KAREL ČAPEK (1890 – 1938) AND THE GARDNER’S YEAR
Hans-Jørgen Wallin Weihe
In 1929 the Czech author Karel Čapek (1890 – 1938) published a book called “The Gardner’s
Year” in Prague. At the time the author was 39 years old and famous for his play R.U.R,
which had introduced the word “robot” to the world. Čapek wrote about everyting. Himself he
regarded two of his mania to be “to understand” and “to express”. He was not occupied with
expressing himself “but to express things”. Čapek was a very emotial man and many claim
that he died as a result of his nation’s death when the München Pact the 30th
of September
1938 allowed Nazi Germany to occupy Sudentland. He lived until Christmas the same year
and was most likely killed as much of grief and depression as by inflamation of his lungs. His
brother died a few yars later in one of the death camps of Nazi Germany. He had made the
illustrations to his brother’s book of gardening.
The Nazi occupation of his country banned all Karel’s works. Thus the Karel most likely have
published the only gardening book ever to be banned by a poltical censurship. In order to
understand the political aspects of his writing and his elegant and great variation in writing I
have found it most helpful to read other works such as “Apocryphal Tales”, which is a
collection of newspaper artcles from Lidové noviny his principal newspaper.
Čapek’s book on gardening is one of a mountain of books about gardening, but most likely
the only one of them devoted to the psychology of gardeners. Even if most students of Čapek
most likely regard the book to be a minor work the author himself thought of life as a subset
of gardening.
The Gardner’s Year can be read as a metaphor of life and the contemporary political situation
of Europe and particularly of Nazi Germany. The comedy of the petty tyrant, the man or
woman, who picks up his garden tools one morning, falls in love with gardening, and then
assumes that the world and particularly the weather will organize itself in harmony with his
new obsession. His prayers are carefully phrased words for all occasions. Nothing is left to
God’s decisions; “that there may be plenty of dew and little wind, enough worms, no plantlice
and snails, no mildew and that once in the week thin liquid manure and guano my fall
from heaven. Amen.”
For Čapek to understand what gardening means is to understand the complexity of human
nature. “If we should say that secret swarming of the future within us, we should say that our
melancholy and distrust is silly and absurd, and that the best things of all is to be a living man
– that is a man who grows”. Michael Pollan, one of the most famous garden writers of USA,
claim that Čapek will engage gardeners centuries ahead because he was able to communicate
the power of plants to change us in mind and body, the gratuitous beauty of a flower, the
moral lesson of a pest, the ancient language of landscape design, and the endlessly engrossing
ways cultivating a garden attaches a body to the earth.
The gardeners described by Čapek are only rarely as good as they would like us to think that
they are. Their body parts get in the way and their bottoms stick high up of the vegetable
patch, they step on their cucombers and strawberries, their spring begins in October and their
fall in March with the fading of the first snowdrops. They have immodest and inexhaustible
desires just by thinking about dirt and they are easily seduced by garden catalogues that lists
the ingridients in a good garden soil such as dung, manure, guano, leafmold, sods, humus, ,
sand, straw, lime, kainit and beautiful flowering plants, seed for all desires and all kind of
technical gadgets used in gardens.
The question of garden soil is a moral one for Čapek. Some soils are beautiful in richness and
consistency while others are as ugly as the coldness, callousness and malice of human souls.
The last phrase is a grim assessment of humanity and the fate of Europe in the war years to
come and perhaps even of the future facing us today.
The tombstone of Karel Čapek and his wife Olga Scheinpflugová (1902 – 1968) ( in Vyšehrad
cemetery in Prague in the Czech Republic.
His widow Olga Scheinpflugová, who was a well acknowledged Czech actress and writer
died on stage from a heart attack during her performance in the play Mother by her husband
Karel Čapek,. Thus, in a very dramatic her death added to the drama of the story of her
husband.
Literature
Čapek Karel (1997) Apocryphal Tales, North Haven CT: Catbird Press
Čapek Karel (2002) The Gardner’s Year, New York: The Modern Library
Čapek Karel (1931) The Gardner’s Year, London: George Allen & Unwin LTD