Dreary nights

Noches lúgubres is the great work of the writer and soldier José Cadalso. However, it was a book that he never published during his lifetime. It was seven years after his death, in 1782, when it saw the light being edited in four parts by the newspaper El Correo de Madrid.
Due to its infringing and subversive tone, Noches lúgubres appeared more than once before the tribunal of the Inquisition and several versions of it were made appropriate to the ideals of the time. It is understood that, due to its content, from the first editions it was tried to give a moral tone to the work.
By means of modifications in the text or by the prologues of the editors, it was tried that this book was impregnated with a more moralistic tone, which could make it admissible before the censorship or before the dominant criteria.
Gloomy Nights tells the story of Tediato over three particularly gloomy nights. Tediato, its protagonist, dialogues with Lorenzo, the gravedigger of the cemetery where Filis, Tediato’s beloved, is buried. He intends to dig up the corpse to take it home and commit suicide, incinerating himself along with the remains of the beloved.
On the first night, when they are about to make it, the sun begins to rise and they must stop. In the second, they mistake him for a murderer and imprison him; he runs into Lorenzo’s son and learns the misfortunes of his friend’s life. And on the last night, you can see how they leave to continue with their mission.
None of his desires can be carried out because night after night events interrupt them, and this ends up plunging him into a vital negativism. Gloomy Nights is a dark work, full of pessimism and omens, written in the fashion of Edward Young’s Nights Thoughts .