The directory «Plots»

Čapek Josef
(1887—1945)
«The Doggie's and the Pussy's Tales»
«Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce, jak spolu hospodařili a ještě o všelijakých jiných věcech»

Josef Čapek was a Czech artist who was best known as a painter, but who was also noted as a writer and a poet. He invented the word robot, which was introduced into literature by his brother, Karel Čapek.

Čapek was born in Hronov, Bohemia (Austria-Hungary, later Czechoslovakia, now Czech Republic) in 1887. First a painter of the Cubist school, he later developed his own playful primitive >Prague. Due to his critical attitude towards Nazism and Adolf Hitler, he was arrested after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939. He wrote Poems from a Concentration Camp in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he died in 1945.

His illustrated stories about Doggie and Pussy are considered classics of Czech children's literature. The world of children became an inspiration for J. Čapek after his daughter Alenka's birth. The book «The Doggie's and the Pussy's Tales, How They Kept Their House, and About Many Other Things» (1929) was written and illustrated mainly for her. The book of events of the Doggie and the Pussy who lived together like human beings contains other short poetic fairy-tales. The kind humor of the author and the beautiful language created a work which became in the course of years a bestseller.

Czech Republic, 2008, The Doggie's and the Pussy's Tales

USSR, 1989, Karel Capek

Czech Republic, 2000, Postman's Tale

Czech Republic, 2007, Brothers Čapek