Leo Perutz
Leopold Perutz (2 November 1882 – 25 August 1957) was an Austrian novelist and mathematician. Leo Perutz was born in Prague, he lived in Vienna until the Nazi Anschluss in 1938, when he emigrated to Palestine. According to the biographical note on the Arcade Publishing editions of the English translations of his novels, Leo was a mathematician who formulated an algebraic equation which is named after him; he worked as a statistician for an insurance company.
Also recorded as Leopold Perutz
Leo Perutz

Josef Čapek · zvab.com · Public domain
- Full name
- Leopold Perutz.
- Born
- 1882. · Prague.
- Died
- 1957.
- Nationality
- Austria, Israel and Mandatory Palestine.
- Occupation
- mathematician, novelist, writer, playwright, critic and translator.
- Fields
- horror and magic realism.
- Known for
- The master of the Day of Judgment.
- Languages
- German.
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Leopold Perutz (2 November 1882 – 25 August 1957) was an Austrian novelist and mathematician. Leo Perutz was born in Prague, he lived in Vienna until the Nazi Anschluss in 1938, when he emigrated to Palestine. According to the biographical note on the Arcade Publishing editions of the English translations of his novels, Leo was a mathematician who formulated an algebraic equation which is named after him; he worked as a statistician for an insurance company.
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Note VALÉORINE
Leo Perutz (1882–1957) was an Austrian and Israeli critic, mathematician and novelist, among other activities. The critic was born Leopold Perutz in Prague.
Works include The master of the Day of Judgment. Genres include horror and magic realism. Languages used include German.
Composed from admitted, traceable facts · 27 September 2026
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wikidata · Q93450 · wikipedia · Leo Perutz
In this article
Overview
Overview
He was related to the biologist Max Perutz. During the 1950s he returned occasionally to Austria, spending the summer and autumn months in the market town of St. Wolfgang im Salzkammergut in the Salzkammergut resort region and in Vienna. He died in the Austrian spa town of Bad Ischl in 1957. He wrote his first novel, The Third Bullet, in 1915 while recovering from a wound sustained in the First World War. In all Perutz wrote eleven novels, which gained the admiration of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Ian Fleming, Karl Edward Wagner and Graham Greene. Wagner cited Perutz's novel The Master of the Day of Judgment as one of the thirteen best non-supernatural horror novels.
Perutz was born in Prague to a largely non-religious family of Jewish ancestry. They moved to Vienna, where he attended various schools and colleges before studying probability theory, statistics, actuarial science, and economics. Perutz's novels are short and are usually historical novels combining fast-paced adventure with a metaphysical twist. They are influenced by the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Arthur Schnitzler and Victor Hugo (whose work Perutz translated into German). Austrian fellow novelist Friedrich Torberg once characterized Perutz's literary style as the possible result of a little infidelity of Franz Kafka and Agatha Christie. The Marquis of Bolibar (1920) features the Wandering Jew appearing during Napoleon's campaign in Spain. The Master of the Day of Judgement (1921) is a decidedly different mystery story about the circumstances surrounding an actor's death in the early twentieth century, and Little Apple (1928) concerns a First World War soldier's obsessive quest for revenge. By Night Under the Stone Bridge (1952) is an episodic work whose separate stories are bound together by the illicit love shared, in their dreams, by a Jewish woman and the Emperor Rudolf II. In the posthumously-published Leonardo's Judas (1959), da Vinci's quest for an appropriate face to give the betrayer in his Last Supper is interwoven with the squabble between a usurer and the merchant to whom he owes money. The title of his 1933 novel Saint Peter's Snow (published in English in 1935 as The Virgin's Brand), which is set in what was then the present day, refers to a drug which induces religious fervour; the Nazis, understandably, did not care for it. Critic Alan Piper considered it "a psychological detective story", although it has varyingly been categorised as science fiction or fantasy. Piper believed that the novel was decades ahead of its time due to the description of a hallucinogenic drug derived from an ergot fungus 10 years before the discovery of LSD. He also thought it astonishing that it discussed the experimental use of this hallucinogen on an isolated village 20 years before the 1951 Pont-Saint-Esprit mass poisoning, and proposed that ergot was the psychoactive ingredient used in the ancient mystery cults 40 years before this was put forward as a serious proposal. In his discussion of German language fantastic literature, critic Franz Rottensteiner describes Perutz as "undoubtedly the finest fantasy author of his time". Literary scholar Alan Piper described Perutz's work as typically containing "an element of the fantastic, with dramatic plots featuring confusing and conflicting interpretations of events".
Novels by Perutz in English translation
Novels by Perutz in English translation
(Dates of publication are for the original German-language editions) From Nine to Nine (1918) The Marquis of Bolibar (1920) The Master of the Day of Judgment (1921) Turlupin (1924) Little Apple (1928) Saint Peter's Snow (1933) The Swedish Cavalier (1936) By Night under the Stone Bridge (1953) Leonardo's Judas (1959)
Filmography
Filmography
The Adventure of Doctor Kircheisen, directed by Rudolf Biebrach (1921, based on the novel Das Mangobaumwunder) Die Geburt des Antichrist, directed by Friedrich Feher (1922, based on the novel Die Geburt des Antichrist) The Marquis of Bolibar, directed by Friedrich Porges (1922, based on the novel Der Marques de Bolibar) Bolibar, directed by Walter Summers (UK, 1928, based on the novel Der Marques de Bolibar) The Cossack and the Nightingale, directed by Phil Jutzi (1935, based on the novel Der Kosak und die Nachtigall) Historia de una noche, directed by Luis Saslavsky (Argentina, 1941, based on the play Morgen ist Feiertag) Historia de una noche, directed by Luis Saslavsky (Spain, 1963, based on the play Morgen ist Feiertag) The Master of the Day of Judgment, directed by Michael Kehlmann (1990, TV film, based on the novel The Master of the Day of Judgment) Saint Peter's Snow, directed by Peter Patzak (1991, TV film, based on the novel Saint Peter's Snow)

Künstlerische Darstellung des Drommetenrots nach dem Roman "Der Meister des Jüngsten Tages" von Leo Perutz aus dem Jahr 1923.
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Life and career
Dated record
Life and career
The full dated record · 2 entries
1882
Leo Perutz born at Prague.
1957
Leo Perutz died.
Notes from the source article
Cited by Wikipedia
Notes from the source article
These works are cited by the source article, in its own numbering. They are recorded as its citations, not as sources VALÉORINE has verified.
- 1.Max Ferdinand Perutz OM FRS, obituary by Alan R. Fersht.
- 2.N. G. Christakos, "Three By Thirteen: The Karl Edward Wagner Lists" in Black Prometheus: A Critical Study of Karl Edward Wagner, ed. Benjamin Szumskyj, Gothic Press 2007.
- 3.Sorrel Kerbel, Jewish writers of the twentieth century (p.792-95), Taylor & Francis, 2003
- 4.Franz Rottensteiner, "German Language Fantasy since 1900" in Frank N. Magill, ed. Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, Vol 3., (pp. 2391-2414) Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, Inc., 1983.
- 5.Andreas Dorschel, 'Dein Feuer, Bürschchen, brennt an einer kurzen Lunte', in: Süddeutsche Zeitung Nr. 218, 20 September 2004, p. 14.
Bibliography printed in the source article · 6
- Giffuni, Cathe. ""Leo Perutz: An English Bibliography," Bulletin of Bibliography, Vol. 48 No. 4 December 1991, pp. 195–197.
- Piper, Alan. Leo Perutz and the Mystery of St Peter's Snow. Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture. 6. 2. 175–198. 2013. 10.2752/175169713X13589680082172.
- Hans Harald Müller: Leo Perutz, München, Verlag C. H. Beck, 1992
- Dietrich Neuhaus: Erinnerung und Schrecken. Die Einheit von Geschichte, Phantastik und Mathematik im Werk Leo Perutz, Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 1984
- Brigitte Forster, Hans Harald Müller (Hrsg.): Leo Perutz. Unruhige Träume - Abgründige Konstruktionen. Dimensionen des Werks, Stationen der Wirkung, Wien, Sonderzahl, 2002 .
- Ulrike Siebauer: Leo Perutz - »Ich kenne alles. Alles, nur nicht mich«, Gerlingen, Bleicher Verlag, 2000
References
Citations
References
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The Encyclopedia exists whether or not anything is for sale. Corrections are recorded rather than overwritten, and every version of this record is kept. Published 14 August 2026.
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38,661 published records in this field, each with its sources named.
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- Leo the MathematicianAuthor
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