In this blog post, we will examine the literary characteristics and significance of the works included in Ivan Turgenev’s collection of short and medium-length stories, ‘Faust’.
Although Turgenev gained fame as a novelist and is counted among the three great Russian writers alongside Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, he actually began his literary career as a poet and is also renowned for the immortal prose poems he left behind. Turgenev is often praised as a true poet—one for whom it is difficult to find a comparable figure in world literature in terms of the beauty of his language, the sophistication of his style, and the conciseness of his expression.
In his book ‘The Art of Reading’, world-renowned humanities scholar Harold Bloom begins his exploration of the short story by examining Turgenev’s works. Bloom defines the lineage of the short story genre in world literary history as a continuum stretching from Turgenev through Chekhov to Hemingway, citing “familiarity with landscapes and people” as a common trait among these three authors. In particular, he described Turgenev’s short and medium-length stories as “chillingly beautiful.”
The three novellas and short stories by Turgenev included in this book—“The Control of Desire” (“Faust,” 1856), “The Pangs of Love” (“Three Meetings,” 1852), and “Self-Sacrifice” (“A Strange Story,” 1870)—each effectively convey these themes.
The novella ‘Faust’ was published in 1856 in the magazine ‘Contemporaries’ with the subtitle “A Story in Nine Letters.” Turgenev had been deeply immersed in Goethe’s ‘Faust’ since his youth, and in 1844, he translated parts of Goethe’s work, receiving favorable reviews from Belinsky. The following year, he published a lengthy essay containing a critique of the Russian translation of ‘Faust’. In this essay, he described Goethe’s ‘Faust’ as “the most perfect expression of the era in which the struggle between the old and the new finally began (……).” Eleven years after publishing that essay, he released the novella ‘Faust’.
‘Faust’ is a work composed in the form of a series of letters and is regarded as a beautiful work of art. It is highly autobiographical and serves as a literary sublimation of the author’s own emotions. It effectively portrays a man’s unrequited love for a married woman and the devastating consequences that such love brings. Ultimately, it emphasizes the need to control desire and the duty to let go, depicting the narrator’s tragic downfall as he is ultimately unable to suppress his love for a married woman whose imagination was awakened upon first encountering poetry. It also reflects, to some extent, Turgenev’s own real-life experience of having loved Madame Viardot for a long time but ultimately being unable to be with her.
The protagonist, Pavel, returns to his estate after nine years. One day, he learns that his college friend, Priimkov, lives nearby, and that Priimkov’s wife is Vera Nikolaevna, the woman he loved in his youth. In his youth, Pavel had intended to marry Vera, but Vera’s mother’s opposition prevented him from doing so. Vera, who is of Italian descent, was raised under her mother’s strict guidance. Vera’s mother feared the intense passions aroused by art, including poetry, and Vera, having grown up in such an environment, also lived her life keeping her distance from all works of art. As a result, by the time she was twenty-eight and the mother of three children, Vera had never read a single novel or poem. After marriage, she breaks free from her mother’s taboos, but Vera continues to shun what she calls “products of the imagination.” It is Pavel who reads Goethe’s ‘Faust’ to her. Vera is awakened to the world of ‘Faust’ and rediscovers the desire for life and the passion for freedom that she had long suppressed. However, this awakening of desire ultimately leads to a tragic outcome. Pavel falls in love with Vera, and Vera, in turn, falls in love with Pavel. But as if seeking to reform her from the emotions stirred by illicit passion and art, the ghost of her deceased mother appears before Vera. Subsequently, Vera falls ill with an unknown disease, gradually wastes away, and ultimately passes away.
The epigraph of this novella, “Deny yourself; subdue your own desires,” quoted from Part I of Goethe’s ‘Faust’, is the central conclusion Turgenev draws from ‘Faust’. In other words, it is the important purpose of human life to exercise self-restraint over one’s desires and uphold moral obligations. In the novel’s final letter, the author emphasizes this theme once again through Pavel’s words.
“Life is not a joke or a pastime; life is not even a game… Life is arduous labor. Abstinence—constant abstinence—this is the hidden meaning of life and the key to solving its riddle. No matter how noble one’s ideas or desires may be, putting them into practice is not what matters. What matters is fulfilling one’s duty, and this alone must be a person’s sole concern. For without binding oneself with the iron chains of duty, a person cannot safely reach the end of life.”
