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Satan’s Diary

First published: 1919
Pages: 147

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About this book

In his final work, the Russian writer Leonid Andreyev sends the Devil to earth wearing the body of a wealthy American named Henry Wondergood. Bored with eternity, Satan means to amuse himself among mortals by playing at generosity and virtue. Instead he meets swindlers, hypocrites, and a beguiling woman who out-deceive him at every turn, until the great tempter finds himself the one being tempted and betrayed. Written in 1919 and published after Andreyev's death, the novel is a bitter, mocking parable about human corruption, told in the form of the Devil's own journal. Its irony cuts at faith, money, and self-delusion alike. This free PDF and EPUB edition offers a strange, biting fable from a major voice of Russian modernism.

About the author

Leonid Andreyev

Andreyev was for a few years around 1905 the most talked-about writer in Russia, outselling Gorky, who had helped him start. His best-known novella follows five revolutionaries and two ordinary criminals through their last days under sentence, and refuses to make any of them heroic.