Status Updates From Оповідання з обох кишень

The Experiment of Professor Rouss: A Czech expatriot solves a murder through an intriguing association experiment, but later thinks his second experiment has failed when, unbeknownst to him, he happens to come across a journalist. He may not realize it, but this is actually an achievement in itself.

Proof Positive: Don’t be too arrogant. You may think you understand everyone and could never be fooled, only to have someone deceive you right under your nose.

Can we really understand who a person is from a few lines of handwriting? No—people are far more complicated than that. Just look at Rubner, who made such a fuss the night before, only to say sheepishly the next night, “the wife might start complaining that I’m always leaving her by herself.”

Should I focus on the Prince’s ability in The Clairvoyant, or on the character of the district attorney?

If you know Karel Čapek even a little, you can more or less guess what will happen in The Fortuneteller once the fortuneteller makes her prediction. Is she a fraud, or can she really see the future? That is the whole point...

The Blue Chrysanthemum is about Klara, the village idiot, turning up with a blue chrysanthemum while Fulinus tends the gardens of the old Prince Lichtenberg. Fulinus even stood up to the prince over the flower, which he found entirely by chance. But what good is that? Despite having had it for fifteen years, he has never seen it bloom. Still, Fulinus hopes that one day Klara—named after the village idiot—will bloom.

Dr. Mejzlik’s Case was a very short, strange story that ended almost as quickly as it began. Yet it reminds us how unavoidable instinct, intuition, chance—or whatever you want to call it—are in shaping our actions.
The mention of Vinohrady immediately drew me in. Also, shouldn’t Dlážděná Street be written correctly? Otherwise, it’s likely to be misread. I couldn’t find the place called the Three Maidens either.

Only relative truth is accessible to us, Čapek was saying, not absolute truth; it's just that we often tend to confuse the one with the other.

"Nor, despite Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk, was there a tradition using everyday, conversational Czech in literature."
The fact that everyday language was virtually absent from literature in 1928 doesn’t seem strange at all if you’ve learned Czech. Two distinct forms of the same language coexist in everyday life.