Karel Čapek
1890 – 1938 · Czechia
Known for: Czech writer whose play R.U.R. gave the world the word robot
“He gave the robot its name and spent his life defending what is human.”
Biography
Karel Čapek was born on 9 January 1890 in Malé Svatoňovice, a village in the Bohemian mountains, and grew up in nearby Úpice, where his father Antonín was the doctor at the textile mill. His mother Božena collected the legends and songs of the district. He was the youngest of three children: his sister Helena became a writer, and his brother Josef, a painter, remained the closest person in his life. Expelled from the grammar school in Hradec Králové for belonging to an illegal student society, he finished school in Prague in 1909 and took a doctorate in philosophy at Charles University in 1915. A spinal disease that troubled him all his life kept him out of the army, and he watched the First World War from Prague.
He began as a journalist and remained one. With Josef he edited Národní listy from 1917, and in 1921 the brothers moved to Lidové noviny, for which he wrote columns and short prose for the rest of his life. His first international success was the play R.U.R., staged in 1920, in which a factory manufactures artificial workers who in the end destroy their makers. For those workers he needed a word, and Josef suggested robot, from the Czech robota, the compulsory labour owed by a serf. The play was translated into English in 1922, by 1923 it was playing in London and New York, and the word passed into every major language. In the novel War with the Newts he turned the same method against the dictatorships rising around him, and the plays The White Disease and The Mother followed. He founded the Czechoslovak PEN Club and became its first president, and his Friday gatherings drew writers and politicians, among them President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, into his garden.
In 1935 Čapek married the actress Olga Scheinpflugová. When France and Britain abandoned Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938, he was offered refuge in England and refused to leave, although the Gestapo had listed him as public enemy number two. That autumn, repairing flood damage at the family's summer house in Stará Huť, he caught a cold. It turned into pneumonia, and he died on 25 December 1938 at the age of forty eight. Months later, after the German occupation, agents came to the house in Prague to arrest him and learned only then that he was dead. Josef was arrested in 1939 and died in the Bergen-Belsen camp in April 1945. Karel Čapek lies in the Vyšehrad cemetery in Prague.