Abstract
The edited commentary presents the history and textological status of Josef Čapek's fiction and drama included in Volume 1 of his Collected Works (works written to 1930). It places the texts in the contexts of their origin, gives a detailed description of textual changes in their history, introduces their original reception, and reviews the critical response to them.
Using a rich body of resources and scholarship devoted to his literary works, the commentary analyzes a number of intertextual, literary historical and cultural links that contributed to the assessment of Čapek's creative path as a kind of critical modernism that both parallels and creates a polemic with the current Avant-garde movements.