FaustJohann Wolfgang von Goethe
About Faust
Goethe's work of sixty years, begun in the 1770s and completed only in the months before his death. Part I, published in 1808, is the tragedy the Romantics seized on; Part II, published posthumously in 1832, is a far stranger work that ranges across classical antiquity, European history, and allegory.
The frame is Goethe's reworking of a medieval legend. Faust, a scholar who has mastered every faculty of the university and found all of it empty, signs a wager with Mephistopheles: the devil will serve him on earth, and if Faust ever says to a passing moment, "stay, you are so fair," his soul will be forfeit. In Part I, Mephistopheles leads him to Gretchen, a young woman whose seduction, infanticide, and execution make up the first tragedy. Part II takes Faust into the imperial court, into the myth of Helen of Troy, into land reclamation from the sea, and ends with Faust at last speaking the forbidden words, in an act of foresight rather than satiety, and being saved by grace.
dramatizes the modern problem of infinite striving, the erosion of the old moral order, and the question whether restless activity can itself become a form of salvation. It is the work through which German literature staked its claim to the European canon, and the text to which nineteenth-century thinkers from Hegel to Nietzsche repeatedly returned.