Hordubal by Karel Capek

Compelling psychological drama of Czech rural life

For his spearheading of early 20th-century modernism, Karel Capek (1890-1938) is one of the most important figures in Czech literature. English-language readers will probably know him best as the writer who introduced the word “robot” to the world in his 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). Capek’s novel Hordubal was published in 1933. It is the first in a trilogy of thematically connected novels—followed by Meteor and An Ordinary Life—often referred to as the Noetic Trilogy. In English, this trilogy of novels is found together in one volume entitled Three Novels, translated by M. and R. Weatherall and first published in 1948.

As the novel opens, Juraj Hordubal is leaving America to return to his homeland, where he owns a farm in the Carpathians. He has spent the last eight years working as a coal miner and sending most of his earnings home to his wife and daughter. Having communicated with his wife only sparsely during his absence, Hordubal has given her no warning of his arrival, yet he nostalgically expects all at home to be just as he left it. His wife is understandably shocked when he shows up unannounced. Rather than pining away for her husband, Polana Hordubalova has been running the family farm successfully with the help of a hired man named Stepan Manya. Polana and Manya’s ideas on profitable agriculture clash with those of Hordubal, who is set in his ways with old-fashioned notions of bucolic life. As a result, in the management of his own property, Hordubal is made to feel like an ineffectual and unwanted interloper.

In personal matters, Polana treats Hordubal more like a stranger than a husband. Not surprisingly, it is hinted that Polana and Manya were lovers during her husband’s absence. Despite all the signs pointing in that direction, Hordubal either fails to ascertain the romantic relationship or deliberately denies it so as not to face up to the fact. Gossip among the neighbors eventually forces him to address the issue, causing conflict between the three parties concerned.

The narrative of Hordubal is related partly through third-person prose and partly through Hordubal’s first-person interior monologue, the two voices alternating seamlessly. As the reader gets to know the characters and become intimately involved in their lives, the story becomes more and more addictive. Despite the deceptively mundane milieu of rural life, each chapter manages to conclude with what feels like a psychological cliffhanger, leaving the reader anticipating what comes next. The suspense culminates in a shocking turn of events in the novel’s latter half. Capek’s storytelling has some of the deadpan objectivity of Franz Kafka’s The Trial or Albert Camus’s The Stranger, as if the characters are but guinea pigs in a philosophical experiment, their fates at the mercy of an indiscriminate universe. What makes this novel different, however, is the pathos and warmth one feels for Juraj Hordubal himself, who comes across as a much more likable and human character than Camus’s existential hero Mersault.

The “noetic” aspect of Capek’s Noetic Trilogy has to do with epistemology—the branch of philosophy that concerns how humans think and know. I won’t know what to say about that aspect of the novel until I’ve read the other two books in the series, which I fully intend to do. Regardless of Capek’s theories on epistemology, I just found Hordubal to be a very compelling story, one I was reluctant to put down until reaching the very end.
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