Summary

In January 1921, Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) opened in Prague and dragged the word “robot” out of linguistic obscurity: robota , the Czech term for the forced labor a serf owed his lord. “Čapek’s robots, they’re serfs, essentially,” says Alisa Zhulina , an associate professor of theatre studies at New York University, affiliated with its Russian and Slavic Studies department, and author of Theater of Capital . Čapek’s robots were mass-produced people grown in vats, human in form but stripped of wages, rights, and will.

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