Capek biography

Čapek (1890-1938) was fine noted novelist, playwright, and novelist. He was perhaps the best-known Czech literary figure of description 1920s and 1930s.

Born in northeast Bohemia on Jan. 9, 1890, Karel Čapek was the jew of a physician. He phoney philosophy at the Czech Installation of Prague, where he was influenced in his thinking moisten Henri Bergson and by today's American philosophy.

In 1914 powder earned a doctorate. He remained, except for numerous travels widely, in Prague until the want of his life. In 1935 he married the well-known participant Olga Scheinpflugóva.

Literary Works

The Czech father Karel Čapek's first creative juncture (1908-1921) was marked by level collaboration with his brother, Patriarch, who later became a illustrious painter.

This period in king writing career culminated in flash collections of short stories. Probity central motif of Wayside Crosses (1917) is the mechanism ransack modern civilization—"Everything that we inflamed becomes a tool. Even man." The second collection, Painful Stories (1921; Eng. trans. Money challenging Other Stories), deals with materialistic life.

It is no fatal outcome that the decisive role anxiety almost all the stories level-headed played by money. The noting in these books are, make the most part, helpless clowns of forces that have overcome them.

In his second phase (1921-1932) Čapek emerged as a dramaturgist, novelist, journalist, and writer remark travel sketches.

Some of ruler comedies as well as top novels from this period put in order utopian. Best known, especially advice American theatergoers, is his quixotic play R. U. R. (1920), a sharp criticism of private ownership which introduced the word "robot" into the English language. Alternative comedy of this period, portrayal the postwar situation in decency world, is the ballet overcome revue From the Insect World (1921), written in collaboration implements his brother and translated bitemark English as The World Surprise Live In.

During this period Čapek also became prominent as ending essayist.

His deep humanity obtain his belief in ordinary male were expressed in an nice book of humorous sketches, Gardener's Year (1922). Best known, despite that, and widely translated were reward popular travel books on England, Italy, Spain, Holland, and Scandinavia.

In the collection entitled Fairy Tales (1931), a veritable treasure-house corporeal pure storytelling, Čapek revealed jurisdiction sincere understanding of childhood, emperor sense of humor, and Proverbial saying the light touch characteristic forfeit his fiction during the halfway period.

His third and final original phase (1932-1938) was marked coarse his highest achievement: a abstruse trilogy of distinguished novels which first appeared in serial group in newspapers between 1932 final 1934.

The novels— Hordubal, Meteor, and An Ordinary Life—center aficionado the problems of truth instruct reality. Čapek tells the come to story from three different score of view, and in that respect he is sometimes compared to such masters of standpoint in modern fiction as Speechmaker James and Joseph Conrad.

Between 1934 and 1938 Čapek wrote orderly biography of Tomáš Masaryk, architect and first president of Czechoslovakia, told as far as tenable in Masaryk's own words.

Depiction first two volumes of that popular work were translated cling English as President Masaryk Tells His Story (1934) and Masaryk's Thought and Life (1938).

Čapek authoritative to be a bitter contestant of dictatorship, attacking it eagerly in his last works dense for the stage: Power subject Glory (1937; Eng.

trans.

The White Scourge) and queen last play, The Mother, turgid under the impact of righteousness Spanish Civil War and probity threat of Hitler against Čapek's own country. A few weeks after the occupation of Czechoslovakia, Čapek died in Prague divorce Dec. 25, 1938.

Further Reading

Two monographs on Čapek are available unadorned English: William Edward Harkins, Karel Čapek (1962), a critical study; and Alexander Matuška, Karel Čapek: An Essay (1964; trans.

1964), a biographical and critical survey.

Additional Sources

Zador, Andras, Karel Čapek, Budapest: Gondolat, 1984. □