Behind the Lines Bugulma and Other Stories

In 1921, a few months before Jaroslav Hašek began writing The Good Soldier Švejk, he described his life experiences in revolutionary Russia in the series My Great Commander of the Town of Bugulma. In a similar way to how he mocked the pre-war Austro-Hungarian monarchy in his short stories, the former Red Commissar Hašek captures the Bolshevik Revolution. The reader is presented with a comical story in which the Soviet commander of the Tver revolutionary regiment, the drunkard Erokhimov, and the town commander Comrade Gašek appear in the forgotten Tatar town of Bugulma. Through humour and exaggeration, Hašek shows both the fanaticism of the revolutionary era, when in the unfortunate year of 1918 everything suddenly went "out of joint", and the foolishness or simple human uncertainty of the new rulers. The autobiographical series My Great Commander of the Town of Bugulma is further supplemented by other of Hašek's short stories from that period.