Pytlík devoted his professional interest to important personalities of Czech and world literature, Jaroslav Hašek, Franz Kafka, his friend Bohumil Hrabal, Hašek’s colleague from the legions Jaroslav Kratochvíl, Fyodor Dostojevský and others.
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His most important monograph, The Wandering House, The Life of Jaroslav Hašek, author of The Fates of the Good Soldier Švejk, has also been published in Polish, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian and Hungarian.
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“Švejk is not a stupid simpleton or archetype of the Austrian military servants, but he is a very interesting type who reveals reality just as we reveal our cards or diagnose individual combs to get things to the marrow. If we learn to understand Švejk, we will understand Hašek in all its complexity, “he said in an interview with Právo.
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“Švejk is not a little man from Prague Street or a picture of the Czech nation, as some critics thought, but a work of art, even a philosophical anti-war novel,” he added.
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Pytlík was born on October 8, 1928 in Prague. As a student in 1945 during the Prague Uprising, he defended the legendary barricade by the river in Holešovice.
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He witnessed the behavior of a janitor who might have broken up after May 9, how high he raised his right to the Nazi salute.
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After graduating from high school in 1947, he studied at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University and graduated in 1952 with the work The Beginnings of Jaroslav Hašek. In 1955 he worked at the Institute for Czechoslovak, and later for Czech literature.
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He was the editor of Jaroslav Hašek’s Writings and a number of committees from his short story work. His Narration of Bohumil Hrabal, Franz Kafka’s Prague Mosaic, Phenomenology of Humor and FM Dostoevsky’s monograph, Life and Work are also worth mentioning.
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Until the end of his life, he devoted himself to literary history, and especially to the work of the author of the immortal Schweik, which was translated into 58 languages. At the age of eighty-five, in 2013, Jaroslav Hašek published an extensive factual collection, Data-fakta-dokumenty.
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“Even after seventy years of studying his life and work, I’m actually at the beginning,” he confided to Práva in 2019, when he published Jaroslav Hašek: Crossing Europe / How Švejk was founded.
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He discovered new facts about the author’s travels across the continent after 1900, the night attempt to jump from Charles Bridge, classified by the police and its doctor as a regular suicide attempt, and the first appearance of Josef Švejk in the cabaret game Fortress in 1911 as a servant of Charles IV.
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Together with his second wife Věra Dyková, a long-time employee of the National Literature Memorial, he has a daughter and a son, singer and actor Vojta Dyk.
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