While Zamyatin dazzled and goaded his readers with radical ideas and angular, ultra-modern prose, Čapek sought to befriend his. Claiming “I am interested in everything that exists,” he wrote more than 3,000 articles, as well as novels, stories, plays, screenplays and children’s books. His short columns, or feuilletons, read like precursors of Orwell in their chatty, companionable tone; their witty aphorisms; their celebration of ordinary lives and the natural world; their criticism of snobbery and elitism; their hatred of dehumanising abstractions; and their fascination with language. A dozen years before Orwell’s landmark essay Politics and the English Language, Čapek was describing the relationship between bad writing and dangerous politics: “The cliché blurs the difference between truth and untruth. If it were not for clichés, there wouldn’t be demagogues and public lies, and it wouldn’t be so easy to play politics, starting with rhetoric and ending with genocide.” He was, however, capable of greater kindness and optimism about human nature than Orwell. “I believe that seeing is great wisdom,” he wrote in 1920, “and that it’s more beneficial to see a lot than to judge”.
Čapek was a close friend of Tomáš Masaryk, Czechoslovakia’s first president, whose government he saw as a humane, democratic middle way between the rising extremes of communism and fascism. In 1924, he wrote an essay called Why Am I Not a Communist? His answer was that communists weren’t really interested in people as individuals, only as revolutionary masses. “Hatred, lack of knowledge, fundamental distrust, these are the psychic world of communism,” he wrote. By contrast, “I count myself among the idiots who like man because he is human”. He believed that people should be “revolutionary like atoms”, and change the world by first changing themselves.
The essay infuriated Czech communists but they were not in charge. For Zamyatin, living in a one-party state, such a declaration of political independence was perilous. As Stalin succeeded Lenin, his letters were censored, his articles were rejected and the periodicals and publishers he worked for were shut down. In 1925, he was informed that We was, as he suspected, officially unpublishable in Russia. “I often encounter difficulties, because I’m an unbending and self-willed man,” he told a friend. “And that’s how I shall remain”.
In 1929, his enemies used the unlicensed publication of Russian-language extracts from We by Russian emigrés in Prague as an excuse to condemn Zamyatin for disseminating “anti-Soviet” ideas, and thus to pass what he called a literary “death sentence”. In 1931, he won permission from Stalin to leave Russia forever but his life in exile in Paris with Lyudmila failed to revive him as a writer. After a few frustrating years consumed by an unfinished novel and mostly unproduced screenplays, he died of heart failure on 10 March, 1937.
Čapek, conversely, went from strength to strength. He was nominated more than once for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and asked by Wells to become the president of the international writers’ group PEN. Yet his success was clouded by his awareness of Hitler’s designs on his homeland, and he became one of Czechoslovakia’s most prominent anti-fascists. “All of us have begun to feel that there is something odd and insoluble about the conflicts between world-views, generations, political principles, and whatever else divides us,” he wrote in 1934.
Čapek revisited RUR’s themes of hubris, greed and conflict in War with the Newts (1936), a spectacularly inventive satire on nationalism, colonialism, militarism and racism. When humans discover a race of intelligent newts living in the sea, they put them to work as slaves, but the fast-evolving amphibians become too numerous to control and demand more living space. Under the Hitleresque command of Chief Salamander, the newts flood and annex vast swathes of land. Čapek explains in War with the Newts how the world will end: “No cosmic catastrophe, nothing but state, official, economic and other causes… we are all responsible for it”. There is a similar anti-fascist message in his 1937 play The White Plague, in which a pro-war mob destroys the only antidote to a pandemic, resulting in a kind of national suicide.
In War with the Newts, the European powers sell out China to the newts in the hope of saving themselves. In October 1938, the Munich Agreement between Britain, France and Germany did much the same to Čapek’s country. “My world has died,” he told his friend Ferdinand Peroutka. “I no longer have any reason to write”. Despite denunciations and death threats from the right, he refused to abandon the country he loved. The Gestapo placed him on its hitlist of people to arrest after the invasion of Czechoslovakia.