“At that moment, Svejk looked as if he had fallen down from the skies from another planet and was now looking with a naive wonder at a new world, where people were demanding from him idiotic questions he had never heard before.”
Jaroslav Hasek’s great Czech comic novel The Good Soldier Svejk follows its amiable hero through the contortions of central Europe during the first world war. Its real subject, though, is human folly, human conflict and the absurdity of human attempts to manage the chaos. At which point cut to Mason Mount on Friday night in Prague, another likeable ingenue who seemed at times also to have fallen from the skies, baffled by his own role in this drama, looking about himself in state of otherworldly bemusement.
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