In this book, published in 1838, Edgar Allan Poe, the famous creator of grotesque phantasmagoria, insane nightmares and impeccable logical constructions, turned to the favorite theme of “sea” novels - sailing in the South Seas. However, the diary of Arthur Gordon Pym, full of dates and geographical coordinates, tells not only about the ordinary misadventures of a sea expedition: a riot, a shipwreck, a severe famine and a meeting of travelers with treacherous and bloodthirsty savages. The journey to the South Pole becomes for the heroes the experience of plunging into the Abyss, encountering Death, meeting with the boundless Chaos of existence, forcing them to experience existential Horror. The phantasmagorical nature of what is happening, multiplied by the spectacular incompleteness of the story, prompted Charles Romain Dyck, Jules Verne and Howard Philips Lovecraft to create their own versions — a continuation of Poe’s book, and Umberto Eco devoted many pages to its slyly sophisticated, almost modernist construction in his “Six Walks in Literary Woods.”