Almost two hundred years have passed since the death of the French writer, philosopher and political figure Marquis de Sade, but passions continue to rage around his name. The author of notorious erotic novels, a prisoner who spent more than a quarter of a century in the dungeons of all the regimes that changed during his time, the chairman of the revolutionary tribunal, who did not sign a single death warrant, sentenced to death for attempted poisoning and to the guillotine for modernism, a brilliant aristocrat and a beggar, barely who did not die in a hospital for the poor - all these are different incarnations of a man called in bohemian circles the Divine Marquis. Nowadays, the stigma of “forbiddenness” has been washed away from de Sade’s novels, and serious research is being conducted into the life and work of the writer. In the biography of the Marquis de Sade offered to readers, the most complete of those currently published in Russian, the author makes an attempt to understand the controversial personality of the Marquis, to connect the writer’s work with the vicissitudes of fate.