Name: CAPEK, Karel Aged: 48
Born: Jan 9, 1890 Where: Male' Svatonovice, Bohemia, AustroHungary
Died: Dec 26, 1938 Where: Prague, Czechoslovakia
Interred: Vysehrad Cemetery, Prague
Married: Olga Scheinpflugova When: 1935
Awarded: The annual Czech SF Award is named in Karel Capek's honor.

Son of a doctor, Capek studied philosophy in Paris, Berlin, and Prague. Becoming a journalist, Karel was firmly entrenched between mutual hatreds for the Nazis and the Communists; promoting a free and democratic Czechoslovakia and supporting those political figures of like mind.

Capek's first major success came as a playwright when he created the robot in his 1921 play R. U. R., (Rossum's Universal Robots); intended as a satire against the Czech agrarian feudal system. Karel authored other less successful works but outstanding above them was the utopian type fantasy novel, War with the Newts, another political statement.

Karel's brother, Josef, contributed to the early works but was also a painter and illustrated several of the books. Capek suffered from spinal problems almost all of his life, and that fraility of frame would help to overcome him in the end.

When the Nazi scourge overtook Europe, Kapek was forced to surrender his dreams along with his spirit and, thereby, his life, when Czechoslovakia was abandoned by the Western nations in the pact made at Munich. He saw his world and time as lost, yet Kapek would not leave the country or his beautiful Prague, fully realizing that the decision to stay meant his death. But rather than death coming at the hands of his enemies, it came from pneumonia...in his home, in his bed, with his wife nearby. Others would not be so lucky.

Karel Capek was the most famous author in Czechoslovakia in the first half of the 20th century, and his works inspired the ill fated revolt against Communist rule 30 years later. His works are widely translated even today and biographies appear regularly.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Not really, but the closest thing available here.

BIOGRAPHY: Karel Capek, Bohuslava R. Bradrook, 1997.

ON-LINE BIOGRAPHY: Here.

OBITUARY: The New York Times, Dec 26, p23 & Dec 27, p16 & Dec 30, p16 - all 1938

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