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Tropos Kynikos

The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.

—Kris Kristofferson/Janis Joplin, "Me and Bobby McGee"

In his celebrated essay "Hasek and Kafka," Karel Kosík wrote:

[Josef] Svejk's "odyssey under the honorable escort of two soldiers with bayonets" takes him from the Hradčany garrison jail along Neruda Street to Malá Strana and over Charles Bridge to Karlín. It is an interesting group of three people: two guards escorting a delinquent. From the opposite direc­tion over Charles Bridge and up to Strahov, another trio makes its way. This is the threesome from Kafka's Trial: two guards leading a "delin­quent," the bank clerk Josef K., to the Strahov quarries, where one of them will "thrust a knife into his heart." Both groups pass through the same places, but meeting each other is impossible.¹

But had they met, the Czech Marxist philosopher continues his flight of imagination, one to be set free, the other executed, could the two Josefs have understood each other? Would they have discerned any trace of affinity in their plights?

This is a provocative question, and Kosík is fully aware of it. In Czech letters Kafka's and Hasek's oeuvres (for which J. K. and J. S. stand here as shorthand) have always enjoyed quite incompatible reputations. "Kafka," Kosík opined, "is read to be interpreted, while Hasek is read to make people 

¹ Karel Kosík, "Hasek a Kafka neboli groteskní svět," Plamen, no. 6 (1963), 96. Quoted from "Hasek and Kafka: 1883-1922/23," trans. A. Hopkins, Cross Currents 2 (1983), 127. Further references will be given in the text; the first number in parentheses refers to the Czech original and the second to the English translation (sometimes slightly modified).

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