Murke's Collected Silences

The book “The Silence of Dr. Murke” includes ironic stories whose heroes live in a grotesque world full of comic and sad situations.

Anyone who writes a note for a newspaper or puts a line of poetry on paper must know that by doing so they set entire worlds in motion. (Heinrich Böll) If people say that Turgenev was the most German of Russian writers, then about Böll you could say that he was the most Russian of German writers—though he is a very “German” writer. (Lev Kopelev) Previously in “Text” there were works by the great German writer, Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Heinrich Böll (1917–1985): “Letters from the War,” the novels “The Cross Without Love,” “The Angel Remained Silent,” story collections “Coughing in the Concert” and “The Mad Dog.”

The story “The Silence of Dr. Murke” was published in the December issue of the magazine “Frankfurter Hefte” in 1955. In the Russian translation—“Foreign Literature,” 1956, no. 7.