Nové Zámky District in the Nitra region

Palárikovo (Hungarian: Tótmegyer) is a large village and municipality in the Nové Zámky District in the Nitra Region of south-west Slovakia.

History[link]

In historical records the village was first mentioned in 1221.

Geography[link]

The municipality lies at an altitude of 113 metres and covers an area of 51.294 km². It has a population of about 4410 people.

Ethnicity[link]

The population is about 97% Slovak, 2% Hungarian and 1% Czech.

Facilities[link]

The village has a small public library, a DVD rental store and cinema. It also has a gym and a football pitch.

External links[link]

• http://www.statistics.sk/mosmis/eng/run.html
• http://www.obecpalarikovo.sk/
• http://www.palarikovo.com/
• http://addocca.szm.sk/palarikovo_druid.zip

v t e Municipalities of Nové Zámky District Nové Zámky Štúrovo Šurany Andovce Bajtava Bánov Bardoňovo Belá Bešeňov Bíňa Branovo Bruty Čechy Černík Dedinka Dolný Ohaj Dubník Dvory nad Žitavou Gbelce Hul Chľaba Jasová Jatov Kamenica nad Hronom Kamenín Kamenný Most Kmeťovo Kolta Komjatice Komoča Leľa Lipová Ľubá Malá nad Hronom Malé Kosihy Maňa Michal nad Žitavou Mojzesovo Mužla Nána Nová Vieska Obid Palárikovo Pavlová Podhájska Pozba Radava Rastislavice Rúbaň Salka Semerovo Sikenička Strekov Svodín Šarkan Trávnica Tvrdošovce Úľany nad Žitavou Veľké Lovce Veľký Kýr Vlkas Zemné

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Coordinates: 48°03′N 18°04′E / 48.05°N 18.067°E / 48.05; 18.067

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Jaroslav Hašek
Jaroslav Hašek in his late years
Born	(1883-04-30)April 30, 1883 Prague, Austria-Hungary
Died	January 3, 1923(1923-01-03) (aged 39) Lipnice nad Sázavou, Czechoslovakia
Occupation	Novelist, soldier
Genres	Satire
Notable work(s)	The Good Soldier Švejk
Influenced Joseph Heller
Signature

Jaroslav Hašek (Czech pronunciation: [ˈjaroslaf ˈɦaʃɛk]; April 30, 1883 – January 3, 1923) was a Czech humorist, satirist, writer and socialist anarchist ^[1] best known for his novel The Good Soldier Švejk, an unfinished collection of farcical incidents about a soldier in World War I and a satire on the ineptitude of authority figures, which has been translated into sixty languages. He also wrote some 1,500 short stories. He was a journalist, bohemian, and practical joker.

Life and work[link]

Youth[link]

Hašek was born in Prague, Bohemia (then within Austria-Hungary, now part of the Czech Republic), the son of high-school math teacher Josef Hašek and his wife Kateřina. Poverty forced the family, with three children — another son Bohuslav, three years Hašek's younger, and an orphan cousin Maria — to move often, more than ten times during his infancy. He never knew a real home, and this rootlessness clearly influenced his life of wanderlust. When he was thirteen, Hašek's father died from excessive alcohol intake, and his mother was unable to raise him firmly. The teenage boy dropped out of high school at the age of 15 to become a druggist, but eventually graduated from business school. He worked briefly as a bank officer and also as a dog salesman (a profession he was to attribute to his hero Švejk and from which many of the improbable anecdotes told by Švejk are drawn). He preferred, however, the liberated profession of a writer and journalist, though he had entered into the circles of gypsies and vagabonds, taking up many bad habits and becoming unruly and hard to track down.

Political activism[link]

In 1906 he joined the anarchist movement, having taken part in the 1897 anti-German riots in Prague as a schoolboy. He gave regular lectures to groups of proletarian workers and, in 1907, became the editor of the anarchist journal Komuna. As an anarchist in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his movements were closely monitored by the police and he was arrested and imprisoned on a regular basis; his offenses include numerous cases of vandalism and at least one case of assaulting a police officer, for which he spent a month in prison. He satirised the lengths to which the Austro-Hungarian police would go to entrap suspected political subversives in the opening chapters of The Good Soldier Švejk.

Marriage[link]

Hašek met Jarmila Mayerová in 1907, and fell in love with her. However, due to his bohemian lifestyle, her parents found him an unsuitable match for their daughter. In response to this, Hašek attempted to back away from his radical politics and get a settled job as a writer. When he was arrested for desecrating a flag in Prague, Mayerová's parents took her into the country, in hope that this would end their relationship. This move was unsuccessful in that it failed to end the affair, but it did result in Hašek renewing his focus on writing. By 1909 he had sixty-four short stories published, over twice as many as in any previous year, and he was also named as the editor of the journal The Animal World. This job did not last long, however, as he was soon dismissed for publishing articles about imaginary animals which he had dreamed up (though this furnished further material for Švejk).

In 1910, he married Jarmila Mayerová. The marriage proved an unhappy one and lasted little more than three years. Mayerová went back to live with her parents in 1913 after he was caught trying to fake his own death. At the outbreak of World War I, Hašek lived periodically with cartoonist Josef Lada, who later illustrated the Good Soldier Švejk. Eventually he was drafted and joined the army; many of the characters in Švejk are based on people he met during the war. He did not spend long fighting in the front line, being captured by the Russians in September 1915. He had a relatively easy time in the Russian prisoner-of-war camps, he was assigned to the camp's commander as a secretary. He was allowed to leave the camp in 1916 to join the newly-formed Czechoslovak Legions as a propagandist.

Later years[link]

After the Russian Revolution, he remained in Russia as a member of the Bolshevik party. He joined the Red Army and became an army unit commissar. During this time he contracted another marriage (although still married to Jarmila). He eventually returned to Prague in 1920 in the hope of finishing The Good Soldier Švejk. However, in some circles he was not a popular figure, being branded a traitor and a bigamist, and struggled to find a publisher for his works.

Statue of Jaroslav Hašek near the pubs where he wrote his works (Žižkov, Praha).

Before the war, in 1912, he had published the book The Good Soldier Švejk and other strange stories (Dobrý voják Švejk a jiné podivné historky) where the figure of Švejk appeared for the first time; but it was only after the war in his famous novel that Švejk became a sancta simplicitas, a cheerful idiot who joked about the war as if it were a tavern brawl. By this time, Hašek had become gravely ill and dangerously overweight. He no longer wrote, but dictated the chapters of Švejk from his bedroom in the village of Lipnice, where he unexpectedly died in 1923, at age 39, of tuberculosis contracted during the war.

Legacy[link]

• Since his death, all of Hašek's short stories have been collected and published in the Czech language.
• For decades (until 2000) a Festival of humor and satire "Haškova Lipnice" had been held in Lipnice.

Namesakes[link]

• Asteroid 2734 Hašek was named after Jaroslav Hašek.
• Asteroid 7896 Švejk was named after the main character of his most famous novel.
• A EuroCity class train on the route Prague - Bratislava - Budapest operated by České dráhy bears the name Jaroslav Hašek.

See also[link]

• Vlastimil Košvanec

References[link]

1. ^ http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hasek.htm

Further reading[link]

• The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War, translated by Cecil Parrott, with original illustrations by Josef Lada
• The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, translated by Zenny K. Sadlon
• The Red Commissar: Including further adventures of the good soldier Švejk and other stories
• Bachura Scandal and Other Stories and Sketches, translated by Alan Menhenett
• Biography by Cecil Parrott, The Bad Bohemian (ISBN 0-349-12698-4).

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jaroslav Hašek

• A comprehensive site, mostly in Czech, but also partly in English