About the book: 1961 / A talented scientist and educational pioneer, rejecting contemporary science and religion, surrendered to the forces of darkness and sold his soul to the devil, driven by a “mad thirst for knowledge of the truth” and a dream of universal happiness. This is how Goethe’s younger contemporary and friend, the German writer Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, saw and portrayed the legendary Faust in 1791, even before the appearance of Goethe’s great tragedy. The plot of his book takes Faust, and with him the reader, through all the circles of European social hell and ends with the tragic death of the soul of the protagonist. In the grotesque-satirical action of the novel, along with fictional characters, real “actors of history” also participate, who have gained gloomy fame - the English king Richard III, the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada, Cardinal Cesare Borgia, his sister Lucrezia and their father, Pope Alexander VI…