What destroys us will not be a cosmic catastrophe but mere reasons of state, economics prestige and so on.”Capek’s entire work testifies to the contradiction faced by his seeing, knowing creative spirit, a spirit that longs to purify and enlighten the world but fears its own imperfection and limitations, fears what people will do with its visions This dilemma will undoubtedly haunt mankind forever. The content is quite simple: the destruction of the world and its people. People committed to “higher” and “suprapersonal” concerns work together with the newts to bring about their own destruction “All the factories” cooperate “All the banks. All nations.”In 1937, in the Soviet anthology Den mira (Day of Peace) edited by Maxim Gorky, Capek wrote: “Today, I completed the last chapter of my utopian novel The main character of this chapter is nationalism. Even Capek’s newts are marked by their encounter with people and their “culture.” This is why, with no precautions, they begin to destroy dry land as soon as they find it to be in their interests to do so.

This view, incidentally, has been supported to the present day by official Czech and Soviet literary historians.Human civilisation has indeed spread throughout the planet, but people show no evidence of being able to treat anything other than particulaconcerns; they have no means of considering, let alone controlling the consequences of their own actions. If some species other than man were to attain that level we call civilisation, what do you think – would it do the same stupid things mankind has done? Would it fight the same wars? Would it invite the same historical calamities? What would we say if some animal other than man declared that its education and its numbers gave it the soul right to occupy the entire world and hold sway over all of creation? It was this confrontation with human history, and with the most pressing topical history, that forced me to sit down and write War with the Newts.”A multitude of political allusions (the figure of the Chief Salamander, whose name was “actually Andreas Schultze” and who “had served someplace during the World War as a line soldier” certainly calls to mind the leader of the Nazi Reich, Adolf Hitler; the chapter on the book of the royal philosopher paraphrases the Nazi theories of the time) led some contemporary critics to conclude that Capek had abandoned his relativism to write an anti-Fascist pamphlet. If the biological conditions were favorable, some civilisation not inferior to our own could arise in the depths of the sea … That sentence was the reason I wrote War with the Newts.” “It is quite thinkable,” Capek reasons, “that cultural development could be shaped through the mediation of another animal species. Capek was too sensitive and responsible to accept the notion that, after all the recent violence, new violence, though now revolutionary, could solve anything.Capek himself tells about the origin of his novel War with the Newts: “It was last spring, when the world was looking rather bleak economically, and even worse politically – apropos of I don’t know what, I have written the sentence: `You mustn’t think that the evolution that gave rise to us was the only evolutionary possibility on this planet.’ And that was it. Many of Capek’s literary friends adopted socialist slogans, at least for the time being, in the form in which they arrived from revolutionary Russia, slogans promising that the revolution would be followed by a new, more just and classless society which would put an end to violence and even to the state.

Perhaps never had so many manifestos been written, so many political banalities set to verse, so many topical, politicising pamphlets published to assert claims of great and engaged activity as in those post-war years. On the other hand, in his novels and dramas he created apocalyptic images and moved his plots toward calamities that threatened mankind’s existence.Of course there were many writers who addressed society prophetically and urged it to follow the “correct” path. On the one hand, he strove in his journalistic and shorter prose work to help form the spiritual climate of the new republic (there were practically no important events that failed to arouse his interest or impel him to state an opinion). However, unlike the totally self-absorbed Kafka and the easy-going Hasek, Capek experienced the catastrophe of the war with the greatest sense of urgency. Artists whose works had often shone with admiration for the human spirit and its technical achievements suddenly stood face to face with rampant destruction.

Like Franz Kafka, Karel Capek never experienced combat firsthand. For once, his physical infirmity (rheumatism and a painful gout of the vertebrae plagued him all his life) brought him some good: he was excused from joining the ranks. The most powerful experience for Karel Capek and his generation, as well as their greatest shock, still lay ahead – the First World War.The suddenness and scope of the war had a searing effect on Europe’s young generation. There is none of his philosophical reflection, none of his splendid storytelling, none of his fantastic and anxious vision. The early prose certainly bespeaks a scintillating spirit and literary and linguistic gifts, but we do not find in it what was later to become so characteristic of Capek’s work. Like his first plays, he wrote these together with his older brother Josef.

It was at this time that he began to publish his first short works of prose. He had spent his childhood in Upice, a small town in the hills of eastern Bohemia, where his father was a doctor. Capek often remembered his country childhood in his feuilletons, tales, and other short prose. The world of his longer novels and plays seems to be altogether different. But alongside the philosopher and intellectual who sees all the way to civilisation’s tragic end, one readily senses in these works a man of the country who watches, in anguish and amazement, the collapse of age-old values and established ways of life, finding danger and portents of destruction in modern man’s estrangement from the natural order.At the age of 19, Capek enrolled in the Philosophy Faculty at Charles University (in subsequent years, he studied at the Philosophy Faculty in Berlin and pursued German and English philology at the Sorbonne).