"The well-known painter, Oskar Kokoschka, also produced a considerable and significant body of literary work: plays, a few poems, essays, and autobiographical stories. The present volume contains all his plays, (some in more than one version) and the poems, plus one short prose passage.

All the pieces in this collection, apart from the play Comenius, were written in the period 1907-1918. The plays, despite Kokoschka's dislike of the term, reflect the style of Expressionism current in Germany during the period. Indeed, the early ones anticipated and, to a certain extent, helped to define Expressionism. The titles of some - Job, The Burning Bush, Orpheus and Eurydice - reflect the use of the mythic mode. Comenius, which was started in the 1930s and only completed in 1972, is a large-scale historical panorama, focusing on the figure of the Czech humanist and educational reformer, Jan Amos Komensky. Comenius' fate reflects Kokoschka's own experience of an increasingly dark world of conflict and oppression. His ideal of a humanity guided by the light of reason cannot find realization amid the strife and carnage of the Thirty Years' War; at the end of the play it is reduced to a tiny spot of light in Rembrandt's picture The Night Watch. The Burning Bush, Orpheus and Eurydice and Comenius appear in English translation for the first time."

"Oskar Kokoschka was one of the major painters of the first half of the twentieth century. He was born in Pochlarn on the Danube, studied in Vienna, was badly wounded in the First World War, and traveled widely around Europe in the years between the wars. He fled from fascism, first of all in 1934 to Prague and then, when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, to England, where he was naturalized in 1947. In 1954 he moved to Villeneuve in Switzerland. He died in 1980." "Kokoschka also wrote a number of plays, poems, and stories. Best known are the early plays, such as Murderer, Hope of Women, which anticipated Expressionism. His last play is a large-scale historical canvas on the life of the Czech educational reformer Comenius."--BOOK JACKET.