Karel Čapek

• 1. Introduction

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  Karel Čapek died on Christmas Day, 1938, of pneumonia, and the Gestapo did not even know he was gone. Months later, Nazi agents arrived at his Prague home to arrest him. They found only his wife. That gap between the power of a regime and the man it feared tells you something essential about Čapek: he was considered dangerous enough to be named public enemy number two by the Nazi Gestapo, yet he never fired a weapon or held political office. His tools were words. And one word in particular, which he gave to the world, still shapes how we think about the future: robot. But the word was only the beginning. Behind it lay a body of work that asked, with increasing urgency, what human beings might do to themselves when they hand power over to machines, to corporations, or to dictators. This documentary follows the life of a man born in a Bohemian mountain village in 1890 who became one of the most prophetic writers of the twentieth century, and who refused to leave his country even as that century closed in around him.

• 2. Roots in Bohemia

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  Malé Svatoňovice, a village in the Bohemian mountains, was where Karel Čapek was born on the 9th of January 1890. Within six months, the family had moved to Úpice, where his father Antonín worked as a doctor at the local textile factory. Antonín was not the kind of man who kept to one role. He co-funded the local museum and served on the town council, and Karel would later call him "a good example... of the generation of national awakeners". His mother Božena was different: she disliked life in the country and suffered from long-term depression, but she collected and recorded local folklore with great care, preserving legends, songs, and stories.

  Karel was the youngest of three siblings. His brother Josef would become a highly successful painter, and the two would live and work together throughout Karel's adult life. Their sister Helena was a talented pianist who later became a writer, publishing memoirs about both brothers.

  High school proved turbulent. At Hradec Králové, Karel was expelled for joining an illegal students' club that he later described with some amusement as a "very non-murderous anarchist society". He tried again in Brno with his sister, then moved once more to Prague, where he finally graduated from the Academic Grammar School in 1909.

  During those years he fell in love with Cubism and the visual arts, an infatuation that would show up in his prose. He went on to study philosophy and aesthetics at Charles University in Prague, with time also at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin and the University of Paris. He earned his doctorate in philosophy from Charles University in 1915, the same year his spinal condition, spondyloarthritis, had already begun shaping his life in ways he could not yet predict.

• 3. War, Politics, and the Press

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  Spondyloarthritis exempted Karel Čapek from military service, so he watched World War I from Prague rather than a trench. The war shook his political convictions deeply. As a young journalist he began writing on nationalism, totalitarianism, and consumerism, the themes that would run through all his mature work.

  Through Prague's social circles he developed close ties with the founders of the Czechoslovak state. Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the country's first president, was a regular guest at Čapek's famous "Friday Men" garden parties, gatherings of leading Czech intellectuals that Čapek hosted at his home. Čapek was also a member of Masaryk's Hrad political network, and their long conversations eventually became the basis for his book Talks with T. G. Masaryk.

  Journalism was his daily trade. With his brother Josef he worked as an editor at the Czech paper Národní listy (The National Newspaper) from October 1917 to April 1921. The two then moved together to the staff of Lidové noviny (The People's Paper). Čapek continued to write for that paper alongside his fiction throughout the 1920s.

  His political outlook was grounded in American pragmatic liberalism. He campaigned for free expression and stood firmly against both fascism and communism. He was, in fact, the first in a notable series of Czech intellectuals to contribute to a newspaper essay series called "Why I am not a Communist". When, in the 1930s, the threat from fascism sharpened, his opposition hardened with it. By the mid-1930s he had become, in the words often applied to him, an outspoken anti-fascist, and his plays and novels began to reflect that directly.

  He also worked to build literary infrastructure for his country. He established the Czechoslovak PEN Club and served as its first president, and he helped bring it into the International PEN network. The Karel Čapek Prize, awarded every other year by the Czech PEN Club for work that upholds democratic and humanist values, still carries his name.

• 4. The Word Robot

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  R.U.R., or Rossum's Universal Robots, opened in 1920. It is a dystopian play set in a factory populated by sentient androids, and the word that appeared in it for the first time would eventually travel into dozens of languages and into everyday speech worldwide.

  But Karel Čapek consistently, and with characteristic modesty, gave the credit for that word to his brother Josef. In a short letter responding to an article in the Oxford English Dictionary on the word's etymology, Karel named Josef as the actual inventor. He had originally wanted to call the creatures laboři, from the Latin labor, but found the word too artificial. He asked Josef for a suggestion, and Josef proposed roboti.

  In an article he wrote for the Czech journal Lidové noviny in 1933, Čapek explained the thinking behind the term. The word robot comes from robota, which carries the literal meaning of corvée or serf labor, and figuratively means drudgery or hard work in Czech. The word also means work or labor in colloquial Slovak, archaic Czech, and many other Slavic languages including Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian, Polish, Macedonian, and Ukrainian. It derives from the reconstructed Proto-Slavic word orbota, meaning work, hard work, or obligatory work for the king.

  The choice was precise and deliberate. The robots in R.U.R. are not slaves in name, but the word insists they are in essence. The play was translated into English in 1922 and was being performed in the United Kingdom and America by 1923. Within a few years the concept was loose in the world, carrying with it the freight of its Slavic root: compulsory labor, servitude, the toil that belongs to someone else.

• 5. A Literature of Warning

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  Karel Čapek's range as a writer was extraordinary. His books include detective stories, novels, fairy tales, theatre plays, travel writing, and a charming guide to gardening with illustrations by Josef. But underneath that variety ran a single insistent concern: the dangers that industrial civilization was quietly building for itself.

  His 1922 novel Krakatit imagined a nuclear-weapon-like explosive decades before the atomic bomb existed. His 1936 novel War with the Newts, a satirical dystopian work, dramatized fears about corporations, colonialism, and the willingness of human institutions to exploit any available labor until catastrophe results. His 1927 play The White Disease placed a pacifist doctor in direct conflict with a fascistic marshal, a direct response to the political atmosphere that was already darkening Europe.

  He also produced more intimate philosophical fiction. His Noetic Trilogy, three novels published in 1933 and 1934 under the titles Hordubal, Meteor, and An Ordinary Life, tried to answer fundamental questions about what it is possible to know about another person. His most important works, he believed, grappled with epistemology: what is knowledge, and how far does it reach?

  Beyond his own fiction, Čapek shaped Czech as a written language. The literary critic and biographer Ivan Klíma wrote that it is thanks to Čapek that the written Czech language grew closer to the language people actually spoke. Alongside Jaroslav Hašek, Čapek chose to write in the vernacular rather than in a more elevated register, and that choice helped drive an early-twentieth-century revival of written Czech. His translations from French poetry opened that tradition to a new generation of Czech poets as well.

  Arthur Miller, recalling his first encounter with Čapek as a college student in the 1930s, wrote in 1990: "There was no writer like him... prophetic assurance mixed with surrealistic humour and hard-edged social satire: a unique combination...he is a joy to read."

• 6. The Final Year

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  In 1935, after a long acquaintance, Karel Čapek married the actress Olga Scheinpflugová. By 1938, the political situation that had driven his writing for a decade had become a personal emergency. France and the United Kingdom refused to honor their pre-war treaty commitments and declined to defend Czechoslovakia against Nazi Germany.

  Čapek was offered exile in England. He refused. The Gestapo had placed him second on its list of Czech enemies, a designation that would have made leaving easy to justify. He stayed anyway.

  While repairing flood damage at the family's summer house in Stará Huť, he caught a common cold. Given his lifelong spondyloarthritis and the fact that he was a heavy smoker, what might have been minor became fatal. Karel Čapek died of pneumonia on the 25th of December 1938, just months before German forces occupied Czechoslovakia.

  The aftermath was cruel for those he left behind. Nazi agents arrived at his Prague home to arrest him, unaware he had already died. They arrested and interrogated Olga instead. She was released, continued acting, and lived until 1968, when she died onstage of a heart attack while performing one of her husband's plays. Josef Čapek was arrested in September 1939 and eventually died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945.

  Karel and Olga are buried at the Vyšehrad Cemetery in Prague. The inscription on Karel's tombstone was written for his brother as much as for himself. It reads: "Here Josef Čapek, painter and poet, would have been buried. Grave far away."

  Though Čapek was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times, he never received it. The communist government that ruled Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1989 was reluctant to celebrate him, because he had refused to accept communism as a viable path during his lifetime. His rehabilitation as a major literary figure came more fully after the war, and after that government's end. In 2009, seventy years after his death, a book was published containing extensive correspondence between Čapek and the Brno lawyer Jindřich Groag, in which Čapek discussed pacifism and conscientious objection to military service. Only a portion of those letters had been known before.