Tag Archives: Karel Čapek

Literary roundup: Putin’s gold and an ill-fated coupling

Author of Maidenhair and the just released The Light and the Dark, Mikhail Shishkin, wrote an article for English PEN on the Potemkin village of the Winter Olympics, now underway in Sochi at the cost of a mere $50 billion, a sum we can all agree is well worth it for a few weeks of […]

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The drama of Czech literature

The international Theatre Festival of European Regions is underway in Hradec Králové, boasting work by and about Czech and international writers. Read more at the Czech Literature Portal Photos – 1) Alexander Grin’s Morgiana, photo by Petr Neubert, 2) Martin Františák’s The Čapek Case, photo by Bohdan Holomíček Petr Neubert

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Literary roundup: Russians in New York

BookExpo America (BEA) starts June 2 in New York, with a fantastic looking ReadRussia program. Guests include Russian émigré writers and editors such as Marina Adamovich, Alexander Genis and Yuri Miloslavsky. Miloslavsky mentions the correspondence between Tsar Alexander I and Thomas Jefferson, something which would certainly cause Jefferson to lose any potential Tea Party support. […]

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Literary roundup: robots and the posthumous wit and force of Vladimir Nabokov

On January 25, 1921 Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) had its official premiere at the National Theater in Prague (The first performances took place in early January in a regional theater in Hradec Králové). Besides being the writer’s most successful work it added the word robot to our international vocabulary. The play was […]

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