Top four books of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

The Austro-Hungarian Empire rose out of the Nineteenth Century and barely made it into the Twentieth. Improbable, fragile and ultimately doomed, it brought together a bewildering multiplicity of national, ethnic and linguistic groups from Silesia to Sarajevo, from Prague to Ruthenia, and then evaporated in 1919 - leaving behind a faint echo of Imperial tinsel, an after-image of brass bands and sachertorte, and the almost-forgotten legacy of a strangely tolerant experiment in multiculturalism. Like most empires, the best literature it produced concerned its fall: and our top five Austro-Hungarian books all share a sense of elegy for the conflicted, rickety and slightly ridiculous dual monarchy that inspired them. 

We start, inevitably, with Kafka. One of those writers who's far more talked about than read, his nightmarish visions loom out of the Prague of the last years of the Empire and cast a shadow forward over the twentieth century. Not that any of this high seriousness and prophetic gloom should distract you from his subversive wit, or his constant sense that a barely-repressed stream of human comedy runs beneath even the most grotesque horror. Recommending one book for Kafka would be meaningless: a good place to start is Michael Hoffman's masterful translation of Metamorphosis and other stories (Penguin Classics, 2007).

Jaroslav Hašek's brutally funny stories of Švejk, a simple-minded dealer of mongrel dogs, with no ambitions beyond his pint and his pipe - whom History nonetheless keeps kicking roughly in the behind - convey a similar mixture of horror and farce, but with a lightness of touch and a Laurel-and-Hardy-esque note of slapstick that will have you laughing out loud. Hašek leads his bumbling anti-hero from the bar-world of Prague, through prison and the Army to the killing-fields of the First World War. Ever ready with a cheerful non-sequitur in face of slaughter, Švejk is a man for the Twentieth Century, a nihilist Candide in an age of atrocity. The best of the Švejk stories are collected in Penguin Classics' The Good Soldier Švejk: and his Fortunes in the World War.

Intimidating as it is, no list of Austro-Hungarian literature would be complete without Robert Musil's monumental The Man without Qualities. Essentially Musil's entire life's work, this breezeblock of a novel (anything up to 1,700 pages, and he never even finished it) routinely gets compared to Joyce and Proust. Musil follows the fortunes of Ulrich, a young mathematician who finds himself adrift in the world of fin-de-siécle Vienna, without ambition or ideals: as he himself puts it, without any discernable qualities. This kicks off a rambling and picaresque series of tales concerning chambermaids, pageboys, prostitute murderers, and a plan to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Emperor's rule (and antagonize the German Kaiser) by declaring 1919 a year of outrageous spectacle and celebration - which we know, of course, will never happen. Musil's satire of Viennese society is savage, absurd, brutally funny and utterly unique.

Finally, Joseph Roth's The Radetsky March is the daddy of all novels of the Austro-Hungarian decline: a gorgeous, shimmering saga of three generations of the Von Trotta family, whose fortunes mirror that of the empire to which their fates are inextricably bound. Between the elder Trotta's unintentionally comic rescue of the young Emperor Franz Josef at the battle of Solferino in 1859, and the sad dissipation of the youngest Trotta in the years leading up to the First World War, The Radetsky March flits between comedy and tragedy, the epic and the domestic, with an unerring touch and a fine sense of the ridiculous. It's a heartbreaking, bittersweet, turbulently comic elegy for a vanished world that its author could never quite decide whether to mock or to mourn.