Karel Čapek

Childhood and family

Karel Čapek was born on 9 January 1890 in Malé Svatoňovice, in the Bohemian mountains, but six months later the family moved to their own house in Úpice. His father, Antonín Čapek, worked as a doctor at the local textile factory and was a very active man: besides medicine he co-funded the town museum and sat on the town council. Karel rejected his father's materialist and positivist views, yet loved and admired him, later calling him a good example of the generation of national awakeners. His mother, Božena Čapková, was a homemaker who disliked country life and suffered from long-term depression, but she diligently collected and recorded local folklore: legends, songs and stories. Karel was the youngest of three siblings. He kept an especially close bond with his brother Josef, a highly successful painter with whom he lived and worked throughout adulthood, and his sister Helena, a talented pianist, later wrote memoirs about both brothers.

Education and youth

After elementary school in Úpice, he moved with his grandmother to Hradec Králové to attend high school. Two years later the school expelled him for taking part in an illegal students' club, which he later described as a very non-murderous anarchist society. He finished school in Brno and then, after another move, in Prague, at the Academic Grammar School in 1909. As a teenager he became enamoured of the visual arts, especially Cubism, which left its mark on his writing. At Charles University in Prague he studied philosophy and aesthetics, and he also spent time at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin and the University of Paris. While still a student he wrote on contemporary art and literature, and in 1915 he earned his doctorate in philosophy from Charles University.

War and journalism

His spinal problems, which haunted him all his life, exempted him from military service, and he watched the First World War from Prague. The war shaped his political views, and as a budding journalist he wrote about nationalism, totalitarianism and consumerism. Through his social circles he formed close ties with leaders of the new Czechoslovak state, among them Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, its first president, and Masaryk's son Jan, later foreign minister. Masaryk was a regular at Čapek's Friday garden parties for leading Czech intellectuals, and Čapek was a member of Masaryk's Hrad political network. Their frequent conversations later formed the basis of Talks with T. G. Masaryk. From 1917 to 1921 Čapek worked as an editor for the paper Národní listy with Josef, and in April 1921 both joined the staff of Lidové noviny.

Plays and novels

His early fiction consisted of short stories and plays, many written with Josef. His first major international success was R.U.R. (1920), a dystopian play about a bad day at a factory populated by sentient artificial beings. It was translated into English in 1922 and was performed in Britain and America by 1923. Throughout the 1920s he worked in many genres, fiction and non-fiction alike, though journalism remained his main trade. From this period come The Absolute at Large (1922), Krakatit (1922), The Makropulos Affair (1922), which inspired an opera by Leoš Janáček, and the noetic trilogy of Hordubal, Meteor and An Ordinary Life (1933–1934). He also wrote detective stories, fairy tales and a book on gardening, The Gardener's Year (1929), illustrated by his brother.

Anti-fascist commitment

In the 1930s his work focused on the threat of brutal national socialist and fascist dictatorships, and by the mid-decade he was an outspoken anti-fascist. He joined International PEN and founded the Czechoslovak PEN Club, serving as its first president. War with the Newts (1936), a satire widely read as a critique of Nazism, and The White Disease (1937), about a pacifist doctor opposed to a fascist marshal, are the clearest texts of this period. In 1935 he married the actress Olga Scheinpflugová, whom he had known for many years.

Late life and death

In 1938 it became clear that France and the United Kingdom would not honour their pre-war treaties and would not defend Czechoslovakia against Nazi Germany. Although offered exile in England, Čapek refused to leave his country, even though the Gestapo had named him public enemy number two. While repairing flood damage at his family's summer house in Stará Huť he caught a cold which, in a man with spondyloarthritis who was also a heavy smoker, developed into pneumonia. He died on 25 December 1938, aged forty-eight. Remarkably, the Gestapo did not know of his death: months later, just after the German invasion, Nazi agents came to arrest him, and on discovering he had been dead for some time they arrested and interrogated his wife, who was later released. Josef was arrested in September and died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945. Karel and Olga are buried at Vyšehrad Cemetery in Prague.

Language, ideas and legacy

Čapek wrote on a wide range of subjects with precise descriptions of reality and was renowned for his command of the Czech language. He is regarded as a science-fiction writer who worked before the genre was widely recognised as such, and many of his works examine the ethics of mass production, nuclear weapons and artificial beings. He feared social catastrophe, dictatorship, violence, human stupidity, the unchecked power of corporations and greed, yet he sought hope and a way out. Ivan Klíma stresses his influence on modern Czech literature and on the move towards a written Czech closer to the spoken language, alongside Jaroslav Hašek. After the Second World War the communist government accepted his work only reluctantly, since he had never accepted communism as a viable alternative. Arthur Miller wrote in 1990 that there was no writer like him, combining prophetic assurance, surrealist humour and sharp social satire. The word robot comes from roboti, a suggestion of his brother Josef, drawn from the Czech robota, meaning forced labour. A popular tradition survives today: visitors to his grave in Prague leave toy robots, and near the anniversary of his death it is often covered with hundreds of them.