Čapek, Karel
Čapek, Karel ( 1890 – 1938 ),Czech novelist and dramatist, born in Bohemia, the son of a doctor, and educated at the universities of Paris, Berlin, and Prague. He and his brother, painter and stage-designer Josef Čapek ( 1887 – 1945 ), began to write plays together c.1910 ; the best known of their joint works is The Insect Play ( 1921 ), a satire on human society and totalitarianism. Čapek's best-known independent work was R.U.R. ( 1920 , first performed in England in 1923 ), a play set ‘on a remote island in 1950 – 60 ’. The title stands for ‘Rossum's Universal Robots’, and the concept of the mechanical robot (a word coined from the Czech ‘robota’, meaning drudgery) opened up a whole new vein of science fiction , as well as adding a word to the English language. In Čapek's play the robots, having acquired human emotions, rebel against their servile status and destroy their masters....
[The entire page is 249 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Oxford University Press Titles
