"Satan’s Diary" by Leonid Andreev, summary

This is Leonid Andreyev’s last novel, left in draft form due to his sudden death. The Lord of Darkness incarnates himself in the body of an American billionaire for a daring performance, but people themselves easily rob and ridicule the naive stranger. The writer worked on the manuscript in Finland from 1918 to 1919, dying of heart failure in September 1919, a few pages before the climax. The novel was first published posthumously in 1921 in Helsinki.

In 1920, Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer made a silent film, "Pages from the Book of Satan," based on the as-yet-unpublished manuscript. The film deviated significantly from the original, breaking it into four distinct historical episodes.

Sea swell and a white house behind the cypresses

In January 1914, Henry Wondergood, a thirty-eight-year-old billionaire from Illinois, is sailing to Europe aboard the SS Atlantic. His body, ten days earlier, had been secretly possessed by Satan, tired of hellish boredom. The stranger is seasick. Along with him is his secretary, Erwin Toppy — a small, foolish devil with a pear-shaped nose, who, in his previous incarnation, had lived to the age of gray in a Franciscan monastery and is now reaching for incense again. The billionaire is carrying three billion dollars. He plans to play the role of philanthropist and give the money away. At night, in his cabin, the alien heartbeat beats in his chest like an annoying meter.

Approaching Rome, the train derails. In the darkness and smoke, amidst the wrecked carriages, Wondergood steps with his heel right on the face of George, the murdered footman, leaps out the window in terror, and runs with Toppi through the hills of the Roman Campagna toward a lonely light behind the cypresses. The door is opened by the tall, black-bearded host with large white hands — Thomas Magnus. After listening to the story of the crash and the billions, Magnus mockingly advises the American to build prisons and scaffolds instead of universities, because throughout human history, people have written in blood without any devilry. As they part, the host shows his palms and whispers about the bloodstains on them.

The next morning, the owner’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Maria, comes out for breakfast. Toppi chokes on air and croaks, "Madonna!" The girl’s resemblance to a religious icon dazzles the stranger; her pure gaze turns his thoughts inside out, forcing him to timidly examine the flowerbeds in the garden. Magnus flatly refuses to go to Rome to manage someone else’s capital, citing a manhunt by international police and his own scorched soul, but he allows the billionaire to occasionally visit their quiet home.

Roman vanity and the shaved monkey

At the Hotel Internationale, a fair is brewing around the rescued rich man. Artists paint his portraits and scour the streets in search of a model for a commissioned Madonna. Journalists swallow any nonsense. When asked by a reporter after an airplane flight about his pride in human genius, Wondergood solemnly proclaims the comfortable restroom of the Atlantic the height of human greatness. At a Protestant meeting, he delivers a tearful sermon about buying plots in the Kingdom of Heaven on an installment plan, and in the evenings he gets drunk on whiskey and champagne, demanding baking soda from the servants for heartburn.

The influential Cardinal X., a former Spanish grandee resembling an old, shaved monkey, a penguin, and a parrot all rolled into one, arrives to visit the purchased and restored Orsini Palace. Counting his rosary beads and bursting into barking laughter, the prelate asks for billions to be donated to the Holy See and frankly explains:

“The world wants to be deceived!”

The cardinal despises rationalism and believes the church is eternal, while people tremble with a primal fear of death, which suddenly distorts even his own square face. Court artists immediately draw a vicious caricature of the guest in a cage. Meanwhile, Satan is increasingly drawn into human flesh: he forgets his former existence behind a blank wall of oblivion, and Toppy is already angry at reminders of hell, considering himself a native of Illinois.

A deal in a thunderstorm and human dynamite

During a March storm, when the wind blows off the roof tiles, Wondergood spends the night in a small house in the Campagna countryside. Magnus, revolver in hand, goes to the iron gates to chase away suspicious travelers, and upon returning, scolds his guest for his drunken revelries, card fights in the palace, and the farce of crowds of beggars whose ladies come to sniff the rotten wounds on their legs. Humbly putting down his extinguished cigar, the American confesses to the failure of his game. Then the host delivers unexpected news: Maria has fallen in love with Wondergood. There will be no marriage — the girl’s hand is promised only to the wrestling hero, not to the idle spectator with a cigar, whose empty pupils frighten with a dead indifference. Then the billionaire casually announces his decision to shoot himself in the forehead tomorrow in order to return home, and offers Magnus to become his heir, after which he suddenly asks his guest to stay alive.

For Maria’s sake, the alien vows not to kill himself. He renounces the capital letter in the word "I." Magnus and his daughter move into the Palazzo Orsini, having kicked out their hangers-on, and with six secretaries, they spend day and night transferring American assets into pure gold in Thomas’s name. Having accepted the yoke of an earthly slave, Wondergood wanders the highways at night, terrified by the thought of a slap or a knife.

In a conversation about the limits of humanity, Magnus tells the story of a Russian escaped convict who, unable to save a seven-year-old boy from a ritual slaughter in the Siberian forests among sectarians, slit the child’s throat himself, taking the mortal sin upon himself instead of the dark fanatics. After an evening car ride to the lights of Tivoli, where Maria removes her glove for the first time to kiss, Magnus displays a gray-yellow bar of soap-like explosive in his office. Fire and hammers are impervious to this substance. However, a high-voltage electric shock would obliterate half of the bar from the ground, destroying St. Peter’s Basilica. Magnus describes the man he intends to blow up with the promise of a miracle, using a billionaire’s money, as a similar living dynamite with eyes and a will.

A few days later, the thirty-two-year-old ex-King E., exiled by the revolution, visits the palace with his perpetually hungry marquis adjutant, asking for money to execute the rebels. Wondergood sees a smug chicken before him, and Magnus enviously admires the monarch’s faith in his own miracle and confesses that he himself aspires to reach beyond the royal and even divine throne — to the throne of Satan. While Maria is supposedly ill, the American wanders through the Vatican museums, admiring a fragment of a marble foot, signs the final transfer of property, and, out of boredom, gets drunk with Toppi in squalid taverns among bandits and mandolin players.

Torn sleeve

After a short trip to Capri, Wondergood notices six of Magnus’s silent employees in the palace and, out of vague anxiety, hides a loaded Browning in his pocket, and at night he sees from the window how Thomas tenderly embraces Maria on the blue sandy path of the garden.

On the evening of April 23rd, in his study, Magnus, his fingers trembling, drinks two glasses of wine to steady his hand, as if about to undergo a vivisection, and declares Wondergood a pauper: all three billion have been legally transferred, the palace has been sold, and Magnus Ergo has no intention of sharing power with a contemptuous egotist who cannot truly hate two-legged scum. The coals scatter in the fireplace. Maria, summoned, enters, but as soon as the groom bows to her hand, Magnus’s sharp cry rings out:

“Don’t kiss hands!”

The girl retreats to the wall. Magnus reveals the truth: he has no children, and nineteen-year-old Maria has been his partner since he was fourteen, a stupid, gold-hungry, and utterly soulless slut from a lupanarium who learned clever phrases from hearsay. One pure youth, Giovanni, had already shot himself because of her. Foma himself would lie at her feet in the mornings, mistaking her for the Madonna, and by nightfall, he would brutally beat her and now offer the former rich man this bird of prey to take back to his bedroom to instill hatred for humanity. Wondergood draws a revolver, misses several times, and in the ensuing scuffle, the officers smash his eyebrow until it bleeds and nearly rip off the left sleeve of his shirt.

Waking up in a chair by the extinguished fireplace next to a weeping Toppi, the battered billionaire attempts to threaten the robber with reprisals beyond the grave and, in a rage, holds up his hanging sleeve, revealing his name. A deafening roar of laughter rings out in response. Magnus throws open the doors and calls the audience: Maria, six employees, Toppi, and Cardinal X., who has already received a share of the stolen capital. In response to the robbed rich man’s statement, the cardinal jokingly raises his hand and exclaims, "Wade retro, Satanas!" Completely distraught, Wondergood rips off the sleeve, waves it like a banner, and begins shouting out clichéd sermons about boiling tar, eternal fire, and red-hot hooks, scaring only Toppi, who has cowered in a corner. Having laughed and drunk some wine, Thomas Magnus condescendingly remarks that modern Rome cannot be touched by the torments of hell, and even if the prince of darkness really does stand before them in person, he is hopelessly late with his childish games, because earthly villains have long outgrown his craft.