Other literary forms
Apart from long fiction, Karel Čapek (CHAH-pehk) wrote many stories, travelogues, and plays. An important journalist, he published many of his feuilletons as well as his conversations with T. G. Masaryk, then president of Czechoslovakia. He also published a book on philosophy, Pragmatismus (1918), and a book of literary criticism, Kritika slov (1920).
Čapek’s collections of short stories include Zárivé hlubiny (1916; with Josef Čapek); Bozí muka (1917; Wayside Crosses , 2002); Krakonošova zahrada (1918); Trapné povídky (1921; Money, and Other Stories , 1929; also known as Painful Tales , 2002); Povídky z druhé kapsy and Povídky z jedné kapsy (1929; Tales from Two Pockets , 1932); Devatero pohádek (1931; Fairy Tales , 1933); and Kniha apokryfů (1946; Apocryphal Stories , 1949).
Among Čapek’s most important plays are R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots (pb. 1920; with Josef Čapek; English translation, 1923); Ze života hmyzu (pb. 1920; with Josef Čapek; The Insect Play , 1923; also known as And So Infinitam: The Life of the Insects , 1923); Vêc Makropulos (pb. 1920; The Macropulos Secret , 1925); Bílá nemoc (1937; Power and Glory , 1938; also known as The White Plague , 1988); and Matka (pr., pb., 1938; The Mother , 1939).
Achievements
Karel Čapek is among the best-known modern Czech writers. He became prominent between the two world wars and was recognized by and acquainted with such eminent figures as George Bernard Shaw , H. G. Wells , G. K. Chesterton , and Jules Romains . Čapek’s international reputation earned for him the presidency of the Czechoslovak PEN Club, and he was suggested for the post of president of the International PEN Club, an honor that he declined. Though he was equally versatile in fiction and drama, his fame abroad rests mostly on his science-fiction play R.U.R ., written in collaboration with Josef Čapek, which introduced into the world vocabulary the Czech word robot , a neologism derived from the Czech robota , meaning forced labor.
Despite Čapek’s lifelong interest in science and its destructive potential, examined in such novels as The Absolute at Large and Krakatit , and despite the worldwide fame that such science fantasies brought him, he is remembered in the Czech Republic as a dedicated humanist, a spokesperson for the tolerance, pragmatism, and pluralism best manifested in the philosophy of relativism that his works so creatively demonstrate. He was one of the strongest voices of his time against totalitarianism, be it fascist or communist.
Čapek’s work is deeply philosophical, but in a manner that is accessible to a wide readership. He managed to achieve this with the help of a chatty, almost pedestrian style informed by a genuine belief in the reasonable person, one who is open to a rational argument when all else fails. Hence Čapek’s humanism; hence, also, his disappointment when, after the infamous appeasement of 1938, he had to acknowledge that the very paragons of the democratic ideal and of Western culture, England and France, had sold out his country to the Nazis.
Such concerns of Čapek as the conflict between humankind’s scientific achievements and the very survival of the human race—a conflict illustrated by the fight between the robots and human beings in R.U.R .—are not merely alive today but have become more and more pressing as the world is becoming increasingly aware of the threat of nuclear holocaust. Čapek was among the first to see the dangerous potential of humankind’s creative ability, not because he was particularly gifted in science, but because he was quite realistic, approaching the tendencies of his time with the far-seeing and far-reaching attitude of one whose relativism was tempered by pessimism derived from his awareness of the past, the tradition from which the imperfect-but-perfectible human departed.
An urbane wit, a certain intimacy with the reader, deft characterization, and concise expression are the hallmarks of Čapek’s style. This style heightens the impact of his fictional treatment of profound issues.
Biography
The youngest child of a country doctor, Karel Čapek was born in 1890 in Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A weak and sickly boy, Čapek was pampered by his mother and protected by his older brother, Josef; they, together with his maternal grandmother, inspired him with a love for literature. Karel and Josef prepared themselves for a literary vocation by their prodigious reading in many foreign literatures; among Karel’s juvenilia are some verses influenced by Symbolism and the Decadents—French and Czech. Josef was to collaborate with Karel on some of his most celebrated successes, including R.U.R ., but he was primarily a gifted artist, illustrator, and designer who gradually established himself as such, leaving Karel Čapek to write alone, though never really drifting spiritually, or even physically, far away.
A brilliant student, Karel Čapek enrolled at Charles University in Prague, though two stints took him to the University of Berlin and the University of Paris. In 1915, he earned his doctorate, having defended his dissertation on objective methods in aesthetics. The next year saw the publication of the short-story collection Zářivé hlubiny , written with Josef. This genre was particularly suited to Čapek’s talents, and throughout his life he continued to write short stories: philosophical, mystical, detective, and apocryphal. Parody and satire, down to the political lampoon, are not rare among them; they seem to flow naturally from the day-to-day concerns of a journalist sharply reacting to the crises and momentous events of his time.
The first such event was the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918, at which time Čapek worked for a National Democrat paper, switching in 1921 to the more liberal Lindové noviny , where he stayed to the end of his life. Čapek’s youth and his middle age parallel the youth and growing pains of his country’s first republic, right down to its (and his) death in 1938. Thus, Čapek is the literary embodiment of the principles of this republic, led by a philosopher-president, Masaryk; among these principles were a distrust of radical solutions, an accent on the small work on a human scale, and a faith in the goodwill of people. In this respect, one can consider Čapek an unofficial cultural ambassador to the world at large.
Čapek was not indifferent to the world: A cosmopolitan spirit, he was drawn toward England in particular, and he traveled widely, reporting on his travels in books on England, Holland, Italy, Spain, and Scandinavia. Indeed, he was a quintessential European, protesting the deteriorating situation in Europe before World War II, which he did not live to witness but the coming of which he foresaw only too clearly. This prescience is particularly evident in his novel The War with the Newts , a thinly disguised presentiment of the Orwellian battle of totalitarian superpowers that left Eastern Europe, after years of Nazi occupation, in the stranglehold of the Soviet Union.
Oddly enough, the fact that a Czech writer became known throughout the world did not result in adulation of Čapek by Czech readers and critics. On the contrary, it inspired jealous critical comments to the effect that Čapek in his unusual works was pandering to foreign tastes. In retrospect, this charge seems particularly unfair. Another oddity is that Čapek abandoned the theater after the worldwide success of R.U.R . and The Insect Play , chiefly producing short stories until his greatest triumph, the trilogy of philosophical novels Hordubal , Meteor , and An Ordinary Life . When, in 1937, he returned to the theater with Power and Glory , followed in 1938 by The Mother , it was to appeal to the conscience of the world with two timely plays concerned with the catastrophe prepared by Nazism. The plays were designed to counter the spirit of pacifism and appeasement then sweeping Europe; Čapek hoped to salvage Czechoslovakia, destined to be given to the Nazis as a peace offering.
Čapek’s last work of great importance was The Cheat , written after the tragedy of Munich. Čapek mourned the death of his republic and yet inspired his compatriots not to despair. The Cheat breaks with the relativist philosophy common to all of his works: The cheat is a cheat, a fake, a swindler and not a composer, and the novel’s many vantage points only underscore this judgment. Death overtook Čapek while he was writing the conclusion of the novel, on Christmas Day, 1938; for political reasons, his grateful readers were not permitted to say good-bye to him in a public ceremony. He was survived by Olga Scheinpflugová, an actor and writer, his companion and wife.
Though Čapek’s life was comfortable in material terms, he lived with calcification of the spine, a painful condition that made full enjoyment of those comforts impossible; it also postponed his marriage to only a few years before his death. This physical suffering was accompanied by a spiritual search. For years, as the testimony of his literary works shows, he was content with pragmatism and relativism, though he was not an ethical relativist. Only toward the end of his life, as witness his last novel, did he embrace the idea that, often, people are what they seem, definitely and irrevocably: They are fully responsible for their actions.
Never does Čapek complain or rant against destiny: There is a sunny and humorous side to his work that balances the dark visions. Perhaps his excellence in life and art is explained by his personal heroism in alchemizing his suffering into a quest for a meaningful life.
Analysis
Karel Čapek was a philosophical writer par excellence regardless of the genre that he employed in a given work, but the form of long fiction in particular afforded him the amplitude to express complicated philosophical ideas. Thus, his greatest achievement is the trilogy consisting of Hordubal , Meteor , and An Ordinary Life . These three novels preserve the fruit of Čapek’s life’s work: the searching and finding of his many short stories, plays, and newspaper columns, as well as his lifelong preoccupation with the philosophy of pragmatism and relativism.
While the trilogy is a complex and at the same time harmonious statement of Čapek’s philosophy, his last novel, The Cheat , though shorter than either of the three novels of the trilogy, is important for representing a sharp and shocking departure from the trilogy’s philosophy. It represents a further development of Čapek’s philosophical search.
Hordubal
Hordubal is based on a newspaper story of a crime that took place in the most backward region of prewar Czechoslovakia, the Transcarpathian Ukraine. Juraj Hordubal, an unsophisticated but very sensitive and even saintly peasant, returns from the United States, where he worked and made some money, to his wife Polana and daughter Hafia. He is unaware that in his absence, Polana has fallen in love with Stefan Manya, a Hungarian hired hand. To disguise this affair, Polana forces Manya to become engaged to the eleven-year-old Hafia. When this ruse does not work, the lovers kill Hordubal with a long needle. An investigation uncovers the crime and identifies the criminals, who are caught and punished.
Appropriating the bare facts of the newspaper report with minimal modifications, Čapek invests this simple tale of passion with philosophical depth, first by making Hordubal a rather sensitive man who is aware of the changed circumstances upon his return home. The reader is painfully aware of this when the author lets the reader follow Hordubal’s thoughts in beautifully stylized, lyric passages of almost saintly insight and renunciation of violence, leading to the acceptance of his death. The tension develops on several levels simultaneously.
The first level is the crime passionnelle , the road that introduces us to the contrasting figures of Hordubal and Manya. A deeper level is attained when the reader perceives the cultural-ethnic contrast: Hordubal, the sedentary agricultural type, is opposed to the Hungarian Manya, the nomadic, violent type. Finally, there is the level on which the tension is between subjective reality, the reality of a given character who sees the world his or her own way, and objective reality. The conclusion, however, undercuts any confident faith in the existence of objective reality. Hordubal is seriously ill when he is murdered, so that a question arises whether the needle of the killer entered his heart before or after his death; if after, there was no murder.
The problem of the interpretation of even simple phenomena is brought to a head in the confrontation between two irreconcilable types of criminal investigations, based on different sets of assumptions and interpretations of events. In the conflict between the young police officer and his seasoned colleague, the deceptively simple case grows more and more complicated. In a plot twist that stresses the evanescent nature of humankind’s certainties, the key evidence, Hordubal’s heart, is lost in transport, condemning those involved in the investigation to eternal incertitude.
The novel shakes the certitudes established in the mystery genre, suggesting that mutually exclusive interpretations are not only possible but also inevitable. More to the point, with the death of Hordubal, the protagonist’s internal monologue ceases; the reader no longer sees Hordubal from inside. What the others think about Hordubal is widely off the mark.
Meteor
If the truth is relative and hopelessly compromised by the very fact that it is being approached by different people, the second novel of the trilogy reverses the procedure and asks if different people might not discover the truth on the basis of sharing with one another the human condition and thus having very much in common: first the difference, then the commonality. Meteor approaches this further elaboration of Čapek’s philosophical quest in an original manner.
Čapek uses three narrators who speculate about the identity of a man fatally wounded in a plane crash and brought to a hospital as “patient X.” The three narrators, including a Sister of Mercy, a clairvoyant, and a writer, try to reconstruct his life and the reason for his flight. The first narrator, the Sister, sees X as a young man who runs away from home unaware of the real meaning of love and responsibility. After some peregrinations, he decides to return home, only to crash and die in the process. The clairvoyant sees X as a talented chemist who discovered important new formulas but lacked the patience to see his experiments through and develop them commercially. When he finds that his experiments were founded on a sound basis, he decides to return and claim the discoveries as his own. The writer sees the patient as a victim of amnesia who falls in love with a Cuban girl but is unable to live without memory. When his suffering triggers the recovery of his past, the man flies home to lay claim to his position.
All three accounts differ from one another in approach and in substance, yet each of them identifies an important facet of the victim and provides an insight into the character of the individual narrator. Čapek thus raises the question of self-discovery, the perennial identity problem: What happens when X and the observer are one and the same person? The third novel of the trilogy, An Ordinary Life , provides the answer.
An Ordinary Life
A retired bureaucrat, a self-confessed “ordinary man,” decides to write the story of his own life. Looking back, he concludes that he lived an ordinary life governed only by habit and chance; it seems repetitious and predictable to him. There are, however, a few incidents that do not fit this summary generalization of his life, and the more he thinks about them, the more fully he understands that right within his ordinary life, there is a multitude of lives: He as a person is not an individuality but a plurality. He, like a microcosm, mirrors the macrocosm of society. Does he have a stable point of view, or does it too change with each different personality as he comes to adopt it? This is not a case of a pathological disorder; theprotagonist is a normal official who, before he settled down to his ways, explored radically different lifestyles. Like all people, he bears within him the potential for many selves, never fully realized.
Thus, the tension between subjective and objective reality that animates Hordubal collapses in An Ordinary Life . This third novel of the trilogy proposes that even that which is considered a subjective reality (the only accessible one, since the objective escapes forever) is itself a plurality.
As an experiment, as individual novels, and as a philosophical trilogy, these three novels are brilliant. What is difficult to communicate beyond the pale outlines and philosophical underpinnings of these works is their distinctive tone, their often lyric air. This atmosphere of numinous twilight, so difficult to communicate, bathes the novels in an unearthly light and adds to them a certain air of beauty. It comes as a surprise, then, that Čapek’s last work, The Cheat , makes a departure from the finished whole of the trilogy on philosophical grounds.
The Cheat
The trilogy was the culmination of Čapek’s work; the relativist philosophy enshrined within it is the summation of findings and beliefs that, for better or worse, animated Čapek’s entire oeuvre. The Cheat continues with the insights gained in the trilogy—for example, the method of multiple narration is preserved. The severalnarratives, nine in all, gradually fill out the picture of the fake artist Folt n, the would-be composer. These multiple narratives, however, do not yield a relativistic perspective: The individual accounts never contradict one another; rather, they gradually illuminate Folt n and answer some of the questions that the various narrators have raised. The collective finding is damning, and yet there is something admirable in Folt n: His obsessive love of art saves him from utter condemnation.
In his attempt to express the impossible, Folt n is like every artist; every artist has a little Folt n in him or her. It is only fitting, given Čapek’s sense of balance, that, after providing in his trilogy examples of the power of art to do good, to express the truth, he should point to the capacity of art to profess evil. Thus, he embraced the totality of the world that his suffering enabled him to know intimately.
Bibliography
Bradbrook, Bohuslava R. Karel Čapek: In Pursuit of Truth, Tolerance, and Trust . Portland, Oreg.: Sussex Academic Press, 1998. A critical reevaluation of Čapek’s work. Bradbrook discusses Čapek’s many intellectual interests, including his search for truth and his appreciation of science and technology. Includes a bibliography and an index.
_______. “Karel Čapek’s Contribution to Czech National Literature.” In Czechoslovakia Past and Present , edited by Miloslav Rechcigl. The Hague, the Netherlands: Mouton, 1968. Clearly places Čapek high on the list of notable Czech authors, demonstrating how much his writing affected other literary production in the country as well as making a political impact. Remarks perceptively on Čapek’s inventiveness and on his ability to work in several genres.
Harkins, William E. Karel Čapek . New York: Columbia University Press, 1962. This carefully researched and well-written critical biography of Čapek remains one of the best available full-length sources on the author.
Klima, Ivan. Karel Čapek: Life and Work . Translated by Norma Comrada. Highland Park, Mich.: Catbird Press, 2002. Catbird Press, an American publisher of Czech literature in English translation, commissioned Klima, a Czech novelist and authority on Čapek, to write this critical biography. Klima analyzes Čapek’s work, relating its themes to events in the author’s life.
Kussi, Peter, ed. Toward the Radical Center: A Karel Čapek Reader . Highland Park, Mich.: Catbird Press, 1990. Kussi’s introduction to this collection of Čapek’s fiction, plays, and other work provides an excellent brief overview of Čapek’s career. Includes a chronology and a helpful list of English translations of Čapek’s writings.
Makin, Michael, and Jindrich Toman, eds. On Karel Čapek . Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1992. Collection of conference papers examining Čapek as a modern storyteller, his versions of dystopia, his early work, his short stories, and his reception in the United States.
Mann, Erika. “A Last Conversation with Karel Čapek.” The Nation , January 14, 1939. Although brief, this account by Thomas Mann’s daughter of her last meeting with Čapek comments on the pressures Čapek found building up all around him, causing him to undergo a physical decline that eventually led to his death. She senses and comments on Čapek’s sickness of the spirit that left him unwilling to continue living in the face of Adolf Hitler’s growing fanaticism and power.
Matuska, Alexander. Karel Čapek: An Essay . Translated by Cathryn Alan. London: Allen and Unwin, 1964. An excellent account of Čapek’s artistry. Discusses how he develops his themes, shapes his characterization, fashions his plots, and handles the details that underlie the structure of his work. This book remains a valuable resource.
Schubert, Peter Z. The Narratives of Čapek and Cexov: A Typological Comparison of the Authors’ World Views . Bethesda, Md.: International Scholars, 1997. Although a somewhat difficult work for beginning students, this book proves valuable with its discussion of the themes of freedom, lack of communication, justice, and truth. Includes a separate section discussing the critical views of Čapek. The comprehensive bibliography alone makes this a volume well worth consulting.
Wellek, René. Essays on Czech Literature . The Hague, the Netherlands: Mouton, 1963. Wellek’s essay, “Karel Čapek,” which originally appeared in 1936, is one of the most searching pieces written about the author during his lifetime. Wellek comments on Čapek’s relative youth and considers him at the height of his powers. When these words were written, Čapek had less than three years to live.