do the same, each according to its own jurisdiction, vocabulary, and procedures. The proceedings begin here, but they begin only after the author has already testified.
Recognizing this sequence does not resolve the question Who is Josef Švejk? It changes the order in which that question should be asked. Before considering whether the military medical commission was correct, mistaken, ironic, or unwittingly satirical, scholarship should first acknowledge that Hašek himself had already placed another characterization before the reader. The commission's diagnosis is therefore not the beginning of the evidence. It is the beginning of the institutional case against Josef Švejk. The distinction is modest, but it will govern everything that follows.
II. The First Institutional Judgment
The military medical commission enters the novel with an authority that has shaped the interpretation of Josef Švejk for more than a century. It does not merely express an opinion. It renders an official determination. Within the world of the Austro-Hungarian Army, its judgment carries administrative force. The commission does not ask who Švejk is in a philosophical or literary sense. It asks a practical question: What kind of person is this for the purposes of military administration? Its answer—"definitely an imbecile"—is therefore neither casual nor private. It is an institutional classification intended to produce institutional consequences.
The distinction is fundamental because it clarifies what kind of evidence the diagnosis actually constitutes.
The commission's judgment is certainly evidence, but it is not evidence of the same kind as Hašek's Introduction. The Introduction belongs to the level of authorial testimony. The commission's diagnosis belongs to the level of institutional procedure. Confusing the two quietly alters the architecture of the inquiry. The author's characterization becomes one opinion among many, while the institution's administrative determination assumes the appearance of objective fact.
Hašek repeatedly resists precisely this transformation.
Throughout the novel, institutions speak in the language proper to institutions. They classify, record, certify, interrogate, authorize, transfer, promote, punish, and acquit. Every institution believes that its own procedures reveal the reality of the individual standing before it. The military medical commission is simply the first to do so. It constructs a Josef Švejk appropriate to military medicine. Later institutions will construct other Josef Švejks appropriate to policing, military command, judicial procedure, ecclesiastical authority, or bureaucratic administration. None encounters an abstract human being. Each encounters a person through the categories its own procedures require.
The commission's diagnosis should therefore be read not simply as information about Josef Švejk but also as information about the commission itself. It tells us how military medicine organizes uncertainty. Faced with conduct that resists straightforward interpretation, the institution does what institutions characteristically do: it classifies. Classification allows administration to proceed. Whether the classification is complete, incomplete, or mistaken is a different question. From the institution's perspective, the immediate necessity is not philosophical understanding but administrative decision.
This distinction becomes clearer if one imagines the alternative. A military medical commission cannot conclude that a recruit is "difficult to understand," "structurally ambiguous," or "worthy of prolonged literary reflection." Such observations may satisfy critics or novelists; they cannot satisfy an army responsible for mobilization. The institution must produce a category upon which further action can be based. Its vocabulary is necessarily narrower than the reality confronting it because administrative systems operate through determinations rather than sustained inquiry.
Hašek exploits this necessity with extraordinary consistency. The commission is not malicious. Nor is it obviously incompetent. It simply behaves as an institution behaves. Its diagnosis is entirely plausible within the procedural world it inhabits. Indeed, the satire loses much of its force if one assumes that every institutional actor is merely foolish. Hašek's institutions are often populated by capable people sincerely performing the functions assigned to them. The absurdity arises not primarily from individual stupidity but from the cumulative effects of procedures that reduce complex human situations to administratively manageable categories.
That observation has important consequences for the interpretation of the commission's diagnosis. Readers often ask whether the military doctors were correct or mistaken. Hašek encourages a different question. What kind of determination could such an institution produce under the conditions in which it operates? Once the question is framed in this way, the diagnosis becomes part of the novel's larger examination of institutional knowledge rather than the final explanation of its protagonist.
This shift in perspective also clarifies why the diagnosis has proved so durable outside the novel. Official classifications possess a peculiar authority. Because they emerge from recognized institutions and are expressed in technical language, they easily acquire the appearance of objective descriptions rather than procedural acts. Yet the distinction remains crucial. A military diagnosis is always produced for military purposes. Its authority extends as far as its jurisdiction. It does not automatically become a comprehensive account of the individual who has been classified.
The history of Švejk's interpretation illustrates this point with unusual clarity. Once the commission's diagnosis enters the narrative, later readers naturally begin asking whether it corresponds to reality. Literary critics ask whether it should be read ironically. Historians ask what such diagnoses meant within the Austro-Hungarian military. Psychiatrists ask whether modern diagnostic categories might explain the behavior more adequately. Every one of these questions is legitimate. Yet they all begin with the commission's determination as though it were the primary phenomenon requiring explanation.
Methodologically, the order should be reversed.
The primary phenomenon is Josef Švejk as presented by Hašek. The military medical commission's diagnosis is itself one of the novel's observable events. Like every subsequent institutional judgment, it belongs to the evidence requiring interpretation rather than standing outside it as an independent measure of truth. It tells us something about Švejk. It also tells us something about military medicine, institutional procedure, and the administrative necessity of classification. The challenge is not to choose between these possibilities but to recognize that the novel deliberately invites both readings simultaneously.
Seen in this light, the commission's diagnosis assumes a different significance. It is no longer the point at which the reader begins asking who Josef Švejk is. It is the point at which the novel begins examining what institutions do when confronted with a man who repeatedly exceeds the categories they are designed to administer. The proceedings have begun, but they have begun against a protagonist whom the author has already introduced in very different terms. That distinction, established in the opening pages of the novel, continues to govern every institutional encounter that follows.
III. Putting Švejk on Trial Again
The military medical commission does not conclude the proceedings against Josef Švejk; it inaugurates them. In Švejk on Trial, I argued that Hašek's novel is structured not merely as a sequence of comic adventures but as a succession of institutional attempts to determine who Josef Švejk is. The commission constitutes the first tribunal before which he appears, but it is by no means the last. Throughout the novel he is examined, questioned, arrested, confined, interrogated, transferred, suspected, punished, and evaluated by one institution after another. Each authority approaches him through procedures appropriate to its own jurisdiction and reaches conclusions appropriate to its own institutional purposes. None, however, succeeds in producing a determination that finally exhausts the man it seeks to explain.
Seen from this perspective, the military medical commission assumes a significance different from that traditionally accorded it. Its diagnosis is not the solution to the mystery of Josef Švejk but the beginning of a recurring narrative pattern. Every subsequent institution repeats essentially the same act. The police formulate one understanding of him, military officers another, judges another, chaplains another, and bureaucrats yet another. Although their vocabularies differ, their activity remains remarkably consistent. Each institution attempts to transform a complex, unpredictable individual into a category that can be administered, regulated, or explained according to its own procedures.
Hašek's satire lies not simply in exposing institutional error but in revealing the limitations of institutional certainty. The authorities that encounter Josef Švejk are rarely portrayed as merely foolish or incompetent. More often they are conscientious officials attempting to perform their assigned duties within systems governed by rules, regulations, and administrative necessity. The military medical commission classifies recruits because armies require classifications. The police investigate because public order depends upon investigation. Courts adjudicate because disputes require judgment. Each institution therefore performs its own function successfully. The comedy arises because procedural success is repeatedly mistaken for comprehensive understanding. The institution assumes that the product of its own procedures is identical with the reality it seeks to describe.
This distinction becomes increasingly apparent as the narrative unfolds. Švejk passes from one institutional environment to another with remarkable regularity. He is arrested for political unreliability, examined medically, remobilized, imprisoned, interrogated, transferred through military bureaucracy, mistaken for a spy, subjected to military discipline, and repeatedly brought before authorities convinced that they have finally understood him. Yet every new encounter quietly undermines the certainty produced by the previous one. The police inherit a man already classified by military medicine. The military inherits a man already processed by the police. Later authorities inherit the accumulated judgments of earlier authorities. The institutional record grows steadily thicker, but Josef Švejk himself remains curiously resistant to definitive explanation.
It is this recurring pattern, rather than any individual diagnosis, that provides the structural framework for the present discussion. Anthony Tyrer and his colleagues enter that framework not because psychiatry is uniquely problematic, but because it represents the latest institutional vocabulary through which Josef Švejk has been examined. Their article proposes that the protagonist exemplifies a recognizable psychiatric syndrome. Whether one ultimately accepts or rejects that diagnosis is, in one sense, secondary. Methodologically, what matters is that psychiatry joins a sequence already established by the novel itself. Like military medicine, it approaches Josef Švejk through concepts developed for particular professional purposes. Like every discipline, it seeks to transform observable behavior into an intelligible explanatory category.
This observation should not be mistaken for a criticism of psychiatry. Every discipline necessarily proceeds in the same manner. Literary criticism interprets. History reconstructs. Translation studies analyzes linguistic structures. Psychiatry diagnoses. None of these activities is inherently reductionist. Like all disciplinary inquiry, each can either illuminate or obscure the literary phenomenon from which it proceeds. The methodological issue arises only when the explanatory products of a discipline begin to replace the literary phenomena from which they were originally derived. A psychiatric diagnosis, however illuminating, remains a psychiatric interpretation of a literary character. It cannot become the literary character itself any more than a historical reconstruction or a translation can replace the work from which it proceeds.
The continuity between Hašek's fictional institutions and modern scholarly disciplines is therefore structural rather than ideological. The institutions depicted in the novel sought to determine Josef Švejk according to the procedures available to them. Modern disciplines do the same, although with vastly greater sophistication and for entirely different purposes. Psychiatry, literary criticism, history, philosophy, and translation studies may each be understood as contemporary forums before which Josef Švejk continues to appear. Each asks legitimate questions, employs legitimate methods, and may contribute genuine knowledge. Yet each also encounters a protagonist who has already survived numerous previous determinations without being fully contained by any of them.
The title of this essay should therefore be understood quite literally. We are, once again, putting Švejk on trial. The courtroom, however, has changed. Military tribunals have given way to academic disciplines, administrative diagnoses to scholarly interpretation, and imperial bureaucracy to professional specialization. The proceedings continue because Josef Švejk continues to resist every attempt to reduce him to a single explanatory category. Psychiatry serves here not as the defendant but as the most recent witness in a trial that has now been in progress for more than a century. The question confronting that witness is the same one that confronted the military medical commission at the beginning of the novel: not simply what category best describes Josef Švejk, but whether any institutional category can finally account for the literary phenomenon that Jaroslav Hašek placed before his readers.
IV. The Author's Second Testimony
If the Introduction establishes Hašek's own characterization of Josef Švejk before the institutions begin speaking, the Afterword to Book One performs an equally important, though often overlooked, function. It records what happened once they had begun. By the time Hašek wrote the Afterword, the novel had already entered public circulation, and readers had begun constructing their own Švejk. Hašek's brief reflection therefore occupies a unique place in the documentary record. It is neither part of the fictional narrative nor a later scholarly interpretation. It is the author's contemporaneous response to the earliest reception of his own work.
The passage is well known but deserves to be quoted in full:
I do not know whether I will manage to express with this book what I wanted. Just the circumstance, that I heard one man cussing at another by saying: "You're as stupid as Švejk," does not attest to that. However, should the word Švejk become a new epithet in the flowery wreath of abuse, I have to be content with this as my contribution to the enrichment of the Czech language.
The passage occupies a unique evidentiary position because it is one of only two places where Hašek speaks directly about Josef Švejk outside the fictional proceedings. Hašek is not lamenting an unfavorable review or expressing disappointment that readers have disagreed with him. He is documenting something much more specific. Even before the novel was completed, the name "Švejk" had already begun entering ordinary language as a synonym for stupidity. More importantly, Hašek explicitly states that this development does not demonstrate that he had succeeded in expressing what he intended.
That sentence deserves careful methodological attention. If the question before us is Who is Josef Švejk?, then the Afterword constitutes the earliest surviving evidence that readers were already answering it in a manner the author himself regarded as inadequate. One need not accept Hašek's own understanding of his protagonist as definitive to recognize the importance of this fact. The passage establishes that the reduction of Švejk to mere stupidity is not a recent misunderstanding produced by modern criticism, psychiatry, or popular culture. It arose during the novel's own publication, and Hašek recognized it immediately.
Taken together, the Introduction and the Afterword therefore perform complementary functions. The Introduction presents Josef Švejk before institutional determination begins. The Afterword records the first documented failure of readers to preserve that presentation. Between those two texts unfolds the narrative itself, populated by institutions that repeatedly classify, diagnose, judge, and explain the protagonist according to their own procedures. The framing is remarkably symmetrical. Hašek first introduces his character in his own voice and later comments, again in his own voice, on the earliest public distortion of that introduction.
This observation has an important consequence for the methodology of interpretation. Discussions of Josef Švejk have understandably devoted enormous attention to the judgments rendered within the novel itself. The military medical commission, the police, the officers, and the bureaucracy have all been treated as significant participants in the construction of the protagonist's meaning. Curiously, as far as I have been able to determine, discussions devoted to the identity of Josef Švejk have not mentioned the two places where Hašek himself steps outside the fictional proceedings and addresses precisely that question. They have therefore never functioned as the point of departure for the inquiry.
I do not suggest that this omission is deliberate. Nor do I propose that it reflects any coordinated interpretive tradition. It is more plausibly understood as the gradual consequence of scholarly habit. Once the military medical commission became the accepted starting point for asking who Josef Švejk is, later discussions naturally inherited that point of departure. The institutional diagnosis came to define the problem requiring explanation. Subsequent scholarship then concentrated, quite legitimately, on whether that diagnosis should be understood literally, ironically, politically, psychologically, or culturally. Over time, the author's own framing statements disappeared from the evidentiary sequence.
Methodologically, however, the distinction remains important. The Introduction and the Afterword occupy a different evidentiary status from every institutional judgment contained within the novel. They are not themselves part of the proceedings. They frame the proceedings. The military medical commission's diagnosis is one event among many in the narrative. Hašek's comments stand outside the narrative altogether. They therefore cannot simply be assimilated to the competing voices that populate the fictional world. They belong to another level of evidence.
Recognizing this distinction does not require a return to intentionalism, nor does it imply that an author's explicit statements determine the meaning of a literary work. Literary texts routinely exceed the intentions of their creators, and readers remain free to disagree with Hašek's own understanding of Josef Švejk. The present argument is considerably narrower. It concerns the evidentiary sequence appropriate to scholarly inquiry. If one wishes to determine who a literary character is, then the creator's explicit testimony concerning that character belongs among the primary evidence. It may ultimately be rejected, qualified, or supplemented, but it should not quietly disappear from the proceedings.
The Afterword therefore serves a purpose extending beyond its immediate historical context. It reminds us that the question Who is Josef Švejk? has been contested from the very beginning. The first documented misunderstanding did not occur decades later in psychiatric literature or modern literary criticism. It occurred during Hašek's own lifetime, while the novel itself remained unfinished. That fact alone should encourage greater caution before accepting any institutional or disciplinary determination as final. If the author could already recognize the emergence of a reduction he regarded as inadequate, then the subsequent history of interpretation ought perhaps to be read not as a gradual accumulation of definitive answers but as a continuing series of attempts to determine a literary character who has persistently resisted being reduced to a single explanatory formula.
V. Complexity Without Interiority
One of the assumptions that has quietly governed much discussion of Josef Švejk is that literary complexity must arise primarily from psychological interiority. If a character is complex, readers expect access to hidden motives, private reflections, internal conflicts, or evolving self-consciousness. Modern literary criticism has become so accustomed to psychological depth as the principal measure of complexity that its absence often appears to require explanation.
Hašek proceeds differently.
Josef Švejk possesses remarkably little interior life in the conventional novelistic sense. The narrator seldom grants the reader direct access to his thoughts. We are not invited into prolonged introspection, nor are we given privileged knowledge of motives concealed from the other characters. Again and again Hašek presents Švejk from the outside, through what he says, what he does, and how others respond to him. His consciousness remains strikingly opaque.
This has frequently encouraged interpreters to supply the missing psychology themselves. If Hašek does not disclose Švejk's motives, readers naturally attempt to reconstruct them. Is he genuinely simple-minded? Is he consciously pretending? Is he an anarchist concealed beneath perfect obedience? Is he a passive resistor? A holy fool? A political strategist? A psychiatric patient? The extraordinary diversity of these explanations reflects less the evidence provided by the novel than the absence of direct psychological access to the protagonist.
The present essay proposes that this absence is not a deficiency to be corrected but an artistic decision that should itself guide interpretation. Hašek does not construct Josef Švejk primarily through introspection. He constructs him through repeated interaction with increasingly complex institutional environments. The reader therefore encounters not psychological explanation but observable conduct.
That distinction changes the nature of the problem entirely.
The question is no longer, What hidden mental state explains Josef Švejk's behavior? It becomes, What kind of person repeatedly survives the environments through which Hašek leads him?
This question directs attention away from speculative psychology and toward observable narrative phenomena. Throughout the novel Josef Švejk moves through an astonishing succession of institutional encounters. He is arrested on suspicion of disloyalty, examined by military physicians, confined, interrogated, remobilized, transferred between military authorities, subjected to judicial procedures, mistaken for a spy, absorbed into the machinery of military bureaucracy, and repeatedly placed under the authority of officers whose competence often proves no greater than his own. Each episode introduces new procedural obstacles. Each places him within systems whose rules are opaque, contradictory, or irrational. Yet he continues moving through them.
The cumulative pattern becomes significant once the episodes are considered together rather than individually.
No single episode proves very much. Any individual might survive one mistaken arrest, one incompetent superior, or one bureaucratic misunderstanding. Hašek, however, constructs not an isolated incident but a sustained sequence extending across the entire novel. Josef Švejk repeatedly enters institutional environments that are both increasingly complex and potentially dangerous. Repeatedly, he emerges from them ready for the next encounter.
This observation does not explain his survival.
It precedes the explanation.
The distinction is essential because discussions of Josef Švejk have often moved too quickly from phenomenon to interpretation. Once the question becomes whether Švejk is clever, stupid, pathological, ironic, or politically subversive, the observable pattern tends to disappear beneath the explanatory vocabulary. The explanation comes to replace the phenomenon it was intended to explain.
The phenomenon itself is comparatively straightforward.
Josef Švejk survives.
Not once.
Not occasionally.
Repeatedly.
He survives institutions that continually attempt to define him, regulate him, discipline him, or remove uncertainty by assigning him to an administratively intelligible category. Whatever explanation one ultimately prefers, the narrative first requires recognition of this recurring fact.
It was this cumulative pattern, rather than any theoretical commitment, that gradually altered my own understanding of Josef Švejk during more than three decades of translating the novel. Working sentence by sentence through Hašek's text, I found myself returning not to questions of psychology but to questions of observable probability. The issue was never whether Švejk occasionally behaved foolishly; he plainly does. Nor was it whether he always understood the situations confronting him; Hašek often leaves that uncertain. The question became simpler. How probable is it that someone possessing only the level of competence implied by the military medical commission's diagnosis would repeatedly negotiate environments of such procedural complexity?
I eventually reached a conclusion that differs from much previous discussion.
Josef Švejk is indeed a complex character, but not because Hašek exposes an unusually rich interior life. On the contrary, Hašek largely withholds that interiority. Švejk's complexity arises from something directly observable: the remarkable success with which he survives increasingly complex and hostile institutional environments. I do not think that success is coincidental. Given the number, variety, and procedural complexity of the situations through which Hašek leads him, the probability that such survival results merely from accident approaches zero.
Whether one explains that success through intelligence, adaptability, irony, cultural practice, extraordinary luck, or some combination of these remains an open interpretive question. The present argument does not seek to settle it. It insists only upon preserving the proper methodological sequence. The phenomenon must first be acknowledged before explanatory categories are brought to bear upon it. Only then can we begin asking what kind of literary character Josef Švejk actually is.
VI. Psychiatry as a Case Study in Literary Determination
The foregoing discussion has deliberately postponed direct engagement with Anthony Tyrer and his colleagues' psychiatric interpretation of Josef Švejk. That postponement has been intentional. If the central argument of this essay is correct, then the first question cannot be whether Tyrer's diagnosis is convincing. It must first be asked what kind of object psychiatry encounters when it approaches a literary character. Only after that methodological question has been clarified does it become possible to assess the significance of the diagnosis itself.
Viewed in this light, Tyrer's article occupies an important place in the history of Švejk's interpretation precisely because it illustrates a process that extends far beyond psychiatry. Like every scholarly discipline, psychiatry approaches its subject through concepts developed to answer questions internal to the discipline itself. Observable behaviour is organized into recognizable patterns, those patterns are compared with established diagnostic categories, and explanatory conclusions are proposed. Nothing in that procedure is unusual. Indeed, it represents precisely the kind of disciplined reasoning that gives psychiatry its intellectual authority.
The methodological difficulty arises not from psychiatry but from the nature of the object to which those procedures are applied.
A psychiatrist ordinarily encounters a living patient. The examination may be extended, questions may be asked, histories clarified, inconsistencies explored, and further observations undertaken. The patient remains capable of responding to the examination itself. None of these possibilities exists in the case of Josef Švejk. Psychiatry encounters neither a patient nor an historical person but a literary construction whose every observable feature has already passed through the artistic decisions of its creator. Dialogue, gesture, action, silence, repetition, and even apparent inconsistency have already been selected and arranged within a narrative designed for literary rather than clinical purposes.
The distinction is obvious. Its consequences are less so.
Psychiatry therefore never encounters Josef Švejk directly. It encounters Hašek's representation of Josef Švejk. Before diagnosis becomes possible, literary narrative must first be transformed into clinical evidence. Individual episodes become behavioural observations. Patterns of speech become symptoms or counter-symptoms. Recurring actions become evidence of enduring psychological characteristics. Even the military medical commission's declaration that Švejk is "definitely an imbecile" enters the psychiatric discussion not simply as a narrative event but as data requiring evaluation. Literary evidence has already begun its transformation into disciplinary evidence.
Exactly the same transformation occurs in every discipline.
The literary critic transforms narrative into critical evidence.
The historian transforms it into historical evidence.
The translator transforms it into translational evidence.
The philosopher transforms it into philosophical evidence.
Psychiatry is therefore not exceptional. It merely makes the transformation unusually visible because diagnosis explicitly depends upon classification.
Recognizing this fact changes the significance of Tyrer's proposal. The article ceases to be merely an attempt to identify a psychiatric syndrome in a fictional character. It becomes an example of a more general intellectual process through which disciplines convert literary phenomena into objects capable of disciplinary explanation. The diagnosis itself may ultimately prove persuasive or unpersuasive. The methodological process by which it is reached remains essentially the same.
At this point, Jaroslav Blahoš's response assumes greater importance than it initially appears to possess. His objection was directed not only against the diagnosis but against the displacement of the cultural environment from which Švejk emerged. A behaviour interpreted clinically in one context might perform a very different function within another. Blahoš therefore insisted that psychiatric explanation should not proceed independently of historical and cultural understanding.
The present essay agrees with that criticism while extending it one step further.
Historical context is indispensable.
Cultural context is indispensable.
But before either becomes relevant, an even more elementary question must be addressed.
What is the phenomenon requiring explanation?
That question cannot be answered by psychiatry alone, because psychiatry inherits the literary character only after he has already been constructed by Hašek. Nor can it be answered by history alone, because historical context explains neither literary construction nor artistic selection. It must be answered first by careful attention to the novel itself.
From this perspective, the disagreement between Tyrer and Blahoš appears in a different light. Rather than representing a conflict between psychiatry and cultural history, it illustrates the larger methodological issue developed throughout this essay. Different disciplines approach the same literary phenomenon through different explanatory procedures. Each produces genuine knowledge. Each also constructs a Josef Švejk appropriate to the questions it has been trained to ask.
The problem, therefore, is not that psychiatry has placed Josef Švejk on trial once again.
The problem would arise only if psychiatry were mistaken for the trial itself.
That distinction returns us to the argument advanced in Švejk on Trial. Hašek's novel is organized around successive institutional attempts to determine Josef Švejk. Modern scholarship has not escaped that structure; it has inherited it. The institutions have changed, their procedures have become more sophisticated, and their vocabularies more technical, yet the fundamental activity remains recognizably similar. The military medical commission asked one institutional question. Psychiatry asks another. Neither asks the author's question. That question was asked—and provisionally answered—before the proceedings ever began.
VII. From Categories to Phenomena
The disagreement between Tyrer and Blahoš illustrates a methodological problem that extends well beyond the interpretation of Josef Švejk. It concerns the relationship between observable phenomena and the conceptual categories subsequently employed to explain them. Although every scholarly discipline depends upon classification, classification itself does not constitute explanation. Categories identify, organize, and compare; they do not relieve the scholar of the prior responsibility to determine what the phenomenon under investigation actually is.
This distinction emerged repeatedly during my work on translating The Good Soldier Švejk. Again and again I encountered situations in which existing grammatical terminology correctly identified a linguistic structure while leaving the translational problem essentially untouched. A Czech ethical dative could be classified as an ethical dative. Reflexive constructions could be described as reflexive. Verbal aspect could be analysed according to established grammatical categories. None of those descriptions was incorrect. Yet none answered the question that repeatedly confronted the translator: What is this structure actually doing here? Only after that question had been answered could one determine whether the existing category adequately explained the phenomenon or whether it merely named it.
The distinction gradually became methodological rather than merely linguistic. Practice repeatedly preceded theory. The phenomenon repeatedly preceded the category. Explanatory terminology remained indispensable, but it could not substitute for observation. Indeed, some of the most persistent translational difficulties arose precisely where accepted grammatical categories created the impression that the problem had already been solved. Classification produced an illusion of explanatory completeness.
The present discussion suggests that something similar has occurred in the interpretation of Josef Švejk. Whether the explanatory vocabulary is psychiatric, literary, historical, philosophical, or political, the temptation remains the same. Once an established category becomes available, the literary phenomenon begins to appear primarily as an instance of that category. The work is read in order to determine whether it exemplifies passive resistance, existential absurdity, instrumental psychosis, national character, or some other recognised conceptual framework. The category gradually becomes the point of departure, while the phenomenon itself recedes into the background.
Hašek's novel repeatedly resists precisely this movement. Josef Švejk does not present himself to the reader as an illustration of an abstract concept. He presents himself through a long sequence of observable encounters with institutions, authorities, procedures, and circumstances. His speech, actions, misunderstandings, stories, apparent compliance, and extraordinary capacity to continue functioning under increasingly adverse conditions constitute the phenomena requiring explanation. They are not themselves explanations.
This distinction explains why the question of Švejk's intelligence has proved so persistent and yet so difficult to resolve. Once the military medical commission's diagnosis becomes the effective point of departure, every subsequent interpretation is tempted to position itself either for or against that institutional determination. Is Švejk genuinely stupid? Is he pretending? Is he manipulating those around him? Is he mentally ill? The explanatory vocabulary changes; the underlying structure of the inquiry remains remarkably stable.
Hašek invites a different procedure. He does not ask the reader to begin by assigning Josef Švejk to a category. He asks the reader to observe him. The Introduction announces that his character deserves analysis before offering any institutional determination. The narrative then presents hundreds of pages of conduct from which the reader may draw conclusions. The institutions classify him repeatedly, but their classifications become part of the evidence rather than substitutes for it. Only after the phenomenon has unfolded does the question of explanation properly arise.
The distinction may appear almost self-evident, yet it has important methodological consequences. It restores priority to the literary work itself. Categories become accountable to the phenomena they claim to explain rather than the reverse. Psychiatric diagnosis, historical reconstruction, literary criticism, and translation studies all remain not only legitimate but necessary. Their explanatory force, however, depends upon the adequacy with which they account for the observable structure of the novel rather than upon the prestige of the disciplinary vocabulary they employ.
It is for this reason that the present essay has repeatedly returned to Hašek's Introduction and Afterword. They do not provide the final explanation of Josef Švejk, nor do they eliminate the need for subsequent interpretation. They do something more fundamental. They establish the phenomenon that later disciplines inherit. Hašek first presents a literary character. Institutions then produce institutional determinations of that character. Disciplines subsequently produce disciplinary determinations. The sequence matters because each stage presupposes the previous one. Reversing it risks allowing explanatory categories to define the very phenomena they were originally created to explain.
The methodological principle that emerges from this discussion is therefore neither anti-theoretical nor anti-disciplinary. On the contrary, it asks every discipline to become more faithful to its own intellectual standards. Scientific explanation begins with careful observation. Historical explanation begins with documentary evidence. Literary interpretation begins with the text. Translation begins with the source language. In each case, the phenomenon retains the right to challenge the adequacy of the category proposed to explain it. The category serves the phenomenon, not the other way around.
This, I believe, is the broader significance of Josef Švejk. Hašek created a literary character whose persistent resistance to definitive classification exposes a methodological temptation common to many disciplines. The question is therefore no longer simply whether psychiatry has diagnosed Josef Švejk correctly. It is whether scholarship, whatever its disciplinary affiliation, remains willing to allow the literary phenomenon itself to determine the adequacy of its explanatory categories. Only under that condition can the proceedings continue without allowing the verdict to precede the evidence.
VIII. The Jurisdiction of Interpretation
If the preceding argument is accepted, even provisionally, it becomes necessary to distinguish more carefully between the authority of a discipline and the jurisdiction of a discipline. These are not the same thing.
Every scholarly discipline possesses legitimate authority within the questions it has developed to investigate. Psychiatry possesses authority in the diagnosis of psychiatric conditions. History possesses authority in the reconstruction of historical events. Literary criticism possesses authority in the interpretation of literary texts. Translation studies possesses authority in analysing the movement of meaning between languages. The authority of these disciplines derives from the methods through which they produce knowledge.
Jurisdiction, however, concerns something different. It concerns the limits within which those methods legitimately operate. A court of law does not become incompetent because it lacks jurisdiction over a particular matter. Its authority is defined precisely by those limits. The same is true of scholarly disciplines. Psychiatry is authoritative within psychiatric inquiry precisely because psychiatry asks psychiatric questions. History is authoritative because it asks historical questions. The difficulty begins only when disciplinary jurisdiction quietly expands into explanatory sovereignty.
Hašek's novel repeatedly exposes this expansion at the institutional level. The military medical commission is authorized to determine military fitness. It is not authorized to determine the ultimate meaning of the individual standing before it. The police are authorized to investigate threats to public order. They are not authorized to define the human person. Military officers are authorized to command soldiers. They are not authorized to explain the individual before them. Nevertheless, each institution behaves as though the products of its own procedures constitute an exhaustive account of reality. Administrative competence gradually becomes epistemological confidence.
The parallel with modern scholarship is not exact, but it is sufficiently close to deserve attention. Psychiatry approaches Josef Švejk through concepts developed within psychiatry. Literary criticism approaches him through concepts developed within literary criticism. Cultural history approaches him through historical reconstruction. None of these approaches is illegitimate. On the contrary, each contributes genuine knowledge. The methodological difficulty arises only when the explanatory vocabulary of one discipline begins functioning as though it had exhausted the literary phenomenon itself.
Josef Švejk is not simply a psychiatric object, a historical object, a political object, or a literary object. He is first a literary character created by Jaroslav Hašek. Every subsequent discipline inherits that prior construction. Consequently, no discipline encounters Josef Švejk in a pristine state. Psychiatry encounters a literary representation. History encounters a literary representation situated within a historical world. Translation encounters a literary representation embodied in language. Literary criticism encounters a literary representation already surrounded by a century of interpretation. Every discipline therefore works upon an object that has already undergone multiple acts of construction before disciplinary analysis even begins.
Recognizing this fact alters neither the legitimacy nor the value of disciplinary inquiry. It simply restores proportion. The purpose of psychiatry is not to replace literary criticism. The purpose of literary criticism is not to replace history. The purpose of translation studies is not to replace either of them. Each discipline contributes an account appropriate to its own methods while remaining accountable to the common literary evidence from which those methods proceed.
This observation also clarifies the place of Hašek himself within the present argument. Nothing proposed here restores the author to the position of supreme interpretive authority. Such a claim would merely substitute one form of sovereignty for another. Hašek's significance lies elsewhere. He occupies a unique evidentiary position because he alone stands outside the institutional proceedings he created. His Introduction precedes every institutional judgment within the novel. His Afterword records the earliest public misunderstanding of the protagonist before the history of interpretation had substantially begun. These documents therefore possess a jurisdiction different from that of every later discipline. They are not interpretations of Josef Švejk. They are part of the evidence that later interpretations must address.
The distinction may seem modest, but it carries important consequences. It shifts the burden of justification. The question is no longer why Hašek's explicit testimony should be admitted into the discussion. Rather, the question becomes why discussions devoted to the identity of Josef Švejk have so often proceeded without first examining the two places where the author himself addressed precisely that issue. To ask this question is not to privilege authorial intention over later interpretation. It is simply to insist that scholarly inquiry preserve the order of evidence before advancing to the order of explanation.
The broader methodological implication extends well beyond Hašek scholarship. Literary studies increasingly draws upon concepts developed in neighbouring disciplines—psychology, sociology, philosophy, linguistics, political theory, cognitive science, and many others. This intellectual exchange has enriched the field immeasurably. Yet interdisciplinarity carries a corresponding responsibility. As explanatory vocabularies multiply, scholars must remain attentive to the literary phenomena from which those explanations originally derive their authority. Otherwise, there is a danger that disciplinary procedures will begin determining the object rather than illuminating it.
In this respect, Josef Švejk continues to perform the same function in scholarship that he performs within Hašek's novel. He repeatedly resists complete institutional determination. Every discipline succeeds in explaining something; none succeeds in explaining everything. The continuing vitality of Hašek's protagonist may lie precisely in that resistance. He remains larger than the categories successively imposed upon him, not because categories are useless, but because literary works, like human beings, often exceed the explanatory reach of the institutions that seek to define them.
IX. Restoring the Order of Evidence
The argument developed in the preceding pages does not require the rejection of psychiatric interpretation, nor does it require the rejection of any other disciplinary approach to Josef Švejk. It requires only that the order of evidence be restored. That order was established not by literary theory but by Hašek himself. Before the military medical commission spoke, the author spoke. Before institutional judgments accumulated, the protagonist had already been introduced. Before readers began reducing Švejk to stupidity, Hašek had already recognized that such a reduction would fail to express what he intended.
This observation appears almost embarrassingly simple. Yet its implications are considerable. Once the military medical commission becomes the effective point of departure, every subsequent discussion is drawn into the commission's conceptual world. Even those who reject its diagnosis continue asking essentially the same question: Was the commission right? Psychiatry asks whether the diagnosis corresponds to modern clinical categories. Literary criticism asks whether it should be understood ironically. Cultural history asks what such a diagnosis meant within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These are all legitimate inquiries, but they remain responses to the commission's question rather than to Hašek's.
Hašek's own question is different. The Introduction does not ask whether Josef Švejk is intelligent, pathological, or subversive. It asks the reader to pay attention to a man whose significance has gone largely unrecognized. The narrative then proceeds to demonstrate that significance not by granting access to hidden psychological depths but by placing its protagonist in one institutional environment after another and allowing the reader to observe what happens. Only after that evidence has accumulated do the institutional determinations begin to reveal as much about the institutions themselves as about the man they are attempting to classify.
The Afterword confirms that Hašek regarded this distinction as central to the reception of his novel. The earliest misunderstanding he records is not political, aesthetic, or psychiatric. It is simply the reduction of Josef Švejk to stupidity. That reduction concerned him because it replaced a literary phenomenon with a single explanatory label. It transformed a character whose significance depended upon the cumulative structure of the novel into a convenient epithet detached from the evidence that had originally given rise to him.
It is difficult to overlook the historical continuity. More than a century later, scholarship continues asking whether Josef Švejk is this or that: an idiot or a strategist, a holy fool or a political dissident, a passive resistor or a psychiatric case. The vocabulary has become more refined, the theoretical frameworks more sophisticated, and the disciplines more specialized. Yet the underlying impulse remains recognizable. We continue seeking the category that will finally determine who Josef Švejk is.
The present essay proposes a different emphasis. Rather than asking first which category best accounts for the protagonist, scholarship should first ask whether the phenomenon itself has been adequately described. That phenomenon includes not only the narrative events of the novel but also the author's own explicit testimony concerning the character he created. It includes the Introduction no less than the military medical commission, and the Afterword no less than later critical tradition. None of these elements is sufficient by itself. Together they constitute the evidentiary field from which responsible interpretation must proceed.
This, I suggest, is the principal methodological lesson to be drawn from the debate surrounding Tyrer's diagnosis. Psychiatry has not misunderstood Josef Švejk because psychiatry is psychiatry. It has simply done what every discipline necessarily does: it has approached a literary character through concepts developed for purposes internal to its own practice. The same observation applies, in varying degrees, to literary criticism, history, philosophy, and translation studies. Each discipline illuminates certain aspects of the phenomenon while leaving others unexplained. The problem begins only when disciplinary explanation silently replaces the phenomenon that originally required explanation.
Returning to Hašek therefore does not represent a retreat into authorial intentionalism. It represents a return to the evidence. One may ultimately disagree with Hašek's own understanding of Josef Švejk. One may conclude that the novel exceeds its author's explicit statements or that later history has revealed dimensions unavailable to him. Such conclusions remain entirely legitimate. They should, however, be reached only after the author's testimony has first been admitted into the proceedings.
That, ultimately, is what this essay means by putting Švejk on trial again. The trial is not being reopened in order to produce yet another verdict concerning Josef Švejk's identity. It is being reopened because the order of the proceedings has gradually been reversed. The first witness has too often remained unheard while later expert witnesses have testified at length. Restoring that first testimony does not decide the case. It simply ensures that the proceedings begin where Hašek himself began—with the literary character he deliberately placed before his readers, before any institution, whether military or academic, claimed the authority to explain him.
Conclusion
Jaroslav Hašek introduced Josef Švejk before anyone else had the opportunity to determine who he was. That sequence is not merely chronological; it is methodological. Before military medicine pronounced him "definitely to be an imbecile," before the police, the courts, the officers, and the bureaucracy began producing their own official versions of the man, Hašek presented him as "the old good soldier Švejk, heroic, valiant," a modest and unrecognized figure whose character deserved careful analysis. He explicitly distinguished him from "that moron Herostratus" and concluded his Introduction with the emphatic declaration, "And that is enough."
The institutions spoke afterward.
The significance of that order becomes even clearer in the Afterword to Book One. There Hašek records that he had already heard one man insulting another by saying, "You're as stupid as Švejk," and immediately adds that this does not demonstrate that he had succeeded in expressing what he intended. The author thus bears witness not only to the creation of his protagonist but also to the earliest documented misunderstanding of that creation. The two texts together frame the novel. One precedes the institutional proceedings; the other comments upon their first reception. Between them unfolds the narrative through which one institution after another attempts to determine Josef Švejk according to its own procedures.
The present essay has argued that modern scholarship has, in important respects, inherited this institutional structure. Psychiatry serves as the principal case study because diagnosis makes the process unusually visible, but the argument extends beyond psychiatry. Literary criticism, history, philosophy, translation studies, and other disciplines all approach Josef Švejk through explanatory categories developed for purposes internal to their own practices. Each has enlarged our understanding of Hašek's novel. None should therefore be dismissed. The methodological question is different. It concerns the order in which evidence is admitted into the discussion.
If the inquiry concerns the identity of a literary character, then the author's own explicit testimony belongs among the primary evidence. This does not confer interpretive sovereignty upon the author, nor does it revive the familiar claims of intentionalism. Hašek's statements do not terminate interpretation; they initiate it. Readers remain free to conclude that the novel exceeds its author's conscious intentions or that later historical experience has disclosed meanings unavailable to him. Such conclusions, however, should follow—not precede—the admission of the evidence that Hašek himself placed before his readers.
The debate surrounding Anthony Tyrer's psychiatric interpretation has therefore served a broader purpose than its immediate subject might suggest. It has revealed a methodological tendency common to many disciplines: the tendency to begin with explanatory categories rather than with the literary phenomenon requiring explanation. Throughout more than three decades of translating The Good Soldier Švejk, I repeatedly encountered an analogous problem. Existing grammatical categories often identified Czech structures correctly while leaving the actual translational question unresolved. The decisive task was always to determine what the text was doing before deciding which category, if any, adequately accounted for it. The same sequence, I have suggested, should govern the interpretation of Josef Švejk himself. Observation precedes explanation. The phenomenon precedes the category.
That methodological principle returns us, finally, to Hašek's protagonist. Josef Švejk has now spent more than a century before successive tribunals. The military medical commission declared him an imbecile. Critics have called him a fool, a trickster, a saint, a resister, an archetype, a malingerer, and a psychiatric case. Every generation has discovered another vocabulary through which to determine him. Yet the remarkable durability of Hašek's novel suggests that none of these determinations has exhausted the literary phenomenon from which they proceed.
Perhaps that should not surprise us. Hašek did not create a protagonist who merely passes through institutions. He created one who continually survives them. The institutions classify him, investigate him, discipline him, diagnose him, and explain him, yet the narrative repeatedly demonstrates that each determination remains provisional. Josef Švejk emerges from one institutional judgment only to enter another. The proceedings never quite end.
The same is true of scholarship.
This essay has not sought to render a final verdict on Josef Švejk. It has sought to restore the order in which the evidence should be heard. Before the experts testify, before the disciplines begin explaining, before another institutional determination is entered into the record, the first witness should once again be called.
His name is Jaroslav Hašek.