version of the author – though most of the events described in the stories presented did take place, even the episode concerning barracks-cleaning nuns, but Hašek’s intention is satire, not verisimilitude. Satire often entails turning things upside down, just as it entails sarcasm, elsewhere considered the lowest form of wit. Probably the account of the vicissitudes of refugees’/repatriates’ journey from the northern Baltic to Germany comes closest to verisimilitude. Satirists also frequently enjoy types, and the know-all who thrusts his banal knowledge on everyone within earshot is one of the most vivid types in the present collection, for he reminds one of people the reader has encountered all over the world. Hašek returned to Prague in 1920. The Bugulma stories were freely available during the Communist era in Czechoslovakia, though given the distorted book supply system, it was often almost impossible to find individual volumes from the Works (1955–74). Still, the exile publishing house in Toronto, 68 Publishers, published the Bugulma stories in 1976, a shorter collection than the present, and many copies were smuggled into Czechoslovakia. In 1981, Cecil Parrott’s translations of eight of the stories contained in the present volume were published in his The Red Commissar. The editors of the present version hope that some readers will have the time to compare the two translations. In the Bugulma stories Hašek has returned to many of the comic techniques of his pre-war short stories, though the slapstick of which he had been a master is greatly diminished and in the present stories the author makes proportionately greater use of what is normally called antithetical hyperbole (satire achieved by means of an exaggeration of horror or evil by portraying the opposite of the actual state of affairs, closer to collusive irony than to sarcasm) than in his pre-war stories. For nearly every episode in these stories Hašek as narrator looks like the opposite of the war-time, ( 99 )
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