Obviously, this is my page for the unfoldment of Fables and Understories, a posthumous collection of Karel Capek short pieces. I plan on updating it until it’s done. I do plan on releasing my work under some sort of CC license and updating the text’s accessibility (one file, .pdf, etc); I need to do some research first. Ooo, and prepare footnotes, which are harder to employ in a blog post.

Go visit and enjoy.

Karel Capek , but what belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire when he was born in 1890. In a period of less than a decade, the Czech lands saw the birth of three titans of early 20th century literature: the raucous Slavic Cervantes Karel Hasek, the moody Jewish-German genius Franz Kafka, and the relentless innovator Karel Capek.

By the time the Czech lands achieved their independence, the Czech language and identity were still struggling to define themselves after having been nearly obliterated during centuries of foreign rule and forced use of German. Some groundwork had been laid in the 19th century by good (but not great) poets like Erben, Nemcová and Neruda, but Capek’s virtuoso skill with the language and his expansion of that skill into such disparate genres as newspaper editorial, science fiction fantasy, and technical handbooks made possible later Czech writers like Kundera, Skvorecký, Hrabal, Klíma, and Havel.