Jaroslav Hašek wrote The Good Soldier Švejk against the First World War, and left it unfinished when he drank himself to death in 1923 at thirty-nine. Švejk is a Prague dog-seller, officially certified an imbecile, who responds to conscription with such overwhelming, cheerful, literal-minded obedience that every institution he touches collapses into farce. Whether he is a genuine idiot or the most effective saboteur in the Austro-Hungarian army is a question the book keeps open for eight hundred pages. Brecht, who adapted it, called Švejk one of the great figures of world literature; Heller's Catch-22 is unimaginable without him. Hašek lived the anarchism he wrote. He founded a joke political organization called the Party of Moderate Progress Within the Bounds of the Law and campaigned for it in Prague pubs. He edited an animal magazine and was sacked for inventing species. He was captured on the Eastern Front, joined the Czechoslovak Legion, then defected to the Bolsheviks and served as a commissar. He returned to Bohemia a bigamist and a scandal, and dictated the last of Švejk from bed.