Faust

by Ivan Turgenev, Hugh Aplin (Translator)

A lesser-known novella by one of the great masters of Russian literature, now available to English readers in a lucid translation, is presented with "Yakov Pasynkov," another story exploring the nature of love and human relations. 
In a series of nine letters, the narrator tells his friend how he introduced Vera Nikolayevna, a married woman who had been forbidden as a child to read fiction and poetry, to the intellectual pleasures of Goethe's masterpiece. Opening up in front of Vera's eyes is not only the realm of imagination, but also a world of unbridled feelings and tempestuous passions, which can only shatter the comfort and safety of her existence and force her to set off on a journey of spiritual awakening.

"Turgenev to me is the greatest writer there ever was." Ernest Hemingway

"These two translations of Ivan Turgenev's earliest long fiction are a welcome sign of renewed interest in Russia's least-appreciated great nineteenth century novelist... In Yakov Pasynkov and Faust, Turgenev takes tragic irony in new directions." M. Maguire, Times Literary Supplement

"These tales highlight his masterful control of character and emotion." The Telegraph

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Russia, Russian Literature, Literature, Short Stories, Novels

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1855

About the author

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (Cyrillic: Иван Сергеевич Тургенев) was a novelist, poet, and dramatist, and now ranks as one of the towering figures of Russian literature. His major works include the short-story collection A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852) and the novels Rudin (1856), Home of the Gentry (1859), On the Eve (1860), and Fathers and Sons (1862).

These works offer realistic, affectionate portrayals of the Russian peasantry and penetrating studies of the Russian intelligentsia who were attempting to move the country into a new age. His masterpiece, Fathers and Sons, is considered one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century.

Turgenev was a contemporary with Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy. While these wrote about church and religion, Turgenev was more concerned with the movement toward social reform in Russia.

Reviews

[Guille · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Eres como el hielo; dura como la piedra mientras no te fundas; pero, si esto último llegara a suceder, no quedaría nada de ti”

Otro relato en el que el amor aparece como fuerza liberadora del tedio (el protagonista es un viejoven de 35 años que piensa que su vida está acabada, la madre que lo trajo) y como enfermedad y tragedia (al igual que en “Diario de un hombre superfluo” un amor imposible incapacita de por vida al enamorado), y donde el incumplimiento del deber se identifica como el gran pecado mortal.

“En mi opinión, en la vida hay que elegir de antemano entre lo útil y lo agradable, y decidirse de una vez para siempre. También yo, en el pasado, quise armonizar una cosa y otra… Pero es una empresa imposible que condena al hombre a la ruina o a la mediocridad.”

Si bien la prosa del Turguénev no desmerece, el tema y la historia con la que lo trata me han dejado bastante frío.

[karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

who knew turgenev did the supernatural?? well he did. cuz this is. and yet it is still a "real book" despite the presence of haints, although david would most likely be among turgenev's detractors for this.

from the introduction:

This led to a degree of criticism from those of his contemporaries who insisted on the pre-eminence of realism in literature, but such disapproval might be countered with the argument that here the supernatural should actually be interpreted not literally, but psychologically, as the projection of the characters' troubled feelings about their situation.

so - phew - still "real literature" and not some early russian paranormal romance. consider yourself countered!!

this book contains two novellas, which is the usual format for hesperus books (and if you don't know them, you should check out their list, because they are great, and strangely - they seem to do a lot of books that involve supernatural elements from authors who don't usually do the supernatural, which is interesting. interesting to me, anyway.)

this is somewhat similar to turn of the screw with all its spooky ambiguity, but without all that tortured prose. yeah, i said it: henry james is a drag, man.

not a "drag man."



that we know of.

so, faust. this is about the dangers of literature upon the fragile human psyche, and the transportive power of words. it details the a story of the relationship that develops between a man and a woman with whom he was enamored in his youth. despite being married now, with children of her own, she still obeys the commands of her now-deceased overbearing mother to avoid fiction and poetry at all costs, with their deleterious effects on the mind. our "hero" is having none of that, and determines to expose her to his great love of literature, and insists on reading to her, and her pesky husband, from faust. in german. which her husband is shitty at. score one for our narrator.

so anyway, she is naturally overwhelmed by it, (what's hotter than faust after all, am i right, ladies?) and this does indeed give rise to powerful emotions. and then horrible things happen, as they will in russian literature.

it is occasionally a little overblown for my tastes. i generally have little patience for powerful emotions resulting in physical illness, but there are occasional lines like these:

You're like ice: until you melt, you're as strong as stone, but when you melt, not even a trace of you will be left.

and

"I know how to do only one thing," she said, "Remain silent until the last moment."

yum, right?

the second novella, yakov pasynkov, is more like hardy where everyone falls prey to unhappy and unfulfilled passions and the threads get all tangled and hopeless. he loves her who loves him who is duty-bound to her and then everyone dies. not really, but no one is happy at the end and everyone is nursing their frustrated passions forever. not a spoiler, because - again - russian lit. everyone is gloomy until the bitter end. sigh.

so for my first turgenev, it was definitely satisfying, and i really liked the introductory material. (which, incidentally, was written not by smug-boy simon cowell,



as i initially thought, but by simon callow,



which makes more sense)

and now i have fulfilled my "real book" reading and can return to the tripe i generally go for, right? bring on the james patterson.

hopefully this attempt at a review will not get deleted by my stupid-assed fingers, as the first one i wrote for this book did. which was probably the best review ever, i will have you know.

come to my blog!

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Minor Turgenev. ‘Faust’ is the cautionary tale of introducing young women to the scandalous passions of Goethe—far better to leave the little ladies to their volumes on crochet or the Aztecs. This volume includes ‘Yakov Pasynkov’, the quintessential tale of nice guys finish with a punctured lung having never known the heat of a woman.

[- Jared - ₪ Book Nerd ₪ · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tragic tale of a love thought to have been lost but then recaptured as a forbidden love. The story is recounted in letters by the protagonist to his friend as he visits a woman that he had once fancied who is now married. The feelings become reignited in him but does she does she share the feeling? Ridiculous! How can she? She is married and never fancied him before... or did she?

Can he win over a married woman? Will she return his affections or will she rebuke him? Will it be all for naught and will he just suffer from embarrassment and shame? No spoilers here!

In this book Turgenev explores one youth's regret and his attempt to remedy it and throws in a bit of tragedy and mysticism. It's a short romantic tragedy that really wasn't my kind of book but it was very well written and I found myself not to be entirely board. Toward the end, Turgenev actually managed to have me very interested in the outcome.

[Night0vvl · Rating 2 out of 5]

كتاب حاوي دو داستان كوتاه از تورگينف به نام فاوست و لوكريا بود. فاوست درباره ي يك عشق ممنوع و لوكريا سرگذشت فردي كه به قديس زنده تعبير ميشد بود. نحوه ي روايت داستانها خوب بود به خصوص فاوست كه در قالب نامه براي يك دوست نوشته شده بود اما محور اصلي هيچ كدام از داستانها براي من جذابيتي نداشت، نمي دانم به خاطر كليشه اي بودن داستانها بود و يا خيلي ساده و فارغ از پيچيدگي بودن آنها. به هر حال در نظر من دو داستان خيلي معمولي بودند و به ويژه فاوست باعث دلسردي من شد، به عنوان كسي كه عاشق فاستوس مارلو و فاوست گوته ست، توقع داشتم كه محور داستان كمي متفاوت تر از صرف يك داستان عاشقانه باشد اما نظر نويسنده با من فرق داشت!

[Maan Kawas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great short stories, moving and engaging! I highly recommend.

[Eleanor]

Previous Turgenev experience: I’ve read quite a lot of Turgenev’s major work over the last two years: Fathers and Sons, Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, Home of the Gentry, Rudin and Smoke in 2022, and On the Eve in 2023.

I have read enough Turgenev at this point to be able to identify that the man has a pattern. Many of his books are said to be about “superfluous men”, or those caught in the cultural transition from tsarist feudalism to a more Westernised, modern-looking society. (This is all pre-Bolsheviks, of course; the tension was there through most of the century preceding the Revolution.) They’re also about men who fall in love with women they can’t have–usually because those women are married, not interested, or both–and often they’re women whom these men knew as children or adolescents before encountering them again as adults. In all of the romantic relationships in Turgenev’s fiction there seems to be this deep-rooted longing to recover lost innocence.

Faust follows this pattern to a certain extent. An epistolary novella, it’s told entirely through one side of a correspondence: the letters of a man in his mid-thirties named Pavel to his friend Semyon. (Pavel’s age is inconsistent within the text; pegging it to the age of his love interest, Vera, he appears to be about six years older, but then he’s described as both thirty-five and thirty-eight while she seems to be about twenty-nine. He also makes several mentions of being “nearly forty”, which might just be an indication of a neurotic character. Thirty-five isn’t nearly forty; even thirty-eight is, I would say, more observing forty ahead of you on the road than nearly there.) Anyway, Pavel has come back to his old family dacha for a bit of a holiday and soon realises that there’s a family living nearby: Priyimkov, his wife Vera, and small daughter Lydia. Vera, it turns out, is known to Pavel: he met her years ago through friends–when she was sixteen and he in his early twenties–and wanted to marry her, but her mother, a peculiar woman with Italian heritage who forbade her daughter from ever reading fiction or poetry, discouraged the match and Pavel moved away shortly thereafter.

The novella is about the annihilating power of fiction. Befriending the Priyimkovs, Pavel finds that Vera has still never read a line of poetry. Determined to introduce her to the world of beauty in literature, he arranges a dramatic reading of Part 1 of Goethe’s Faust. Priyimkov is polite but unmoved by the experience, but it changes Vera permanently. She doesn’t go into immediate raptures, but after the reading, she moves outside, out of the summer house into the night air. It’s as though she doesn’t have words for what’s happened to her. Indeed, she doesn’t: her reading has been strictly factual until now and she genuinely can’t articulate what the poetry has achieved. But she feels it. This might have been my favourite part of the novella: the moment when some completely new experience of art crashes into a person. Obviously it can’t end well.

Goethe’s Faust is a very loaded work. The Doctor Faustus story is powerful in the Western imagination: selling your soul to an eternity of torment for the chance of ultimate knowledge, wealth and fulfilled desire here on earth. It’s odd to use it as a writer of fiction, in a story about the power of fiction. Are we to assume that Vera is damned? She thinks she is: falling in love with Pavel and agreeing to meet him secretly, she sees what she thinks is the ghost of her disapproving mother on the way to the rendezvous, falls ill (as women seem able to do on a dime in the novels of the past), and dies several days later. If forbidden love is sin and damnation, is fiction then Vera’s Mephistopheles? And the role of her mother in all of this: is she the condemnation of society at large, in which case we should view her appearance as providential, a way of saving her daughter from sexual transgression through the much-to-be-preferred death? Or is she something else, something crueller and colder, a vengeful, abusive parent whose control extends beyond the grave (even if only in hallucination)? Or, possibly, a third option, in which Vera’s mother does represent society’s opinion and yet should be viewed with horror all the same?

Vera’s death makes everything about Faust darker, even if Turgenev only meant to write a fable-like tale. Whether the ghost is “real” or not seems to me beside the point: the weight of terror at what will happen if a woman crosses a line–reads poetry, falls for someone not her husband, feels something–is enough to kill. In that sense, Faust feels like a horror novella, in the way so many nineteenth-century fictions do: the stakes are very high in a stratified world, and the game is rigged from the start.

This is the fourth book in my 2024 B-Sides reading project, an attempt to explore the lesser works of authors whose “big” or “famous” books I’ve already read.

[Prerazmišljavanje - Katarina Kostić · Rating 3 out of 5]

Uskoro na blogu - beleške iz uporednog čitanja ovog i Pračetovog Fausta. :)

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two stories on art and (unfulfilled) love as moral experience and test.

[Javier Muñoz · Rating 3 out of 5]

"En la vida hay que elegir entre lo útil y lo agradable"

Tenemos algo parecido a "Una Historia Corriente" de Goncharov, pero ya llevada al extremo la dualidad. Vera se educo en la parte Util de la vida.

No he leído Fausto de Goethe, sé que esto me pesará.

Como en otras novelas habla del deber por sobre la pasión; el control y la renunciamiento.

En medio de sus aspiraciones inciertas, el hombre de bien sabe discernir siempre dónde se encuentra el verdadero camino.-Goethe

Tintes Góticos y sobrenatural (no entendí si es que había algo más entre el cuadro que tenia en su casa nuestro héroe con la Madre de Vera, si alguien alguna vez llega a leer esto y tiene alguna idea, favor comentar)

Otra novela más de terratenientes, sin dejar a los Románticos Alemanes. (Ahora entiendo por que decía que su literatura se basa en el pasado)

[emil · Rating 4 out of 5]

why didn’t he write back tho lol what a bad friend

[Anastasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25/5

*Read for class.

Unfortunately, I have not read Goehte's Faust, so I'm sure I've missed some allusions and hints, but I still enjoyed this novella. Although I'm a little bit sick and tired of lovers (or one lover) dying or turning out to be a jerk, but what can you do. That's classics for you. Happy endings are not as fun, of course.

[Juri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ich werde immer mehr Freund von Briefromanen.
Wahrscheinlich wären vier Sterne eher angebracht, aber warum geizen, wenn das Buch nur 500 Bewertungen hat. Mir hat es sehr gefallen!

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nine letters, that's all you have to read. If you can make it through these nine letters you've read the book. Our letter writer is Pavel Alexandrovich and the unfortunate man who has to read them is Semyon Nikolayevich. I think I have those names right, but I don't guarantee it. The first letter, which goes on and on telling his poor friend about the trees, and the gardens, and the birds, and the furniture in his house, until I'm wondering if his friend is still reading the thing:

the garden has become amazingly pretty; the modest little lilac, acacia and honeysuckle bushes (you remember, you and I planted them) have filled out into magnificent dense shrubs; the birches and maples - they've all shot up and spread wide; the lime tree walks have become particularly attractive. I love those walks, I love the delicate grey-green colour and the subtle scent of the air, I love the dappled network of bright little circles across the dark earth. My favorite oak sapling has already become a young oak tree. All around the grass was so cheerful and flourishing; a golden light, strong and soft, lay on everything; it even penetrated into the shade, and the birds that could be heard!

I'm not going on with the birds that could be heard. Finally he gets through the grass, trees, birds, cottages, village people, and we go on to the second letter. The poor guy getting the letters fell asleep during the first one. The second one though has our writer going for a walk and coming across an old friend by the name of Priyimkov. Priyimkov surprises Pavel by telling him that he is married to Vera Nikolayevna, another old "friend" of his. He had known her long ago and had asked her to marry him. Back then Vera's mother was still alive. She is described as a "very strange woman with a strong character, insistent and intense". She had a powerful influence on both her daughter and Pavel. She feared anything that affects the imagination, so her daughter has never read a story, a novel, or a poem, but was excellent in geography, history, and natural history, I guess these things don't stir the imagination. According to her:

"You say,' she said finally, 'reading works of poetry is both useful and pleasant...I think one has to choose in life in advance: either the useful or the pleasant, and thus come to a decision once and for all. I too once wanted to combine both the one and the other...It is not possible and it leads to ruin or to vulgarity."

So Vera never reads poetry or novels and she never marries our hero either. The years pass until that day when he takes a walk and meets Vera's husband once again. Now he is invited to visit them and of course he goes. Often. Too often.

I was really bored with that first letter, but each one seemed more interesting to me and I didn't put the book down until I was finished. Of course, the book was nine letters long, so that wasn't some great accomplishment. I liked the book, I'm not sure how I would have felt had the book been nineteen letters instead of nine, but I liked it. I am glad I read it, on to the next one.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was completely enraptured by Faust from start to finish. The story is presented through nine letters written by a man to one of his dear friends, about the connection that is formed between himself and a woman after he introduces her to Goethe's Faust. The power of literature is presented beautifully and elegantly as something that can affect the mind in both positive and negative directions. As a reader, I could deeply relate to the narrators love of literature, and I recognized his joy of sharing his favorite books because it is something I find joy in too. However, Turgenev's Faust is not a light and romantic story – there is a philosophical aspect to it as well as parts that can be viewed as supernatural or metaphorical depending on what meaning the reader attaches to it. I loved that it had these extra dimensions, and it really upped my enjoyment of the story as a whole. I would say that Faust is in some ways similar to the Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol, though Faust has a more sentimental and melancholic vibe to it.

[Sheyda · Rating 2 out of 5]

اولین کتابی از تورگینف که خوندم و شامل دو داستان مجزا بود. میتونم بگم که تورگینف بنظرم باصفا و نجیب اومد! صفاتی که در کتابهاش هم براحتی دیده میشه. درحال خوندن "پدران و پسران" ام، دیدگاه نویسنده رو بهتر درک کردم. یکی از صفات بارز نویسنده های روسی که در آثار تورگینف هم دیده میشه؛ حمایت از پاکی، حقیقت و درستیه. نکته ای که در فاوست تورگینف توجهمو جلب کرد این بود که نویسنده کارکتر مورد نظر رو توسط مادرش نجات میده و این پیام رو القا میکنه زمانیکه دل به تنهایی تصمیمی میگیره، توجیهی برای برگزیدن مسیر اشتباه وجود نداره!

[Toby R]

This actually contains two long short stories/short novellas of about 40-50 pages each. Faust is the first, and owes a lot to Goethe, although you can understand much of it if you haven't read Goethe's Faust (as I haven't, although I have read Christopher Marlowe's). The second is Yakov Pasynkov, which is about a saintly type figure somewhat akin to Alyosha from The Brothers Karamazov but without the religiousness.

[elena porras · Rating 2 out of 5]

painfully mediocre to me. I have not read Goethe’s Faust but apparently this book doesn’t parallel it, just references it so maybe I’m not missing as much as I think I am. I am really starting to despise the trope of the perfect woman ( or literally any woman ) corrupted by the narcissistic, Byronic man. Some nice musings on time and age which I enjoyed.

[Jana · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first short story "Faust" is very nice, but I'd like to recommend the second one of that little book: "Ein Briefwechsel", a story told through the exchange of a few letters. In less than 40 pages Turgenev tells us the secret of life as only a Russian understands and is able to share it.

[Eugenia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ничего себе мамаша! Довела дочу до невроза...

[S'hi · Rating 4 out of 5]

(The version I read includes Yakov Pasynkov)
These stories are a bit like the Princess and the Pea – they have multiple layers through which the sensitivity of the characters finds its own irritation and attention to a detail that gives even greater scope for more sensitivity.

In Faust the sharing of this classic of literature with an innocent girl is seen as unleashing tragedy where others have already considered the vulnerability to be worth protecting rather than challenging away from itself. All the variables that come with judgment and discernment are displayed, but ultimately come down to the dilemma of one unaccustomed to such choice having to make it alone.

In Yakov Pasynkov the quality of love is measured within itself compared with the recognition and requiting love of others. Once again the purity of the isolation of the emotion is held up to be appreciated like a fine gem. But only by showing it can this become possible – and by then it is too late.

Both tales are like experiments carried out by one who is isolation oneself.

As a scientist in a laboratory, as the times were allowing scientific investigation to step out from under the shadow of religion, the experiment is believed to be carried out in controlled circumstances. That other people react differently than expected by the storyteller, and reveal unknown elements of the story as it reaches its climax, so the scientist discovers the limits of his control over his experiment.

Story does operate like a laboratory for many writers. It gives them a means for exploring the many sides of their own ideas and experiences. It allows them to test their own ability to delve the actions and opinions they experience from others as separate characters. And yet ultimately the story tells itself in ways that also challenge the writer’s own permission to allow such things to come about or reveal themselves despite the expected control of the pen.

Whatever the tools we use, they always have an element of weapon about them. Such weapons can easily turn against us if we are not aware of their double nature – and our own!

[Trounin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Следовало сообщить о даровании Гёте. Иван писал так, будто немецкой литературы прежде вовсе не существовало. Где те немцы, писавшие до него? Они были. А где литература, ими созданная? Была и она. Так в чём суть претензии Тургенева? Кто же признает ту литературу немецкой, ежели написана она языком любым, кроме немецкого… Иван выражает твёрдую уверенность — все, вплоть до немецких мыслителей, составляли научные и художественные труды исключительно на латинском и французском, нисколько не пользуясь немецким. Что же, укор частично оправданный. Может это было связано с преобладанием данных языков в просвещённых уголках Европы, так и среди русских были литераторы, предпочитавшие писать для Запада средствами соответствующей речи, тем облегчая способность понять сообщаемую ими мысль.

(c) Trounin

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listened to via LibriVox (along with Acia and ) . Frivolous Narrator in Germany (traveling) meets up with 2 russians in passing. A pleasant fellow (would be painter) and his sister. The sister is a little odd- shy / reserved. She was brought up in poorer circumstances / less cultured. Her mother insisted that she not read any books at all - zero. So, when our hero reads his favorite- Faust- she is shaken. She reads more and is finally brought to love this new man. He is iffy. but finally realizes he loves her. but he is torn by loyalty to the brother (???) and general hesitation, which is enough to ruin things (kind of random to me) and so she disappears forever. He poignantly retreats to his estate to live quietly and lovelessly. Story is written in letters.

[Faisal Hans · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was interested in this because the blurb mentioned the nature of love, and the potentially disastrous consequences of a spiritual awakening; also because of my respect and admiration of T.

I liked it being presented as a series of letters. It saves the resolution of the tension that slowly builds to right at the end, I felt. I liked the element of the supernatural too.
I'm still working through what the novella means, especially the character of the mother which interests me. Overall 3/5 because 4/5's and 5/5's probably do more, and because it didn't absolutely captivate me at all points.

Also, it talks of youth and older age. Again, still thinking through.

[Jardar Østbø · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kort, men god bok om å bli påverka av "åndslivets opphøyede nytelser" (Skjønnlitteraturen), men aller mest om kjærleik, forelskelse og innverknaden enkelte menneske har.
Gamal bok, men framleis aktuell i sitt innhald; som Pavel seier på slutten: "Anstreng deg for å leve slik som du bør, livet er ikke så lett som det ser ut til". Om ikkje det er moderne greier som kunne vore skrive på ein kaffikopp så veit ikkje eg.

[Janith Pathirage · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a strange novella this is !. There are so many things to like and dislike about it. I enjoyed the Gothic elements of this story very much. It was not directly a ghost story, nobody knows for sure if the ghost in this story was real or an illusion, but I think it was better that way. What I didn't like about it was Vera. She was not a very likable character.

[Aleeza Kainat · Rating 5 out of 5]

her dreams were of a
different nature: she either imagined herself on the plains of Africa, with some traveller or other, or hunting for
the traces of Franklin in the Arctic Ocean; she vividly pictured to herself all the hardships which she must
undergo, all the difficulties with which she must contend.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

This story is captivating! I loved how the main character's feelings are audibly/visibly changing throughout the letters, and how by denying in cliches it becomes all the more clear that he is smitten with the woman.

A moral of the story also seems to be to not read novels and poetry, because you might fall in passionate love and start to believe in the impossible.

[Alice Yoder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Falling in love with a married woman with an overprotective mother is never a good thing and usually ends badly, which it does. Written in letter-form between two friends, you only get one side of the correspondence. Enjoyable read.

[Lila · Rating 3 out of 5]

Apparently these are the first English translations of two short stories: "Faust" (1856) and "Yakov Pasynkov" (1855). The stories continue Turgenev's themes of close male friendship and doomed unrequited love.