Franz Werfel - a classic of Austrian literature of the 20th century, Prague poet, writer and playwright, student of Gustav Meyrink, comrade and friend of Max Brod, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Musil, Martin Buber - was a star. He was considered the face of German-language expressionism and, along with Franz Kafka and Max Brod, was part of the “Prague Circle,” a group of writers and poets who, before the outbreak of the First World War, were inventing an unprecedented voice for a new literature. Werfel's poetry was admired by the masters; his plays were staged throughout Europe. Werfel had a developed sense of the tragic, terrible and funny, almost journalistic observation, a romantic, sometimes mystical view of the world and a rare ability to capture the subtlest movements of the human soul. Werfel’s late novel “The Song of Bernadette,” a heartfelt story of the French saint who appeared to the Virgin Mary in Lourdes, captivating with its journalistic accuracy, became a bestseller in the United States and was filmed in 1943; in Werfel’s short stories and short stories, high-voltage intensity coexists with sympathetic irony, and religious pathos with the deep sadness of a man who survived one war, fled halfway across the world from another, never looked away and understood more clearly than anyone what world he had to be born into. Some short stories and the stories in this collection, including “It’s not the murderer, but the murdered one is to blame,” “The Death of a Tradesman,” and “A Pale Blue Woman’s Letter,” are published in Russian for the first time.