The Song of Bernadette. Black Mass

Franz Werfel — a classic of 20th-century Austrian literature, a Prague poet, writer, and playwright, a student of Gustav Meyrink, associate and friend of Max Brod, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Musil, and Martin Buber — was a star. He was... considered the face of German-speaking Expressionism and, along with Franz Kafka and Max Brod, was part of the "Prague Circle" — a group of writers and poets who, before the start of World War I, invented the unprecedented voice of a new literature. Werfel's poetry was admired by the masters; his plays were staged across Europe. Werfel had a developed sense of the tragic, the terrifying, and the humorous, almost journalistic observation skills, a romantic, sometimes mystical view of the world, and a rare ability to capture the subtlest movements of the human soul. Werfel's later novel "The Song of Bernadette," an insightful and captivating story of the French saint to whom the Virgin Mary appeared in Lourdes, became a bestseller in the USA and was adapted into a film in 1943; in Werfel's novellas and stories, high-voltage tension coexists with sympathetic irony, and religious pathos coexists with the deep sadness of a man who survived one war, fled from another halfway across the world, never averted his gaze, and clearly understood in what world he had to be born. Some novellas and stories in this collection, including "Not the Killer, but the Killed is to Blame," "The Death of a Bourgeois," and "The Pale Blue Woman's Letter," are published in Russian for the first time.