1. This coming Friday (at around 7am AEST) I’ll be participating in SVEJKATHON 2021: an international non-stop online reading of the comic masterpiece The Good Soldier Švejk to mark the 100th anniversary of its publication.

2. The titular character (pron. ‘Shvayk’) is a Bohemian layabout who joins the Austrian army at the start of World War I. He acts like he’s keen to get to the front, but makes a nuisance of himself playing cards, getting drunk, and getting dragged in and out of jail.

3. TGSS is based on the real-life adventures of his creator, Jaroslav Hašek, who was himself a spectacular buffoon and prankster. His story is featured in my history of Prague, ‘The Golden Maze’.

4. Hašek’s childhood was truly horrible, scarred by family alcoholism, poverty and suicide. After finishing his studies, young Jaroslav quickly slid into a congenial life as a writer, vagrant, drinker and troublemaker around the pubs of Prague.

5. In 1910, Hašek took on a respectable job as editor of 'Animal World' magazine in Prague, but was sacked when it was discovered he’d written articles about non-existent animals he’d invented.

6. When his wife left him, he attempted to hurl himself off the Charles Bridge, but was pulled off the parapet (reportedly by ‘a passing hairdresser’) and incarcerated in a mental institute.

7. On his release, Hašek founded The Cynological Institute of Prague, his pretentious name for his dog-fancier’s salon where he made a living picking up stray mongrels, dyeing their fur, and selling them off as rare breeds with exquisite pedigrees.

8. With his drinking friends, he founded a political party: ‘The Party of Mild Progress Within the Limits of the Austro-Hungarian Law’. He advertised himself as: Jaroslav Hašek: Imperial-Royal Writer, Father of the Poor in Spirit and Certified Parisian Clairvoyant.

9. When WWI broke out, Hašek couldn’t resist provoking the Austrian authorities: he checked into a brothel under a Russian-sounding name, stating the reason for his visit was to ‘look into’ the activities of the Austrian military high command.

10. When arrested, he insisted he was merely testing police vigilance. Then someone noticed that his fake Russian name, when spelt backwards, became ‘kiss my arse’ in Czech, and he was jailed for five days.

11. Hašek enlisted with the Austrian army in 1915. He was soon captured by the Russians and sent out to a bleak prisoner of war camp near Kazakhstan. He joined the Czechoslovak Legion, then, after the Bolsheviks took power, he defected to join Trotsky’s Red Army.

12. In 1920, Hašek was sent to Irkutsk on the Mongolian border where he gave up drinking and served as a ruthless Bolshevik officer. He survived a bout with typhoid, and also, allegedly, an assassination attempt.

13. After the war, Hašek returned to Prague, accompanied by a new Siberian wife Shura, whom he had married bigamously. Shunned as a traitor to everyone and every cause, Hašek retreated to the countryside where he wrote the adventures of Švejk while drinking himself to death.

14. Jaroslav Hašek died in 1923, a few months shy of forty. Hardly anyone came to the funeral - people assumed the death notice was a typical Hašek prank. 'The Good Soldier Švejk' became the most translated Czech novel of all time.

15. Praguers, who would suffer invasion from the Nazis in 1939, and then the Soviets in 1968, held up the character of Švejk as a model of non-cooperation with an occupying power.

16. Nazis were infuriated by the Švejkian behaviour of Czechs, defined as ‘a baffling willingness to comply with all orders, and an equally baffling ability to execute them in such a way that the effect is quite different from that contemplated by those who did the commanding'.

17. So anyway: ŠVEYKATON, the non-stop reading of 'The Good Soldier Svejk', put together by the Czechoslovak Society of Arts & Sciences in New York will include readers in NY, Prague, London, Rome, Istanbul, LA, Chicago & Sydney. Tickets: https://bit.ly/32JuehA