Lada, Josef. Pictures of the Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk (Kartinki pokhozhdeniy bravogo soldata Shveyka). Based on the novel by Jaroslav Hašek, 1973. In Russian.

Лада И. Картинки похождений бравого солдата Швейка / По роману Ярослава Гашека.
Прага: Артия (Artia), 1973. — 318 с., ил.
Твёрдый издательский цельнотканевый переплёт, цветная иллюстрированная суперобложка, увеличенный квадратный формат.
Состояние книги хорошее: переплёт крепкий, коленкор чистый, золотое тиснение яркое, страницы чистые. Суперобложка в удовлетворительном состоянии: общее загрязнение и пожелтение белого фона, потёртости и заломы по краям и сгибам, без существенных надрывов и утрат.
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Lada J. Pictures of the Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk / Based on the novel by Jaroslav Hašek.
Prague: Artia, 1973. — 318 pp., illustrated.
Publisher's full cloth hardcover binding, pictorial color dust jacket, oversize square format.
Book in good condition: binding tight, cloth clean, gilt stamping bright, pages clean. Dust jacket in fair condition: general soiling and yellowing of the white ground, rubbing and creasing along edges and folds, no significant tears or losses.

A landmark of twentieth-century Czech book illustration: Josef Lada's complete pictorial cycle for Jaroslav Hašek's «The Good Soldier Švejk», issued by the Prague export house Artia in a Russian-language edition for distribution throughout the Soviet bloc. Lada (1887–1957) — a self-taught painter from the village of Hrusice and one of the most beloved Czech artists of his century — was Hašek's close friend and tavern companion; he created the original cover image of Švejk for the first edition of the novel in 1921 and went on to produce, in 1924–1925, the monumental cycle of more than 540 drawings reproduced in the present volume, with brief captions beneath each image that effectively transform Hašek's sprawling satire into a graphic narrative — a proto-comic of remarkable wit and compositional invention. Interspersed among the line drawings are full-page color portraits of the principal characters: Švejk himself, Lieutenant Lukáš, Chaplain Katz, the gluttonous Baloun, the volunteer Marek, and the indomitable Mrs. Müller. Lada's clean contour line, flat color planes, and folk-art sensibility — drawn from the painted glass and gingerbread moulds of the Bohemian countryside — gave Hašek's antihero the visual identity by which he is known throughout the world; no other illustrator of Švejk has displaced him. The cycle also extends to the spurious continuations of the novel published after Hašek's death, completing the visual record of the Good Soldier's wanderings. Issued by Artia primarily for export, the Russian-language edition is now scarce outside the former Soviet bloc and is sought both by collectors of Czech graphic art and by admirers of Hašek's novel.