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Survival of the Unfittest on the Eastern Front

In 1911, F. T. Marinetti imagined war as “the only hygiene of the world.” Such social Darwinist visions are contested by modernism’s antimilitarist fictions. Focusing on Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (1921–23), this chapter explores the dynamics of this contestation and its ramifications for understanding modernist epic. The eponymous protagonist of Hašek’s fiction, Švejk, is not a standard hero. Rather, he is imbecilic, alcoholic, lazy, rheumatic, “degenerate,” mongrel-like, and speaks an “impure” colloquial version of the national language. His only positive feature is how, ironically because of his stupidity, Švejk always manages to escape a terrible destiny, delaying his arrival at the Eastern Front. As this chapter describes, the story is a moral of survival of the unfittest, dramatizing how the underdog can succeed in a violent world and how the Czechs emerged from under the Austrian empire. Analyzing this alter-Darwinian nation-building, the chapter places Hašek’s work into relation with the larger genre of modernist epic. It shows that although Hašek was not invested in any modernist movement, and did not read Joyce or Stein, his text was nevertheless shaped in relation to the same underlying historical forces. It reveals, consequently, an encompassing narrative of evolutionary thought that different national modernisms can be coordinated against, which also crosses the cultural divide between high and low.