Abstract
The book presents three studies on the border of different and yet interrelated interpretive perspectives of philosophy, or hermeneutics and literary studies.
The first study attempts to explicate the philosophical aspects of Hašek's novel The Fate of the Good Soldier Švejk during the World War in three separate steps. In the first step, one starts from monitoring the appearance of the word philosophize and descends through several layers to the possible inherent philosophical urgency of Hašek's novel, which springs from the confrontation of the individual with history. The second step recalls the integration of Haškov's novel into the history of the modern novel in Milan Kundera's concept, who at the same time shows that this history is determined, among other things, by how the modern novel itself relates to the phenomenon of history. In the third step, in the context of Heidegger's history of metaphysics, an attempt is made to see how Hašek's novel responds to the situation of the end of this history.
The second study compares Hašek's work with the thought and creative world of Georg Lukács, not only regarding the possibility of including Hašek's Fates within Lukács' typology of the novel, but also reveals a deeper intellectual affinity between the two through the motif of the reification of man, which is characteristic of modern society, and through the concept of defense against him.
The third study places Haška's novel in the context of the canonical works of literary modernism, Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses, and Rilka's Duino Elegies, and attempts to apply the mythic method to Haška's novel and verify to what extent it opens up the interpretation of the novel as a whole. This will be demonstrated on two motifs from the Preface and Afterword to the first volume of the Fates - on Herostratus seeking immortal glory and on Saint Alois as a masturbator of false culture.