19. - 20. století
Karel Capek
One of the most influential Czech writers of the 20th century
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He was a prominent and world-renowned Czech writer, a man known to have numerous occupations – he was a writer, a translator and a photographer.
As an amateur photographer, Capek became quite renowned and the First Republic’s most sold photographic publication was his Dashenka, or the Life of a Puppy. He was also a passionate collector of ethnic music and owned over 500 records.
He went to high-school in Hradec Kralove, from where he had to transfer to Brno because of his participation to the Anti-Austrian Association. He then continued his studies at the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University, and he later studied philosophy in Paris and in Berlin.
He wasn’t enrolled as a soldier during the First World War due to health problems. By the end of the war and during the 20’s he worked as an editor in some magazines and he was the chief of dramaturgy at the theater Vinohradske divadlo.
In 1935 he married his companion of many years Olga Scheinpflugova and lived his last years in the growing shadow of Nazism. He died only a few months before his planned imprisonment by the Gestapo.
* The Luminous Depths (1916)
* The Wayside Crosses (1917)
* A Critique of Words (1920)
* The Absolute at Large (1922)
* Krakatit (1922)
* Stories from a Pocket, Stories from Another Pocket (1929)
* In Praise of Newspapers (1931)
* Hordubal (1933, made into a film in 1937)
* Povetron (1934)
* An ordinary Life (1934)
* War with the Newts (1936, movie in pre-production in 2009)
* The Outlaw (1920, made into a film in 1931)
* R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots, 1920).
* The Makropoulos Affair - (1922, put into music by L. Janacek)
* The White Plague - (1937, put into music by T. Andrasov, made into a film by H. Haas in 1937)
