Toward the Radical Center [antikvár]

F OREWORDby Arthur MillerI read Karel Capek for the first time when I was a college student a long time ago in the Thirties. There was no writer like himno one who so blithely assumed that the common realities were not as fixed and irrevocable as one imagined. Without adopting any extraordinary tone of voice he projected whole new creatures and environments onto an oddly familiar, non-existent landscape. He made it possible to actually invent worlds, and with laughter in the bargain.This prophetic assurance was mixed with what to me was a brand new surrealistic humor, and it was honed to hardedged social satire, still a unique combination. Utopians don't usually like people too much, but Capek's spirit is ample and welcoming and not at all self-important as he outlines the probable end of the known world.We were great believers in Science in the Thirties, the Depression time. Our problem seemed to be that scientific objectivity was not being applied to social problems, like that of scarcity in the midst of plenty, for instance, or unemployment. But here were stories warning against the tyranny and unreasonableness of the rational. They were fancifully put, to be sure, but surprisingly easy to imagine as the oncoming reality.I knew nothing about Czechoslovakia, of course, could hardly have located it on a map let alone as a culture in relation to other cultures. But having now experienced that country and its literature, Capek seems totally Czech, with his impishly straight-faced and at the same time secretly tragic tales. But in the Eighties the uncanny itself is Czech, as are the more elaborate examples of the absurd. I don't know why this is so, but it seemed Czechishly inevitable, for example, that Russian tanks invading Prague should have thought they were A: repelling a West German revanchist invasion, and B: since the store windows were so filled with unimaginably varied goods and the streets so clean, they must have landed in West Germany. It