Roy’s Reviews > Faust en andere verhalen > Status Update

If it hasn’t happened already, the story ‘Appearances: a fantastic narrative’ deserves a visual adaptation. Rarely have I read such an ominously visual text.

Turgenev’s ‘Faust’ is a story of a love so intense, that the woman in the dynamic cannot endure its force, and succumbs. The ‘protection’ she received from her embittered and hurt mother proved to be her downfall.

Goethe’s ‘Faust’ is a leitmotiv throughout, in some ways even the catalyst of this tragic love, and a beautiful one at that. Indeed, similar to that of Faust en Gretchen.

The titular story is definitely not what I expected, namely Turgenev’s take on the Faust story, although it does show hints of the relationship between Faust en Gretchen, but I love it nonetheless.

It is, so far, a love story of the intellect; two individuals are inherently drawn to each other, but of course circumstances won’t allow them to fulfil this attraction. Nor the intellectual nature of their love.

‘A correspondence’ is one of the most beautiful, tenderly distant stories I have ever read.

Where is my Marja Aleksandrovna?

I’ve had plenty of the dancers described by the narrator, Aleksej Petrovitsj.

This second story in the collection, freely translated from the Dutch as ‘Diary of a redundant person’, tells of a jealousy that did, for a change, direct itself to the correct object. Of course, the jealousy was inspired by unrequited love, love answered to another; but the course of the jealousy focussed on the other’s lack of trustworthiness.

Here, the narrator turned out right.

All told by a dying man.