Three Novels

Praise for Three Novels and Karel Čapek:

Enjoyable philosophical novels can be counted on a hand or two … Now, thanks to Catbird Press, American readers can add to this skimpy list the obscure but thoroughly deserving trilogy comprising Hordubal, Meteor, and An Ordinary Life.

—Washington Post Bk. World

Čapek’s masterpiece.

—Chicago Tribune

A stunning, mortuary trilogy of novels.

—The Nation

Fifty years after his death, Čapek’s work has lost nothing of its freshness and luster…. He is as great a delight to read today as he ever was.

—N.Y. Times Book Review

Karel Čapek (1890-1938; CHOP-ek) was Czechoslovakia’s leading novelist, playwright, story writer, columnist, and critic during the first twenty years after the founding of the nation in 1918. He was the inventor of the literary robot in R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), as well as a writer of delightful detective stories, humorous columns, and the great satire on science and modernity War with the Newts.

Introduction Copyright © 1990 William Harkins

All rights reserved.

This is a reprint of a trilogy of novels originally published separately in Czech as Hordubal, Povetron, and Obycejny zivot in 1933-1934, published separately in English translation in Great Britain in 1934-1936 by George Allen & Unwin, Ltd, and published in a single volume as Three Novels in 1948 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd in Great Britain and in 1949 by A. A. Wyn in the United States. This is a reprint of the second impression of the one-volume edition published by A. A. Wyn. The Introduction by William Harkins has been added, and the translation of the Afterword by Karel Čapek has been revised by Robert Wechsler.

CATBIRD PRESS

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800-360-2391 [email protected]

Our books are distributed to the trade by Independent Publishers Group

Third printing

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Čapek, Karel, 1890-1938

Hordubal, Meteor, An ordinary life; Three Novels by Karel Čapek, translated by Maria and Robert Weatherall; introduction by William Harkins.

ISBN 0-945774-08-7 (pbk.)

I. Title. II. Title: Hordubal. III. Title: Meteor. IV. Title: Ordinary life.

PG5038.C3A28 1990

891.8’635-dc20 89-23957 CIP

CONTENTS

Introduction by William Harkins

HORDUBAL

METEOR

AN ORDINARY LIFE

Afterword by Karel Čapek

INTRODUCTION

Karel Čapek has remained, over the decades since his death in 1938, the great national writer of his Czech people. At the same time, he has also enjoyed special favor in the English-speaking world, to the extent that all of his major and many of his minor works are available in English translations.

If we inquire concerning the secret of such popularity, an answer is not easy to give. Čapek turns out to have written many types of literature and to have meant many things to many people. One thinks first of his Utopian or, to use today’s terminology, dystopian works (a dystopia is a utopia gone amok): the play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (1920), the novel The Absolute at Large (1922), or the somewhat later novel War with the Newts (1936). These works, for all their penetrating insight into how human progress can be our own worst enemy, are also admirable for other qualities: the dramatic expressionism of R.U.R., with its robots marching in step to epitomize the dangers of mechanization; the trenchant satire and parody of the two novels, the first burlesquing a world of technological overproduction, the second describing man’s subjugation by a species of giant, intelligent newts which mankind had previously subjugated for its own industrial and military purposes. In a Swiftian vein, these novels mock the seeming achievement of our modern, civilized and technological world.

Standing next to this theme of the disasters facing our modern civilization is the theme of war. It first appears in the satirical revue From the Life of the Insects (1921), which Karel Čapek wrote with his brother Josef. In the third act of the play, one tribe of ants conquers and exterminates another. The war theme figures by implication in the scientific fantasy Krakatit (1924), in which Čapek foresaw how the power of atomic energy might be used for military purposes. Finally, his two late, anti-Nazi plays, The White Plague (1937) and The Mother (1938), finally accept war (Čapek had been a pacifist), but only on the ground of justifiable self-defense or, more precisely, the defense of others more defenseless. One does not normally think of Čapek as an anti-war author, but perhaps this theme did as much to establish his reputation, particularly in the modern theater, as did the theme of scientific dystopia.

Although his best-known works tend to be about social problems, Čapek was essentially a humanist.