The works included in this book reveal to the reader the nocturnal, dark, irrational-mystical side of the creative fantasy of the German romantic writer Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann - the author of the famous fairy tales about the Golden Pot, the Nutcracker and Little Tsakhes and the tragic confessional (and at the same time parody) novel about musician Johannes Kreisler and his pet cat Murra. This is a different Hoffman, the Hoffman of “Elixirs of Satan” and “Night Studies”, gothic, dangerously ambiguous, phantasmagorically sinister, discerning terrible hidden abysses in the human soul and in the world around him and overcoming them, surrounded by ghosts and doubles generated by his own imagination …