Charles Robert Maturin

Born 1782 in Dublin; died there Oct. 30, 1824. British writer.

The son of an Irish postal worker, Maturin graduated from Trinity College in Dublin and became a curate. He published his first Gothic novels (The Fatal Revenge, 1807, and others) under the pen name Dennis Jasper Murphy. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820; Russian translation, 1833) is widely known; it was highly praised by A. S. Pushkin (Pushkin-kritik, 1950, p. 276) and V. G. Belinskii (Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 1, 1953, p. 317). Melmoth the Wanderer stands out among British Gothic novels by virtue of its moral and philosophical generalizations and romantic symbolism. Balzac wrote a sequel to it, Melmoth réconcilié, in which he satirically reinterpreted the romantic conflicts of the original novel.