Peadar O'Leary (1839–1920) was a Catholic priest, translator, patriarch of Irish literary modernism, and generally one of the founders of modern prose in the Irish language. The fairy tale novel "Shenna" - the story of the Irish Faust of the common people - was the first work of large form in the living spoken Irish language, it is a real literary monument. Here is a 120-odd-year-old casuistic novel of ideas about karmic retribution in the Abrahamic world with its Manichaean dichotomy and strict bipolarity. But it reads far from being a moralizing novel, but rather a morally descriptive one. “Shenna” is first and foremost a comedy of manners, and only then a literary fairy tale with unexpected narrative cuts, nested plots and other gifts of proto-modernism.