Čapek, Karel - Photography of the Czech author Karel Čapek

€ 24,95

Karel Čapek Geluidsfragment uitspraak (info / explanation) (Malé Svatoňovice, January 9, 1890 - Prague, December 25, 1938) was a Czech writer.

He is considered one of the most important Czech writers. He wrote several works together with his brother Josef. His most famous works can be classified as science fiction, entirely in the line of British authors such as Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. He is known as the inventor of the word 'robot'. The word first appears in his work R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) (1920). In a letter sent in Lidové Noviny (a Czech newspaper, of which he was editor for some time) in 1933, Karel Čapek says that the word was invented by his brother Josef (see external links). He also wrote Krakatit (1924) about the discovery of an explosive of unprecedented destructive power by 'atomic explosions'. (The book was written in a period in which a lot of scientific research was done on radioactivity and atomic nuclei. The principle of nuclear fission was only discovered in 1938.)[1]

He also wrote numerous newspaper articles, plays, children's books, detectives, travel reports and even a book about gardening. Čapek made use of countless writing styles and genres, often also within a work. Much of his work has been written with a witty sense of humor. In 1932 a collection of his travel accounts from the Netherlands was published under the name Obrázky z Holandska (published in Dutch under the title About Holland). Famous is also his Dášeňka (1932, published in the Netherlands as Tuuntje) about his stubborn young dog, illustrated with his own photographs. In 2019 it appeared again in Dutch at EPO publishers, this time under the name "Dasja, or the life of a puppy", ISBN 9789491738449.

The brothers Čapek formed the pivot of intellectual life in Czechoslovakia between the two world wars. They united left-wing avant-garde artists with more conservative intellectuals. Charles also enjoyed the warm sympathy of the charismatic president of the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938), Tomáš Masaryk (1850-1937). Masaryk asked him to record his life story in Hovory s Masarykem (1928, Conversations with Masaryk).

In the 1930s, Čapek increasingly opposed the rise of Nazism, fascism and communism in his work. In this period he wrote a number of plays and novels with strong political overtones. Válka s mloky (1936, War with the Salamanders) is the best example of this. When the Munich Agreement of September 1938 made it clear that the Western European countries would not assist Czechoslovakia against the National Socialist threat, his world collapsed. Shortly afterwards he died as a broken man of pneumonia.

 

ISBN 3925835571

1 druk 1990

Soft cover

New