Hašek originally intended Švejk to cover a total of six volumes, but had completed only three (and started on the fourth) upon his death from heart failure on January 3, 1923.

[1] The volumes are: Following Hašek's death, journalist Karel Vaněk was asked by the publisher Adolf Synek to complete the unfinished novel.

In addition to satirising Habsburg authority, Hašek repeatedly sets out corruption and hypocrisy attributed to priests of the Catholic Church.

Švejk gets his charwoman to wheel him (he claims to be suffering from rheumatism) to the recruitment offices in Prague, where his apparent zeal causes a minor sensation.

However, Katz loses Švejk in a bet over a game of cards to Senior Lieutenant Lukáš, whose batman he then becomes — which would eventually lead him to the front.

Here, where relations between the two nationalities are somewhat sensitive, Švejk is again arrested, this time for causing an affray involving a respectable Hungarian citizen and engaging in a street fight.

The unfinished novel breaks off abruptly before Švejk has a chance to be involved in any combat or enter the trenches, though it appears Hašek may have conceived that the characters would have continued the war in a POW camp, much as he himself had done.

The book includes numerous anecdotes told by Švejk (often either to deflect the attentions of an authority figure or to insult them in a concealed manner) which are not directly related to the plot.

The characters of The Good Soldier Švejk are generally either used as the butt of Hašek's absurdist humour or represent fairly broad social and ethnic stereotypes found in the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time.

A number of literary critics consider The Good Soldier Švejk to be one of the first anti-war novels, predating Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.

- Macdonald Daly[9]Sue Arnold, writing in The Guardian, stated: "Every harassed negotiator, every beleaguered political wife and anyone given to ever-increasing moments of melancholy at the way things are should keep a copy of Hasek's classic 'don't let the bastards get you down' novel to hand.

[13] Švejk is the subject of films, plays, an opera, a musical, comic books, and statues, even the theme of restaurants in a number of European countries.

Švejk has many statues and monuments, for example, at Humenné in Slovakia; Przemyśl and Sanok in Poland; St. Petersburg, Omsk, and Bugulma in Russia and Kyiv, Lviv, and Donetsk in Ukraine.

[30] Following Max Brod's first steps toward a German translation, he introduced the book to Grete Reiner, executive editor of the anti-fascist magazine Deutsche Volkszeitung.

[33] Selver's translation also bowdlerized the original text, omitting paragraphs and occasionally pages that may have seemed offensive; despite this he has been praised for preserving some of the tension in the work between Literary and Common Czech.