A talented scientist and pioneering printer-educator, having rejected the science and religion of his time, fell into the forces of darkness and sold his soul to the devil, driven by a “mad thirst for knowing the truth” and a dream of universal happiness. This is how, in 1791—before the appearance of the great Goethe tragedy—Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, a legendary Faust’s younger contemporary and friend of Goethe, saw and depicted him. The plot of his book leads Faust—and the reader—through all the circles of European social hell, ending in the tragic death of the main hero’s soul. In the grotesque-satirical action of the novel, along with fictional characters, appear the real “actors of history,” infamous for their dark fame: English king Richard III, the great inquisitor Torquemada, Cardinal Cesare Borgia, his sister Lucretia, and their father, Pope Alexander VI…