The Monk

18 hrs. 4 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Lewis Matthew Gregory

Narrator Vyacheslav Dugin

Description

“Epatage,” “provocative,” “sensational”—for two centuries these epithets have accompanied critics’ reviews of the novel “The Monk” by the English writer Matthew Gregory Lewis, which after its release in the spring of 1796 instantly became a bestseller and the cause of a loud public scandal.

The story of the Spanish Capuchin monk Ambrosio—a new Faust, victim of the devil’s machinations and destroyer of other people’s lives—brought the twenty-year-old author, who knew the great Goethe personally, a conflicting reputation: for an immoralist and atheist, and at the same time the creator of the gothic novel-tragedy, which anticipated plot twists of romantic literature.

Having directly influenced A. Radcliffe’s “The Italian,” E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Elixirs of Satan,” and C. R. Maturin’s “Melmoth the Wanderer,” “The Monk” was later highly praised by the masters of 20th-century art: André Breton devoted enthusiastic lines to the book in his “Manifesto of Surrealism,” Antonin Artaud…