First Czech(oslovak) cultural artifact

 

Slavic SF, Thursday, 2-11

 

 

Today’s topic

We will discuss our first Czech(oslovak) cultural artifact, Karel Čapek’s play RUR—a work that gave the world the word “robot.”

Let’s go over the quiz first

1.  The robot factory is: (a) in Prague; (b) in Washington, DC; (c) on an island; (d) on a remote mountaintop. There is an inspiration for this that we’ll mention.

2.  The robots eventually kill all the humans: true or false. Alquist remains alive because…

3.  Helena marries: (a) Dr. Gall; (b) a robot; (c) Alquist; (d) Domin. It’s a strange proposal that you may even have missed while reading.

4.  Rossum’s formula for creating robots survives: true or false. Helena burns it.

5.  What’s the twist at the play’s end? The robots essentially become human.

Start-of-class discussion

Let’s talk about answers to the film’s guide questions (below) and also bring in things you learned about Karel Čapek from our Canvas page about him. Who wants to contribute?

1.  What does RUR stand for and what’s its history?

2.  Who is Helena and what is her relationship to RUR and to the other characters?

3.  What happens to the robots and why? What happens to the human characters?

4.  How do you read the message(s) of this play?

5.  How does this work fit into Suvin’s framework for SF as cognitive estrangement?

Some introductory quotes about our author

“In Čapek, any high-minded idea leads necessarily to huge disasters, and one should stick to the pragmatic immediacy of people believing in other people” (Harkins, who was one of his English- language biographers).

“Čapek, along with Zamyatin, is the most significant interwar SF writer” (Suvin).

 

 

“Čapek’s play [RUR] is, in my opinion, a terribly bad one, but it is immortal for that one word” (Isaac Asimov).

Čapek’s writing

He was an engaged writer: he detested art-for-art’s-sake. Art is not a space for the self- expression of the artist, which seemed to Čapek “a monstrous piece of presumption” on the part of the artist, but rather is a space for the expression of ideas.

 

Art, in other words, has a key sociocultural role to play.

 

 

In his early work, he wrote with his brother Josef. Common themes in this early work include industrial capitalism, the mechanization of human being in the modern era, love, socialism, poverty, life and death.

The main question for the brothers Čapek was: is modern industrial civilization a blessing or does it instead destroy aesthetical and ethical values?

 

You won’t be surprised to learn that another theme in their work was also…

 

 

It was his brother Josef who coined the term “robot” (from robota, meaning “heavy labor, toil”).

Other SF works by Čapek

1.  The Insect Play (play, 1921)

2.  The Makropulos Affair (play, 1922, which was turned into a famous opera by Leoš Janáček)

3.  The Absolute at Large (novella, 1922, which is on the list for your final project)

4.  Krakatit (novella, 1922, which is on the list for your final project)

5.  War with the Newts (novella, 1936, which we’ll be reading)

The White Plague (play, 1937, which is on the list for your final project)

Contextualizing the play: its era

It was published in 1920 and first performed in 1921. It was written immediately following World War I during which Europe had seen, in the words of one scholar, “the horror which human society could create in the name of absolute ideas and slogans.” As one critic notes, the play is attempt to “frame the great questions of its age.”

RUR is Čapek’s response to that. It is a kind of “collective drama” of humanity.