Sold to Satan

The story opens with a description of the narrator's finances: his steel shares have fallen, reliable enterprises are going bankrupt, and so he decides to sell his soul. But the deal isn't set up as a mystical ritual — it's arranged like an ordinary business transaction, through a local broker, who'll take a 2.5% commission if the deal closes. From the very first sentences, Twain fuses the religious-mystical tradition with the language of Wall Street, setting the story's comic tone.

The guest who arrives at midnight matches none of the reader's expectations: no horns, no tail, no smell of sulfur, no thunderclap. Instead, a tall, well-built "modern-looking" gentleman glides quietly through the closed door — dressed in a body-hugging tricot, a rapier at his side, a short cape thrown over his shoulders, a plumed hat rakishly cocked, and a fine, Mephistophelian smile. The only unusual thing about him is that his body glows not bronze-red but silver, like moonlight — the narrator compares it to a tropical sea's surface shimmering under moonlight.

Small talk follows — the weather, glasses of hot punch — until the narrator gradually works up the nerve to ask Satan what he's made of. The answer is short and unexpected: "Radium." This answer sets the whole comic-fantastical center of the story. Written in 1903–1904, just a few years after the discovery of radium by the Curies, the story turns the era's "radium fever" into its subject — radium was then received almost as a magical, inexhaustible source of energy, and newspapers eagerly wrote about its miraculous properties.

The original title is "Sold to Satan," and the story was first published only after Twain's death, in the collection of his unpublished writings, "Europe and Elsewhere." This explains why the story is relatively little-known, but also why it draws particular interest among historians of science — as an early literary echo of radioactivity.

When Satan announces his weight — two hundred fifteen pounds if he were flesh and blood, over nine hundred pounds since he's radium — the thought running through the narrator's mind is plainly legible: form a joint-stock company to "acquire" this precious substance, price every pound at millions, and flood the world market with shares. Satan simply reads his mind and lets out a loud laugh: "How creative! How original!" This small ironic accusation delivers the story's central satirical blow — even sitting face to face with the Devil himself, a person's first instinct is to turn him into a financial instrument.

This satire also fits neatly into Twain's broader body of work. Thirty years earlier, with the novel "The Gilded Age," he exposed the glittering but hollow face of American business — a novel that even gave its name to the era — and here he compresses the same critique into a smaller, sharper form. The difference is that this time the target of the criticism isn't a banker or a politician, but the very reader following the story — the narrator is literally an "I"-tagged figure speaking in our name, mirroring our own instincts.

The narrator's unreliable, self-flattering voice is the story's hidden strength: he reveals his own stinginess and naivety at every turn, yet never admits it — instead, he presents every step as a clever move. This is one of Twain's favorite techniques: handing the narrator the microphone in order to mock him.

Emin Bakuvi's Azerbaijani translation preserves this light tone well, especially the conversational rhythm in the dialogue and the play on old-fashioned, slightly grandiose style, carrying over the narrator's self-mocking, slightly boastful voice without losing it. The translation is available free on kultaz.com, which has helped the story reach a wide audience and creates an easy, fast entry point to Twain in Azerbaijani.

What comes after this is the work of the story's remaining half — Satan's backstory, the cigar episode, the full demonstration of radium's power, and the story's unexpected ending. So we're stopping here, and we recommend you read the story yourself. But if what you've read so far interests you and you're still undecided, you can check the spoiler section below.

• Just a few pages long — finishable over a cup of coffee.
• A first-person, self-flattering, unreliable narrator — one of Twain's favorite techniques.
• A humor style that mixes the era's scientific discoveries (radium, the Curies) with everyday conversational language.
• The story is in the public domain (Twain died in 1910) — the original text is freely available in any language.
• Emin Bakuvi's translation is available to read free on kultaz.com.