Karel Čapek ( / ˈ tʃ ɑː p ɛ k / ; Czech: [ ˈkarɛl ˈtʃapɛk ] ; 9 January 1890 – 25 December 1938) was a Czech writer, playwright, critic, and journalist. He is most famous for his science fiction works, including his novel War with the Newts (1936) and his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots, 1920), which introduced the word "robot." He also wrote many works that discussed political issues and the social problems of his time. Inspired by American ideas that value freedom and practical solutions, he supported free expression and strongly opposed the rise of fascism and communism in Europe.

Although he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times, Čapek never won it. However, several awards honor his name, such as the Karel Čapek Prize, which is given every other year by the Czech PEN Club to recognize literary work that supports democratic and humanist values in society. He also helped create the Czechoslovak PEN Club as part of International PEN.

Čapek died just before World War II due to a medical condition he had his whole life. His importance as a writer became widely recognized after the war.

Life

Karel Čapek was born in 1890 in the village of Malé Svatoňovice in the Bohemian mountains. Six months after his birth, the Čapek family moved to their own house in Úpice. Karel’s father, Antonín Čapek, worked as a doctor at the local textile factory. Antonín was very active; in addition to his work as a doctor, he helped fund the local museum and was a member of the town council.

Although Karel disagreed with his father’s views about material things and scientific progress, he loved and admired him, later calling him “a good example … of the generation of national awakeners.” Karel’s mother, Božena Čapková, was a homemaker. Unlike her husband, she did not enjoy life in the country and suffered from long-term depression. Despite this, she collected and recorded local folklore, such as legends, songs, and stories. Karel was the youngest of three siblings. He had a close relationship with his brother Josef, a successful painter who lived and worked with him throughout his adult life. His sister, Helena, was a talented pianist who later became a writer and published several memoirs about Karel and Josef.

After finishing elementary school in Úpice, Karel moved with his grandmother to Hradec Králové, where he began high school. Two years later, he was expelled from school for joining an illegal students’ club. Čapek later described the club as a “very non-murderous anarchist society.”

After this incident, he moved to Brno with his sister and tried to finish high school there. Two years later, he moved again to Prague, where he completed high school at the Academic Grammar School in 1909. During his teenage years, Čapek became interested in visual arts, especially Cubism, which influenced his later writing.

After graduating from high school, he studied philosophy and aesthetics at Charles University in Prague. He also spent time at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin and the University of Paris. While still a student, he wrote works about contemporary art and literature. He graduated with a doctorate in philosophy from Charles University in 1915.

Because of spinal problems that affected him his whole life, Čapek was exempted from military service and observed World War I from Prague. His political views were strongly influenced by the war, and as a young journalist, he began writing about topics like nationalism, totalitarianism, and consumerism. Through social connections, Čapek developed close relationships with many political leaders of the newly formed Czechoslovak state, including Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, a Czechoslovak patriot and the first president of Czechoslovakia, and his son Jan Masaryk, who later became minister of foreign affairs. T. G. Masaryk often visited Čapek’s “Friday Men” garden parties for leading Czech intellectuals. Čapek was also part of Masaryk’s Hrad political network. Their conversations on various topics later became the basis for Čapek’s book Talks with T. G. Masaryk.

Čapek began his writing career as a journalist. With his brother Josef, he worked as an editor for the Czech newspaper Národní listy (The National Newspaper) from October 1917 to April 1921. After leaving, he and Josef joined the staff of Lidové noviny (The People’s Paper) in April 1921.

Čapek’s early fiction included short stories and plays written with his brother Josef. His first international success was R.U.R., a dystopian work about a bad day at a factory filled with sentient androids. The play was translated into English in 1922 and performed in the UK and America by 1923. Throughout the 1920s, Čapek wrote in many genres, producing both fiction and non-fiction, but worked mainly as a journalist.

In the 1930s, Čapek’s work focused on the dangers of brutal national socialist and fascist dictatorships. By the mid-1930s, he became “an outspoken anti-fascist.” He also joined the International PEN Club and was its first president in the Czechoslovak PEN Club.

In 1935, he married actress Olga Scheinpflugová after a long acquaintance. In 1938, it became clear that Western allies, such as France and the United Kingdom, would not defend Czechoslovakia against Nazi Germany as agreed in pre-war treaties. Although offered the chance to go into exile in England, Čapek refused to leave his country—even though the Nazi Gestapo had labeled him “public enemy number two.” While repairing flood damage to his family’s summer house in Stará Huť, he caught a common cold. Because he had suffered all his life from spondyloarthritis and was a heavy smoker, Karel Čapek died of pneumonia on December 25, 1938.

Surprisingly, the Gestapo was not aware of his death. Several months later, just after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, Nazi agents came to the Čapek family house in Prague to arrest him. Upon learning he had already died, they arrested and questioned his wife, Olga. She was later released and lived until 1968; she died onstage from a heart attack while performing one of her husband’s plays. His brother Josef was arrested in September 1944 and eventually died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945. Karel Čapek and his wife are buried at the Vyšehrad Cemetery in Prague. The tombstone reads: “Here Josef Čapek, painter and poet, would have been buried. Grave far away.”

Writing

Karel Čapek wrote about many different topics. His books and plays are known for showing real life in a clear way. Čapek is well-known for his work with the Czech language.

He is considered a science-fiction writer who wrote before science fiction became a recognized type of writing. Many of his stories talk about the moral questions of industrial inventions and processes that were predicted in the early 1900s. These include making things in large amounts, nuclear weapons, and intelligent machines like robots or androids. His most active years were during the first Czechoslovak Republic (1918–1938).

Čapek also worried about problems like social disasters, dictatorships, violence, human foolishness, the power of large companies, and greed. He looked for hope and solutions. Starting in the 1930s, his writing became more against fascism, war, and what he called "irrationalism."

Ivan Klíma, who wrote a book about Čapek, says Čapek had a big influence on modern Czech literature and helped develop the Czech language as a written form. Čapek, along with writers like Jaroslav Hašek, helped bring the Czech language back to life by using everyday speech in their work. Klíma wrote, "Because of Čapek, the written Czech language became closer to the way people actually speak." Čapek also translated French poetry, which inspired new Czech poets.

His books and plays include detective stories, novels, fairy tales, theater plays, and even a book about gardening.

His most important works try to answer the question, "What is knowledge?" Examples include Tales from Two Pockets and the first book in the trilogy Hordubal, Meteor, and An Ordinary Life. He also helped write the libretto for an opera called Lásky hra osudná in 1922.

After World War II, the communist government of Czechoslovakia (1948–1989) was slow to accept Čapek’s work because he had never supported communism. He was the first in a group of important non-Marxist thinkers who wrote an essay titled Why I am not a Communist.

In 2009, 70 years after his death, a book with many of Čapek’s letters was published. These letters show his views on peace and his refusal to join the military. Before this, only some of these letters were known.

Arthur Miller wrote in 1990:

"I first read Karel Čapek when I was a college student in the 1930s. No other writer was like him. He mixed clear predictions with strange humor and strong criticism of society. He is a joy to read."

Etymology ofrobot

Karel Čapek introduced and helped popularize the commonly used word "robot," which first appeared in his play R.U.R. in 1920. Although many believe he created the word, he wrote a letter to the Oxford English Dictionary explaining that his brother, Josef Čapek, a painter and writer, was actually the inventor of the term.

In an article published in the Czech journal Lidové noviny in 1933, Karel Čapek explained that he first considered naming the creatures laboři, which comes from the Latin word labor, meaning "work." However, he disliked the word because it felt too artificial. He asked his brother Josef for suggestions, and Josef proposed the word roboti, which became the name used in English.

The word "robot" comes from the Czech word robota, which means "corvée" or "serf labor" and can also mean "drudgery" or "hard work." In colloquial Slovak, archaic Czech, and many other Slavic languages, such as Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian, Polish, Macedonian, and Ukrainian, robota means "work" or "labor." The word robota is believed to have originated from the ancient Proto-Slavic word orbota, which meant "work, hard work, or obligatory labor for a king," or a short form used for plowing.

Awards and honours

The asteroid 1931 Čapek was discovered by Luboš Kohoutek and named after him.

Čapek was awarded the Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk in honor of him in 1991.

Richard E. Pattis created the Karel computer programming language to honor Čapek.