Word: capek
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Biting Satire. These days, Czechoslovakia's writers specialize in biting satire on Communist bureaucracy. Their work is in the tradition of Kafka and Karel Capek, whose play R.U.R. first introduced the concept of a robot. In The Memorandum, a popular play by Vaclav Havel, the main character gets an important memorandum in an impenetrable official language; in order to get permission to learn the language, he must first write a petition in it. One of the biggest hits of the Prague theater season, The Labyrinth by Ladislav Smoček, shows men imprisoned in a maze of park pathways...
...define modernism, it is an international phenomenon. Yet Connolly leaves out Ibsen and Strindberg, Nietzsche and Rilke, Tolstoy and Chekhov, all of whom surely have "helped shape the contemporary mind" to a far greater degree than Ivy Compton-Burnett or Henri Michaux. What about Marinetti and Cavafy and Karel Capek and Federigo Garcia Lorca and other influential thinkers who did not happen to write in English or French...
...Makropoulos Secret (by Karel Capek) is a kind of philosophic mystery story-by the author of R.U.R.-first produced in the '20s. It is the kind of phililosophic mystery story that Director Tyrone Guthrie, with his instinct for theater and his itch for new slants, would clearly have enjoyed remodeling. The Guthrie treatment did not mean giving the play a more modern look or a different philosophic spin. It meant reverting to a 19th century mode of acting and a Continental air of high twaddle-one moment for their value as drama, another for what is the outlines...
...Monkey Wife, first published in 1930, Collier wrote an improper parable to indicate his preferences and, incidentally, to pull man's leg. It has since become a minor classic in his own special fiction-fantasy style, and belongs on the same shelf as Swift's Houyhnhnms, Karel Capek's newts, and with all those who like to move to the other side of the zoo bars the better to observe mankind. Its reissue now is a lively event in a dull publishing season...
When Karel Capek wrote these words in his 1920 play R.U.R., such a dream of effortless productivity seemed fantastic indeed. But this week, when Massachusetts Institute of Technology explained the operations of the first completely automatized milling machine, the idea no longer seemed quite so farfetched. Ranged beside the big milling machine, which looked like any other, were three formidable-looking banks of electronic devices, each of which decoded the "messages" punched out on a tape similar to teletype. When M.I.T.'s Associate Professor William Pease fed the tape into a transmitter, the huge machine swung into action, cutting...