For more than a hundred years, the novel "The Gadfly" has been exciting many generations of readers, but it was received in different ways. Puritan England treated him with restraint. In America, he caused a storm of indignation with his anti-religious character, in Russia he was enthusiastically welcomed, in the USSR he was published in millions of copies and was included in the school curriculum. It is no coincidence that the title of the novel: it refers us to Socrates, who accepted death for his beliefs. The protagonist Gadfly, like the Greek sage, remains true to the ideas that inspired him from his youth. Gadfly is an international type of revolutionary. In different eras, different societies, the novel was perceived ambiguously. Today he can find his fans again.