Friedrich Durrenmatt

Dürrenmatt, Friedrich 

Born Jan. 5, 1921, in Konolfingen, the canton of Bern. Swiss writer, who writes in German. Son of a pastor. Studied philosophy in Zürich and Bern.

Dürrenmatt’s first plays were It Is Written (1947), The Blind Man (1948), and Romulus the Great (1949). He won worldwide fame with the plays The Visit (1956; Russian translation, 1958), The Physicists (1962), and The Anabaptists (1967). Outstanding among his prose works are the collection of stories The City (1952), the novella The Breakdown (1956; Russian translation, 1961), and the novels The Judge and His Executioner (1950-51; Russian translation, 1966) and The Promise (1958; Russian translation, 1966). Using parody and the grotesque to expose the vices of the bourgeois world, Dürrenmatt calls on every person to accept personal moral responsibility. The plays The Physicists and The Visit were staged in Moscow in 1963, 1965, and 1966 and in Leningrad in 1962.

WORKS

Gesammelte Hörspiele. Zürich, 1961.
In Russian translation:
Komedii. Moscow, 1969.
“Grek ishchet grechanku.” Novyi mir, 1966, no. 9.
“Operatsiia ‘Vega.’” In Biblioteka sovremennoi fantastiki, vol. 5. Moscow, 1966.
“Meteor.” Inostrannaia literatura, 1967, no. 2.

REFERENCES

Pavlova, N. S. F. Diurrenmatt. Moscow, 1967.
Brock-Sulzer, E. Dürrenmatt in unserer Zeit. Basel [1968].
Hansel, J. Friedrich Dürrenmatt-Bibliographie. Bad Homburg [1968].

G. L. EGOROVA