With seven years left until the centennial commemoration of Jaroslav Hašek's death, a new collective monograph devoted to his fiction claims other purposes for its publication. As stated in the introduction, it has the ambition to approach Hašek's heterogeneous oeuvre with complexity and without ideological biases. The most striking effect of such an intention becomes apparent while merely browsing through the contents: Most of the essays avoid Hašek's masterpiece, the novel The Good Soldier Švejk, and focus on the other texts, mainly short stories, travelogue sketches, and cabaret performance texts. Consequently, the whole volume seems to depart from the main venue of the Hašek's interpretations that had been established since the 1960s, when Czech philosopher Karel Kosík put Hašek's Švejk into the central position of central European modernism in his celebrated essay “Hašek and Kafka” (1963). Approaching Hašek from the narratological perspective, as the introduction proudly claims, means that in most essays of this book small textual units are interpreted, assuming their potential synecdochic reference to the wholeness of Hašek's fiction. The material of small units means that most essays are built on the interpretation of one story, one aspect of the Hašek's authorship strategies, one aspect of his Soviet propaganda texts or one aspect of The Good Soldier Švejk novel composition—the utilization of the encyclopedia genre, for instance. As a result, the volume functions more as a set of exercises in interpretation of Hašek's fiction than a book with a new conceptual frame that would shed new light on Hašek's oeuvre. The tools and concepts of narratology fail in their compatibility with literary history in the case of this book: the synecdochic approach, analyzing the partial entity standing for the whole oeuvre, can work in case such an oeuvre is coherent and well-structured. Hašek's fiction, however, stands for the opposite—it is extensive, fragmented, and lacks deeper features of unity. Most of his stories, articles, and sketches were written as mere improvisations, as attempts to cash out on his talents for quick and funny free-lance writing. Hundreds of fictional texts that Hašek wrote lack any type of standard literary unity or coherence and thus when interpreting one such fragment, we do not get more than the interpretation of that particular fragment.

The twelve essays that the book offers differ dramatically in their quality. Some of them are truly able to offer new, insightful analyses that aim at a certain degree of abstraction applicable to Hašek's fiction more or less generally. Jan Staněk offers a complex interpretation of the image of Jaroslav Hašek that stems from the memoirs and other texts of his contemporaries. Focusing on inversion as the key trope of converting the biography of Hašek into the myth of the author, he finds relevant arguments for rather paradoxical conclusion: the “authentic” Hašek who emerges from the layers of myths, legends, and rumors looks even more incredible than the author had wrapped in deliberate mythologies. Zdeněk Hrbata offers also a relatively universal key to Hašek's travelogue texts. He interprets them with the help of the concept of incongruence that proves quite productive for explaining the comic effect of these texts. Pavel Janoušek focuses on problematic editing practices that tend—as he shows in the particular case of editing dramatic sketches for cabaret performances—to assign Hašek's authorship even to texts that he did not write but was only sometimes hypothetically present when a group of pals produced them collectively while spending the night in a pub. The last essay to offer some tendencies toward synthesis is the outline of the film adaptations of the novel The Good Soldier Švejk, written by Radomír D. Kokeš. Instead of a mere chronological approach, Kokeš coins a typology of three distinctive film-narrative strategies and interprets each film version as an adaptation of one particular strategy.

The other essays share more or less the same rhetorical strategy: they tend to show that even Hašek's short stories and sketches, picked up as samples of his fiction, prove the same complexity, ambiguity, and modernist features of grotesqueness and absurdity as his masterpiece, The Good Soldier Švejk. It looks like they intend to add one more phase to the linear story of Hašek's interpretations: originally considered a mere humorist and author of fiction that serves its purpose for the day, his unique novel The Good Soldier Švejk has been eventually elevated to canonic status and put into the pantheon of central European modernism from 1960s on, leaving, however, the rest of his fiction to stay in the low-brow category. The reviewed volume seems to articulate that even the samples of Hašek's non-canonic writings show the hallmarks of a genius. To do so, the argumentation used in the essays tends to cross the floating border line between interpretation and over-interpretation. Petr Steiner thus interprets Hašek's simplistic propaganda rhyming from 1919, when Hašek served under the Soviets (the poem is, as Steiner admits, actually a plagiarism, and Hašek just adapts a Russian poem from the middle nineteenth century, converting its iambic rhythm into a free verse) as a complex poetic structure that shifts the religious motif of martyrdom into a tribute to the revolutionary “saints” Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Similarly, he—as well as the other participants—attempts to find compositional subtleties and philosophical depths in other examples of Hašek's journalism or short fiction that he publishes in the journals of his days.

The whole volume thus exhibits an ambition to push past the view of Hašek as the author of one and only one masterpiece. However, the attempts to find depths of meaning inside texts usually considered peripheral to his oeuvre fail to offer interpretations that prove that such depths are something more than our desire to find—or construct—them.