Jonathan Bolton is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard University, where he teaches Czech and Central European literature, history, and culture. He is the author of Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture Under Communism (2012). His translations of Czech poetry and prose have appeared in Circumference, B O D Y, Best European Fiction, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere; he has edited and translated book-length collections by Ivan Wernisch (In the Puppet Gardens: Selected Poems, 1963–2005, 2007) and Petr Hruška (Everything Indicates: Selected Poems, 2023).
Jonathan Bolton
Articles
To Touch the Dust of Anarres
Jonathan Bolton thoughtfully reads Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed” within and against the grain of a half century of criticism.
Prove You’re Not a Robot: On Karel Čapek’s “R.U.R.”
Jonathan Bolton uses the occasion of a new edition and translation of Karel Čapek’s play “R.U.R.,” first published in Prague in 1920, to revisit the origins of the word “robot,” and explore the play’s uncannily prescient vision of artificial life.
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