The Good Soldier Švejk Mini-Sculpture

For twenty years Uzhhorod was a Czechoslovak town — administrative seat of Subcarpathian Rus from 1919 until the Vienna Award handed it to Hungary in November 1938. Czech clerks, Czech architects and Czech botanists all left their mark on it. So Jaroslav Hašek's shambling private, sitting on the railing of the Kyivska embankment with a dumpling in one hand, is less an import than a returning resident.

He is bronze, about the height of a coffee cup, bolted to the ironwork a few steps from the pedestrian bridge and looking off along the Uzh. Hold the cap, mind the dumpling, wait for orders that make no sense.

The soldier who won by playing the fool

Švejk is the hero of The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War, which Hašek began publishing in 1921 and left unfinished when he died two years later. Conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army, Švejk obeys every order with such beaming, literal-minded enthusiasm that the machinery around him — officers, army doctors, chaplains, military courts — collapses into farce. Nobody can ever prove he is doing it on purpose.

English readers know his standby line as humbly report, sir. He has bronze doubles in Prague, Budapest, Odesa and a scattering of other cities; the Uzhhorod one is among the older members of the family.

A dumpling, and the railing underneath

The right hand holds a knedlík, the Czech dumpling. The left steadies his cap. Everything above the waist is comic; what he is sitting on is not. The rail is an original length of the old embankment ironwork, and the pitting along it is bullet damage from the Second World War — a soldier who spends an entire novel refusing to take a war seriously, bolted to the evidence of one.

Unveiled by Hašek's grandson

The figure went up on 10 July 2012, during a run of Ukrainian–Czech friendship events, paid for by Pavlo Chuchka, who runs the tavern-museum Detsa u Notaria. Richard Hašek came from Prague to do the honours — a considerable quantity of Czech literary provenance for an object you could carry off in a coat pocket.

Somebody did. Thieves prised Švejk off the rail one night in March 2020, the second miniature to vanish from the city that year; he is back where he was. Mykhailo Kolodko, who made him, takes a level view of the thefts: things get stolen because people like them.

Finding him

Kyivska naberezhna, south bank, a few metres from the pedestrian bridge — the easiest of Uzhhorod's roughly sixty palm-sized bronzes to find, which makes him a sensible first one. Catch one and you start scanning every railing and kerb for the rest.

Two more are within a short walk along the same bank: the violinist Nándor Plotényi, and Buffalo Bill. Come early if you want him to yourself; by mid-morning in summer there is usually a phone pointed at him.