The image of Faust in Goethe's work of the same name, essay. Essay on the topic: affirmation of the greatness of reason and creativity in the tragedy “Faust”

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Samara branch
Moscow State University of Printing Arts

Test
on the history of foreign literature on the topic:
“The image of Faust in Goethe’s tragedy “Faust”

Performed:
1st year student majoring in Book Distribution
V.S. Volodarskaya
Checked:
Grade:

Samara 2006 Plan
Introduction
1. The image of Faust
2. The World of Faust
3. Second part of Faust
Conclusion

Introduction

The reader has long appreciated Goethe's immortal creation - his tragedy "Faust", one of the remarkable monuments of world literature.

Great national poet, ardent patriot, educator of his people

in the spirit of humanism and boundless faith in a better future on our land, Goethe is undoubtedly one of the most complex phenomena in the history of German literature. The position he took in the struggle between two Cultures - and they are inevitably contained in the “national” culture of any society divided into classes - is not free from deep contradictions. The ideologists of the reactionary camp tendentiously selected and continue to select individual quotes from the poet’s vast literary heritage, with the help of which they try to proclaim Goethe a “convinced cosmopolitan,” even “an opponent of the national unification of the Germans.”

Having strengthened his global significance creation of Faust, Goethe is least of all “the author of one book.” Yes, this would not be reconciled with the main feature of his

personality, his amazing versatility.

The largest Western European lyricist, whose poems contain German poetry

for the first time spoke in a truly popular language about the simple and strong

human feelings, Goethe is at the same time the author of widely known ballads

(“The Forest King”, “The Corinthian Bride”, etc.), dramas and epic poems and, finally, a wonderful novelist who depicted the spiritual life of a whole series in “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, in “Wilhelm Meister”, in “Poetry and Truth” generations German people. However, even such diverse literary activities do not exhaust the significance of Goethe. “Goethe represents, perhaps, the only example in the history of human thought of a combination of a great poet, a deep thinker and an outstanding scientist in one person” (K. A. Timiryazev, Goethe is a natural scientist. Encyclopedic Dictionary, ed. Granat, vol. XIV, p. 448.), - K. A. Timiryazev wrote about him.

Goethe accomplished great feats of labor in any field in which he put his hand. His research and scientific interests included geology and mineralogy, optics and botany, zoology, anatomy and osteology; and in each of these areas of natural science, Goethe developed the same independent, innovative activity as in poetry.

Hence the flawed aspects in Goethe's worldview; hence the duality inherent in his work and his personality. “In his works, Goethe has an ambivalent attitude toward the German society of his time,” Engels wrote, “...he rebels against it, like Gaia, Prometheus and Faust, showers him with the bitter ridicule of Mephistopheles. Then, on the contrary, he gets closer to him, “adapts to "to him... protects him from the historical movement pressing on him... in him there is a constant struggle between a brilliant poet, who was disgusted by the squalor of his environment, and the prudent son of a Frankfurt patrician, the venerable Weimar privy councilor, who sees himself forced to conclude a truce with this squalor and adapt to it. Thus, Goethe is sometimes colossally great, sometimes petty; sometimes he is a rebellious, mocking, world-despising genius, sometimes a cautious, contented, narrow philistine. And Goethe was unable to defeat German squalor; on the contrary, it defeats him; and this victory of wretchedness over the greatest German is the best proof that “from within” it cannot be defeated at all."

But Goethe, of course, would not have been Goethe, would not have been the “greatest German” if he had not at times managed to win glorious victories over the German squalor that surrounded him, if in other cases he had not been able to rise above his environment, fighting for a better life and better ideals.

I was a man in the world,

This means he was a fighter! -

the poet spoke about himself in the decline of his life.

As a young man - following Lessing and in close collaboration with his comrades in the literary movement of Sturm und Drang - he rebelled against provincial German society, thundered against the “wrong power” in Prometheus, in his rebellious odes, in Goetz von Berlichingen - this “dramatic praise of the memory of a revolutionary,” as F. Engels defined it (R. Marx and F. Engels, Works, 2nd ed.; vol. 4, pp. 232-233.).

It was not all-German, but worldwide fame that brought young Goethe his second major work - “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” a novel in which the author enormous power showed the tragic fate of the progressive man in Germany at that time, the entire disastrous nature of the continued existence of the feudal order for society and for the individual.

"Faust" occupies a very special place in the work of the great poet. In him

we have the right to see the ideological result of his (more than sixty years) vigorous creative activity. With unheard of courage and with confident, wise caution, Goethe throughout his life (“Faust” began in 1772 and finished a year before the poet’s death, in 1831) invested his most cherished dreams and brightest guesses into this creation. "Faust" is the pinnacle of the thoughts and feelings of the great German. All the best, truly living things in Goethe’s poetry and universal thinking found their most complete expression here.

Faust image

“There is the highest courage: the courage of invention,” wrote Pushkin, “of creation, where a vast plan is embraced by creative thought - such is the courage... Goethe in Faust” (“Pushkin the Critic,” Goslitizdat, 1950, p. 129.).

The boldness of this plan lay in the fact that the subject of Faust was not just one life conflict, but a consistent, inevitable chain of deep conflicts throughout a single life path, or, in Goethe’s words, “a series of increasingly higher and purer types of activity.” hero." This plan for the tragedy, which contradicted all the accepted rules of dramatic art, allowed Goethe to put all his worldly wisdom and most of the historical experience of his time into Faust.

The very image of Faust is not Goethe's original invention. This image arose in the depths of folk art and only later entered book literature.

The hero of folk legend, Doctor Johann Faust, is a historical figure. He wandered through the cities of Protestant Germany during the turbulent era of the Reformation and peasant wars. Whether he was just a clever charlatan, or really a learned doctor and brave natural scientist, has not yet been established. One thing is certain: the Faust of folk legend became the hero of a number of generations of the German people, their favorite, to whom all kinds of miracles, familiar from more ancient legends, were generously attributed. The people sympathized with the successes and wonderful art of Doctor Faustus, and this sympathy for the “warlock and heretic” naturally inspired fear in Protestant theologians.

And so in Frankfurt in 1587 a “book for the people” was published, in which the author, a certain Johann Spiess, condemns “Faustian unbelief and pagan life.” A zealous Lutheran, Spiess wanted to show, using the example of Faust, the disastrous consequences of human arrogance, which prefers inquisitive science to humble contemplative faith. Science is powerless to penetrate the great secrets of the universe, the author of this book argued, and if Doctor Faustus nevertheless managed to take possession of lost ancient manuscripts or summon the legendary Helen, the most beautiful of women, to the court of Charles V ancient Hellas, then only with the help of the devil with whom he entered into a “sinful and disgusting deal”; for unprecedented success here on earth, he will pay with the eternal torment of hell...

This is what Johann Spiess taught. However, his pious work not only did not deprive Doctor Faustus of his former popularity, but even increased it. Among the masses of the people - with all their centuries-old lack of rights and downtroddenness - there has always been faith in the final triumph of the people and their heroes over all hostile forces. Disregarding the flat moral and religious rantings of Spiess, the people admired Faust's victories over obstinate nature, but the terrible end of the hero did not frighten them too much. The reader, mostly an urban artisan, tacitly assumed that such a fellow as this Legendary Doctor would outwit the devil himself (just as the Russian Petrushka outwitted a doctor, a priest, a policeman, evil spirits, and even death itself).

This is approximately the same fate as the second book about Doctor Faustus, published in 1599. No matter how sluggish the learned pen of the venerable Heinrich Widmann was, no matter how overloaded his book was with condemnatory quotations from the Bible and the fathers of the church, it nevertheless quickly won a wide circle of readers, since it contained a number of new legends about the glorious warlock. It was Widmann’s book (abridged in 1674 by the Nuremberg doctor Pfitzer, and later, in 1725, by another nameless publisher) that formed the basis of those countless popular prints about Dr. Johann Faust, which later fell into the hands of little Wolfgang Goethe back in his parents’ home. But it was not only large Gothic letters on cheap gray paper from popular prints that told the boy about this strange man. The story of Doctor Faustus was well known to him from its theatrical adaptation, which never left the stages of fair booths.

This theatrical "Faust" was nothing more than a crude adaptation of the drama of the famous English writer Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), who was once fascinated by the outlandish German legend. Unlike Lutheran theologians and moralists, Marlowe explains the actions of his hero not by his desire for carefree pagan Epicureanism and easy money, but by an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Thus, Marlowe was the first not so much to “ennoble” the folk legend (as some bourgeois literary critics put it), but to return this folk fiction to its former ideological meaning, obscured by the books of narrow-minded priests.

Later, during the era of the German Enlightenment, the image of Faust attracted

the attention of the most revolutionary writer of that time, Lessing, who, turning to the legend of Faust, was the first to plan to end the drama not with the overthrow of the hero into hell, but with the loud rejoicing of the heavenly hordes in honor of the inquisitive and zealous seeker of truth.

Death prevented Lessing from finishing the drama he had planned, and its theme was inherited by the younger generation of German enlighteners - the poets of Sturm and Drang. Almost all the “stormy geniuses” wrote their own “Faust”. But its generally recognized creator was and remains only Goethe.

After writing Goetz von Berlichingen, young Goethe was busy with a number of dramatic plans, the heroes of which were strong personalities who left a noticeable mark on history. Either it was the founder of the new religion, Mohammed, or the great commander Julius Caesar, or the philosopher Socrates, or the legendary Prometheus, the God-fighter and friend of humanity. But all these images of great heroes, which Goethe contrasted with the pitiful German reality, were supplanted by the deeply popular image of Faust, which accompanied the poet for a long sixty years.

What made Goethe prefer Faust to the heroes of his other dramatic plans? The traditional answer: his then passion for German antiquity, folk songs, Russian Gothic - in a word, everything that he learned to love in his youth; and the very image of Faust - a scientist, a seeker of truth and the right path was, undoubtedly, closer and more related to Goethe than those other “titans”, for to a greater extent he allowed the poet to speak from own person through the lips of his restless hero.

All this is true, of course. But ultimately, the choice of the hero was prompted by the very ideological content of the dramatic concept: Goethe was equally not satisfied either with staying in the sphere of abstract symbolism ("Prometheus") or limiting his poetic and at the same time philosophical thought to the narrow and binding framework of a certain historical era(“Socrates”, “Caesar”). He sought and saw world history not only in the past of mankind. Its meaning was revealed to him and deduced from the entire past and present; and along with the meaning, the poet also saw and outlined a historical goal, the only one worthy of humanity. "Faust" is not so much a drama about the past as about the future of human history, as Goethe imagined it.

The very era in which the historical Faust lived and acted has become a thing of the past. Goethe could survey it as a whole, could be imbued with the spirit of its culture - the passionate religious and political sermons of Thomas Münzer, the epically powerful language of the Luther Bible, the fervent and heavy verses of the intelligent commoner Hans Sachs, the mournful confession of the knight Goetz. But what the masses rebelled against in that distant era has not yet disappeared from the face of German soil: the former, feudally fragmented Germany has been preserved; the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation survived (until 1806), according to the old laws of which unjust justice was carried out in all German lands; finally, as then, there was a muted discontent of the people - although this time it did not burst into a life-giving revolutionary thunderstorm.

Goethe's Faust is a deeply national drama. The very emotional conflict of her hero, the obstinate Faust, who rebelled against vegetating in the vile German reality in the name of freedom of action and thought, is already national. Such were the aspirations of not only the people of the rebellious 16th century; the same dreams dominated the consciousness of the entire generation of Sturm und Drang, with which Goethe entered the literary field.

But precisely because the popular masses in modern Goethe Germany were powerless to break the feudal shackles, to “remove” the personal tragedy of the German man along with the general tragedy of the German people, the poet had to look all the more closely at the affairs and thoughts of foreign, more active, more advanced peoples. In this sense and for this reason, Faust is not about Germany alone, but ultimately about all of humanity, called upon to transform the world through joint free and reasonable labor. Belinsky was equally right when he asserted that “Faust” “is a complete reflection of the entire life of contemporary German society” (V. G. Belinsky, Collected works in three volumes, Goslitizdat, M. 1948, vol. 3 , p. 797.), and when he said that this tragedy “contains all the moral questions that can arise in the chest of our inner man time" (V. G. Belinsky, Collected works, 1919, vol. VII, p. 304.) (my italics - D. V.)

Goethe began working on Faust with the daring of a genius. The very theme of Faust - a drama about the history of mankind, about the purpose of human history - was still unclear to him in its entirety; and yet he undertook it in the expectation that halfway through history would catch up with his plan. Goethe relied here on direct collaboration with the “genius of the century.” Just as the inhabitants of a sandy, flinty country intelligently and zealously channel every seeping stream, all the meager subsoil moisture, into their reservoirs, so Goethe, over the course of his long career, with unremitting persistence, collected into his Faust every prophetic hint of history, the entire subsoil historical meaning of the era.

Bourgeois literary criticism (represented by Cuno Fischer, Wilhelm Scherer and their students) from the fact of Goethe's long-term work on his drama made the vicious conclusion that Goethe's Faust lacked internal unity. They persistently pursued the idea that in Faust we are supposedly dealing not with a single philosophical and poetic concept, but with a motley bunch of disparate fragments. They self-confidently passed off their own inability to penetrate the spirit of Goethe's dialectic as contradictions and incongruities inherent in the drama itself, as if explained by the different times in which the author worked on Faust.

Bourgeois German scholars invited the reader to “enjoy each fragment separately,” without getting to their overall meaning. Thus, German literary criticism equated Goethe’s deep cognitive and at the same time artistic feat, which was his “Faust,” with a purely fragmentary (aphoristic) play of thought, deliberately evading knowledge of the world, which we observe among the German romantics and decadents.

Goethe himself, on the contrary, was always interested in the ideological unity of Faust. In a conversation with Professor Luden (1806), he directly says that the interest of Faust lies in its idea, “which unites the particulars of the poem into a whole, dictates these particulars and gives them their true meaning.

True, Goethe sometimes lost hope of subordinating to a single idea the wealth of thoughts and aspirations that he wanted to put into his Faust. This was the case in the eighties, on the eve of Goethe’s flight to Italy. This was the case later, at the end of the century, despite the fact that Goethe had already developed general scheme both parts of the tragedy. We must remember, however, that by this time Goethe was not yet the author of the two-part “Wilhelm Meister”; he did not yet stand, as Pushkin said, “on a par with the century” in socio-economic issues, and therefore could not introduce a more clear socio-economic content in the concept of a “free edge”, the construction of which his hero was supposed to begin.

But Goethe never ceased to seek “the final conclusion of all earthly wisdom” in order to subordinate to him that vast ideological and at the same time artistic world that contained his “Faust.” As the ideological content of the tragedy was clarified, the poet again and again returned to the already written scenes, changed their alternation, and inserted into them philosophical maxims necessary for a better understanding of the plan. This “embracing by creative thought” of enormous ideological and everyday experience lies the “highest courage” of Goethe in “Faust” about which the great Pushkin spoke.

Being a drama about the ultimate goal of the historical, social existence of mankind, Faust, for this reason alone, is not a historical drama in the usual sense of the word. This did not prevent Goethe from resurrecting in his Faust, as he once did in Goetz von Berlichingen, the color of the late German Middle Ages.

Let's start with the verse of the tragedy itself. Before us is an improved verse by Hans Sachs, the 16th-century Nuremberg poet-shoemaker; Goethe gave him a remarkable flexibility of intonation, which perfectly conveys a salty folk joke, the highest flights of the mind, and the subtlest movements of feeling. The verse of "Faust" is so simple and so popular that, really, it is not worth much effort to memorize almost the entire first part of the tragedy. Even the most “unliterary” Germans speak in Faustian lines, just as our compatriots speak in verses from “Woe from Wit.” Many poems of "Faust" have become proverbs, national catchphrases. Thomas Mann says in his sketch about Goethe's Faust that he himself heard one of the spectators in the theater innocently exclaim to the author of the tragedy: “Well, he made his task easier! He writes only in quotations.” The text of the tragedy is generously interspersed with heartfelt imitations of an old German folk song. The stage directions to Faust are also extremely expressive, recreating the plastic image of the ancient German city.

And yet, Goethe in his drama not so much reproduces the historical situation of rebellious Germany in the 16th century, but rather awakens to new life the extinct creative forces of the people that were active in that glorious time of German history. The legend of Faust is the fruit of the hard work of popular thought. It remains so under Goethe’s pen: without breaking the skeleton of the legend, the poet continues to saturate it with the latest folk thoughts and aspirations of his time.

Faust's World

Entering the unusual world of Faust, the reader must first of all get used to the abundance of biblical characters inherent in this drama. As in the times of the religious-political heresy of the late Middle Ages, here theological phraseology and symbolism are only the outer cover of by no means religious thoughts. The Lord and the archangels, Mephistopheles and other evil spirits are nothing more than carriers of eternally struggling natural and social forces. In the mouth of the Lord, as he is presented in the “Prologue in Heaven,” Goethe puts his own views on man - his faith in the optimistic resolution of human history.

The plot of Faust is given in the Prologue. When Mephistopheles, interrupting the praises of the archangels, claims that on earth he gives only

Impenetrable darkness

And the poor man feels so bad,

That even I spare him for now, -

the Lord puts forward, in contrast to the pitiful people mired in insignificance, about whom Mephistopheles speaks, the zealous truth-seeker Faust. Mephistopheles is surprised; in the painful scans of Doctor Faust, in his duality, in the fact that Faust

Demands stars from the sky as a reward

And the best pleasures on earth, -

he sees an even more certain guarantee of his destruction. Convinced of the correctness of his game, he declares to the Lord that he undertakes to recapture this “madman” from him. The Lord accepts Mephistopheles' challenge. He is confident not only that Faust

By instinct, by choice

Breaks out of the dead end -

but also that Mephistopheles, with his machinations, will only help the stubborn truth-seeker achieve the highest truth.

The theme of Faust's duality (here first touched upon by Mephistopheles) runs through the entire Drama. But this “dualness” is of a very special kind, having nothing to do with weakness of will or lack of determination. Faust wants to comprehend the “internal connection of the universe” and at the same time indulge in tireless practical activity, live in full swing of his moral and physical powers. In this simultaneous craving of Faust both for “contemplation” and for “activity”, and for theory and practice, there is, of course, essentially no tragic contradiction. But what seems to us now to be a self-evident truth was perceived quite differently in distant times, when Doctor Faustus lived, and later, in the era of Goethe, when the gap between theory and practice continued to constitute the tradition of German idealistic philosophy. The hero of Goethe’s tragedy stands here against this disgusting feature of feudal and, later, bourgeois society. Faust hates his learned retreat, where

Living and God-given forces

Yourself among these dead walls

You surrounded me with skeletons.

precisely because, remaining in this musty world, he will never be able to penetrate the innermost meaning of nature and the history of mankind. Disappointed in the dead dogmas and scholastic formulas of medieval wisdom, Faust turns to magic. He opens the treatise of the warlock Nostradamus on the page where the “sign of the macrocosm” is written and sees the complex work of the mechanism of the universe. But the spectacle of continuously renewed world forces does not console him: Faust is alien to passive contemplation. The sign of an active “earthly spirit” is closer to him, for he himself dreams of great exploits;

I'm ready to give my soul for everyone

And I know for sure that I won’t be afraid

The time of the crash is fatal.

In response to Faust’s threefold call, the “spirit of the earth” appears, but immediately again

retreats from the exorcist - precisely because he has not yet dared to act, but continues to rummage through the pitiful “treasures of his fathers,” feeding on the fruits of an infantilely immature science.

At this moment of greatest hopes and disappointments enters Wagner, Faust's adjunct, the philistine of the learned world, "an obnoxious, narrow-minded scholar." Their dialogue (one of the best in the drama) outlines the restless character of the hero even more clearly.

But Faust is alone again, again continues to struggle with his doubts. They lead him to thoughts of suicide. However, this thought is not at all dictated by fatigue or despair: Faust wants to part with life only in order to merge with the universe and, even more accurately, as he mistakenly believes, to penetrate its “secret.”

The cup of poison is taken away from his lips by the sudden sound of the Easter gospel. It is significant, however, that Fausta “returns to the earth” not a revived religious feeling, but only the memory of his childhood, when on the days of church celebrations he so vividly felt unity with the people. After the “contemplative principle,” the craving for knowledge divorced from life, almost drove Faust to suicide, to an insane egoistic determination: to buy the truth at the cost of his life (and, therefore, to master it without benefit for his “neighbors,” for humanity), in him, Faust, his “craving for action” again prevails, his readiness to serve the people, to be at one with the people.

In live communication with the people, we see Faust in the next scene - “At the Gates”. But here, too, Faust is possessed by the tragic consciousness of his powerlessness: ordinary people love Faust, honor him as a doctor-healer; he, Faust, on the contrary, has the lowest opinion of his medicinal art, he even believes that “...with his sophisticated potion... he raged worse than the plague itself.” With heartache, Faust realizes that the people’s love, so dear to him, is essentially undeserved; moreover, it rests on deception.

This completes the circle: both “souls” contained in Faust’s chest (“contemplative” and “active”) remain equally unsatisfied. It is at this moment of tragic discontent that Mephistopheles appears to him in the form of a poodle.

The messenger of hell reveals his identity in the next scene - in “Faust’s Work Room”, where the tireless doctor is working on the translation of the Gospel verse: - “In the beginning was the Word.” By rendering it as “In the beginning was the work,” Faust emphasizes not only the effective, material nature of the world, but also his own determination to act. Moreover, at this moment he seems to have a presentiment of his special, effective path of knowledge. Going through “a series of increasingly higher and purer types of activity,” freeing himself from low and selfish aspirations, Faust, according to the author, must rise to such a height of action, which at the same time will highest point cognitive contemplation: in the daily harsh struggle, the highest goal of all human development will be revealed to his mental gaze.

But so far Faust only vaguely foresees this path of effective knowledge destined for him: he still still relies on “magic” or on “revelation” gleaned from “sacred scripture”. Such confusion of Faust's consciousness supports in Mephistopheles the firm expectation that he will take possession of Faust's soul.

But seducing the “crazy doctor” is not so easy for the devil. While Mephistopheles lures Faust with earthly pleasures, he remains adamant: “What can you promise, poor fellow?” - he sarcastically asks the tempter and immediately exposes the pitifulness of his temptations:

You will give me food that is not at all satisfying,

Give me gold, which is like mercury

It spreads between the fingers; sweetheart,

Which, falling on your chest,

He's already trying to sneak away to someone else.

Captivated by the bold idea of ​​developing a living, comprehensive activity with the help of Mephistopheles, Faust sets out his own terms of the contract: Mephistopheles must serve him until the first moment when he, Faust, calms down, content with what has been achieved:

As soon as I exalt a single moment,

Crying out: “Just a moment, wait a moment:” -

It's over and I'm your prey

And there is no escape for me from the trap.

Then our deal comes into force,

Then you are free, I am enslaved.

Then let the hour hand become

The death knell will ring for me.

Mephistopheles accepts Faust's conditions. With his cold critical mind, he came to a number of small, “short” truths that he considers unshakable. Thus, he is sure that the entire universe (“the universe in its entirety”), which Faust so boldly encroaches on to embrace in deed and thought, will never become accessible to him, like to any person. "Finitude", short-termism of all human life Mephistopheles seems to be an insurmountable obstacle to this kind of cognitive and practical activity. After all, Faust is “only a man,” and therefore will deal only with imperfect, transitory phenomena of the world. Constant dissatisfaction will eventually tire him, and then he will nevertheless “exalt a single moment” - the short-lived value of “finite” existence, and therefore, betray his desire for endless improvement.

Such a calculation (erroneous, as we will see, for Faust will be able to “extend” his life to the life of all humanity) is closely connected with the nature of Mephistopheles’ intellect. He is “a spirit always accustomed to denying” and for this reason alone he can only be a detractor of earthly imperfection. His nihilistic criticism only superficially coincides with Faust's noble discontent - reverse side boundless Faustian faith in a better future on this earth.

When Mephistopheles certifies himself as

Part of the strength that is without number

He does good, desiring evil for everyone -

he, in his own conviction, is only blasphemous. Under "good" he

here he sarcastically understands his merciless absoluteness and nihilism:

I am a spirit, always accustomed to deny,

And with reason: nothing is needed.

There is no thing in the world worth mercy.

The creation is no good.

Incapable of comprehending the “universe in its entirety,” Mephistopheles does not even allow the thought that he, Mephistopheles, is entrusted with some positive task, that he is indeed “part of the force,” against his will, “doing good.” Such blindness will not allow him to continue to suspect that, by destroying Faust's transitory illusions, he is actually helping him in his tireless search for truth.

Faust's journey, accompanied by Mephistopheles, begins with hilarious devilry in the scenes "Auerbach's Cellar in Leipzig" and "The Witch's Kitchen", where a witchcraft drink returns Faust to his former youth. The axis of further dramatic action in the first part of Faust becomes the so-called “tragedy of Margarita”. The unfortunate story of Margarita is based on only one very brief mention in a folk book about Doctor Faustus: “He also became inflamed with passion for a beautiful but poor girl, a servant of a merchant who lived next door.”

Margarita is the first temptation on Faust's path, the first temptation to exalt a separate "beautiful moment." To submit to Margarita’s charms would mean, one way or another, to sign a peace agreement with the surrounding reality. Margarita, Gretchen, with all her charm and girlish innocence, is flesh and blood of the imperfect world in which she lives. Undoubtedly, there is a lot of good, kind, pure in her. But this passive-good, passive-kindness in itself will not make her life neither good nor kind. Of her own free will, she will not choose evil, but life can force her to do evil. The whole depth of Gretchen’s tragedy, her grief and horror is that the world condemned her, threw her into prison and sentenced her to death for evil, which her lover not only did not prevent, but which he had the cruelty to push her into.

Gretchen’s irresistible charm, which so amazed Faust, lies precisely in the fact that she is not tormented by doubts. Her passive “harmony” is based on a lack of understanding of the deceitfulness of society and the falsity and humiliation of her position in it. This misunderstanding does not allow her to doubt the “harmony of the world” that the priests talk about, the rightness of her god, the rightness of... the gossip at the city well. She is so touching in her concern for Faust’s agreement with her world and with her god:

Ah, give in even a bit!

So you don’t honor the Holy Gifts?

Margarita

But with only one mind,

And you don’t want to partake of the mysteries of the saints,

Haven't you gone to church in a year?

Do you believe in God?

Faust does not accept Margarita's world, but does not refuse to enjoy this world. This is his fault - guilt in front of a helpless girl. But Faust himself experiences tragedy, for he sacrifices to his restless searches what is most dear to him: his love for Margarita. Gretchen's integrity, her spiritual harmony, her purity, the unspoiled nature of a girl from the people - all this charms Faust no less than her pretty face, her “tidy room”. Margarita embodies the patriarchal-idyllic harmony of the human personality, a harmony that, according to Faust (and partly Goethe himself), perhaps does not need to be sought at all, to which one only needs to “return.” This is a different outcome - not forward, but backward - a temptation to which, as we know, the author of “Herman and Dorothea” more than once succumbed.

Faust initially does not want to disturb Margarita’s peace of mind; he retires to the “Forest and Cave” to again “contemplate and learn.” But his attraction to Margarita overpowers the voice of reason and conscience; he becomes her seducer.

There is now little sublime in Faust's feelings for Margarita. The base attraction in him clearly displaces the impulse of pure love. Much in the nature of Faust's relationship to the object of his passion offends our moral sense. Faust only plays with love and, all the more likely, condemns his beloved to death. He is not offended when Mephistopheles sings an obscene serenade under Gretchen’s window: that’s how it’s supposed to be. We see the full depth of Faust's fall in the scene where he heartlessly kills Margarita's brother and then flees from justice.

And yet Faust leaves Margarita without a clearly realized intention not to return to her: any rational weighing would be unbearable here and would irrevocably damage the hero. Yes, he returns to Margarita, frightened by a prophetic vision on the terrible Walpurgis Night.

Look at the edge of the hillock,

Mephisto, you see, there at the edge

Is the shadow so lonely?

She glides through the air

Without touching the ground with your foot.

The girl looks unhappy

And, like Gretchen, her appearance is meek,

And on her feet there are stocks.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

And a red line on the neck,

As if on canvas

Taped with a thread along a ruler

Border, ax width.

But during his absence, everything happens that would have happened if he had deliberately sacrificed the girl. Gretchen kills the child she gave birth to from Faust, and in mental confusion she accuses herself of false accusations - she pleads guilty to the murder of her mother and brother.

Jail. Faust is a witness to Gretchen's last night before her execution. Now he is ready to sacrifice everything to her, perhaps even that highest thing - his search, his great daring. But she is mad, she does not allow herself to be taken away from prison” and can no longer accept his help. Goethe also saves Margarita from the choice: stay, accept punishment, or live with the consciousness of the sin committed. Much in this last scene of the first part of the tragedy is from the scene of Ophelia’s madness in "Hamlet", from the dying yearning of Desdemona in "Othello". But in some way she still surpasses them. She can beat them, with her utmost, final simplicity, the harsh everydayness of imagined horror. But above all, because here - for the first time in Western European literature - this complete defenselessness of a girl from the people and this merciless sovereignty of the feudal state punishing her are confronted with each other.

For Faust, Margarita's death agony has a purifying meaning. Hearing the insane, suffering delirium of a beloved woman and not having the power to help her - this horror, with a red-hot iron, burned out everything that was low and unworthy in Faust’s feelings. Now he loves Gretchen with pure, compassionate love. But it’s too late: she remains deaf to his pleas to leave the dungeon. With crazy lips she urges him to save their poor child

Hurry! Hurry!

Save your poor daughter!

Along the side of the groves,

Across the stream, and from there,

To the left from the rotten bridge,

To the place where from the pond

The board stuck out.

A trembling child

When the head comes up

Grab your hand quickly,

She's alive, alive!

Now Faust realizes the full immensity of his guilt towards Gretchen; equal to the centuries-old vic of feudal society in front of a woman, in front of a man. His chest is embarrassed by the “sorrow of the world.” The inability to save Margarita and thereby at least partially make amends for what he had done is the gravest punishment for Faust:

Why did I live to see such sadness?

One thing is certain: Mephistopheles failed to turn Faust into a carefree “connoisseur of beauties” and thereby distract him from the search for high ideals. This means of distracting Faust from his great quest turned out to be untenable. Mephistopheles must take on new intrigues. Voice from above: “Saved!” - not only a moral justification for Margarita, but also a harbinger of an optimistic resolution to the tragedy.

The second part of Faust

Five large acts, interconnected not so much by external, plot unity, but by the internal unity of the dramatic idea and the strong-willed aspiration of the hero. Nowhere in world literature is there another work equal to it in richness and variety of artistic means. In accordance with the frequent changes in historical scenery, the poetic language changes here and there. The German "broken verse", the main meter of the tragedy, alternates with white iambic pentameter, then with ancient trimeters, then with severe terzas in the style of Dante, or even with the prim Alexandrian verse, which Goethe did not write since he left Leipzig as a student, and above all this is the “silver Latin” of the Middle Ages, latinitas argentata. The entire history of the world, the entire history of scientific, philosophical and poetic thought - Troy and Missolungi, Euripides and Byron, Thales and Alexander Humboldt, here rush like a whirlwind along the highly soaring spiral of the Faustian path (aka, according to Goethe, the path of humanity).

It is difficult to understand the aesthetic insensitivity of reading Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries to the “second Faust.” Is it possible to speak more simply, more poetically and (we dare to use this word) more gracefully about such complex and important things - about the origins and goals of culture and the historical existence of mankind, the individual? This was and remains an innovation, to which we have not yet gotten used to after more than a hundred years, but we should get used to it!

And what a delight is Lynceus’s song, this best example of Goethe’s senile lyricism!

Born to see everything,

I'm vigilant, point blank

I look from the bastion

To the free space.

And I see without edge

The beauty of the constellations,

And I can see the forest,

And deer in the forest.

When you reach this place, we don’t know how others do, but the writer of these lines is reminded of Chekhov’s “Steppe” every time. Do you remember the eccentric Vasya there with his dull-looking but extraordinarily keen eyes? “It’s no wonder to see a running hare or a flying drokhva... And Vasya saw playing foxes, hares washing their paws, drokhva spreading their wings, little bustards knocking out their “points.” Thanks to such visual acuity, in addition to the world that everyone saw, Vasya there was another world, his own, inaccessible to anyone and probably very good, because when he looked and admired, it was difficult not to envy him. Did Chekhov, when he wrote his Vasya, remember about Goethe's Lynceus? No one will answer this question anymore. One thing is certain that Chekhov loved the tragedy of the great poet and even dreamed of an accurate prose translation of “Faust” in order, without knowing the German language, to penetrate into all the details of Goethe’s poetic thought.

And it was this guard Lynceus, intoxicated by the spectacle of the world, who said about himself:

I like my whole life

And I get along with her, -

must announce the terrible death of Philemon and Baucis and their “damp with years” shack, burned by Mephistopheles, in treacherous zeal serving his master, Faust the organizer.

Here the flame flared up,

Desolation, ashes, fumes! -

And goes into the distance with centuries

Something that pleased the eye.

How heartbreaking and how unbearably beautiful this is! The first act begins with the healing of Faust. Benevolent elves erase from the hero’s memory the memories of what befell him, his blow:

Little elves' participation

Everyone is in trouble,

Is misfortune deserved?

Or it is without guilt.

What our conscience cannot cope with can be overcome by vital forces that instill cheerfulness in a person striving for a high goal. Faust can again continue his painful search. Mephistopheles, who had previously introduced Faust to the “small world,” now introduces him to the “big one,” where he thinks to seduce him with a brilliant career. We are at court at the highest level of the hierarchy of the Holy Roman Empire.

The "Imperial Palace" scene has significant similarities with "Auerbach's Cellar in Leipzig". Just as there, when entering the “small world”, in communication with ordinary people, with private individuals, so here, when entering the “big world”, in the field of historical existence, Mephistopheles begins with tricks, with seducing minds with incomprehensible miracles. But the imperial court requires tricks of a less innocent nature than those performed in the company of feasting students.

Every trifle, every vulgarity here acquires political significance and assumes national proportions. At the very first meeting of the imperial council, Mephistopheles invites the impoverished sovereign to issue paper money to secure underground treasures, which, according to the ancient law, “belong to Caesar.” With a relieved heart, in anticipation of a happy outcome, the emperor appoints a luxurious court masquerade and there, dressed as Plutos, without noticing it, he puts his signature on the small imperial seal under the first state credit card.

The destructiveness of this financial project is that it - and Mephistopheles knows this very well - falls on the soil of a state in the era of decaying feudalism, capable only of plunder and extortion. The underground treasures, symbolizing all the dormant productive forces of the country, remain untouched. The credit note, which with such inaction of the state cannot help but fall in price, essentially only continues the former fleecing of the people by armed tax collectors. The Emperor is least able to understand the benefits and dangers of the new financial system. He himself is innocently perplexed:

And instead of gold, such rubbish

Will the army and court accept payment?

With “hereditary generosity” he gifts those close to him with paper money and demands new amusements from Faust. He promises him to call the legendary Helen and Paris from the kingdom of the dead. To do this, he descends into the kingdom of the mysterious Mothers, who keep the prototypes of all things, in order to extract from there the ethereal shadows of the Spartan queen and the Trojan prince. For the emperor and his entourage, gathered in a dimly lit hall, all this is nothing more than a session of salon magic. Not so for Faust. He strives with all his thoughts for the most beautiful of women, for he sees in her the perfect creation of nature and human culture:

Once you know her, you can’t give up!

Faust wants to take Helen away from the ghostly Paris. But - a thunderclap; the daring one falls unconscious, the spirits disappear into the fog.

The second act takes us to Faust's familiar office, where the successful Wagner now lives. Mephistopheles delivers the unconscious Faust here at the moment when Wagner, using mysterious recipes, is making a Homunculus, who will soon show Faust the way to the Pharsalian fields. They will fly there - Faust, Mephistopheles, Homunculus - to look for the legendary Helen.

The image of the Homunculus is one of the most difficult to interpret. He is not a momentarily glimpsed mask from “A Walpurgisnacht Dream” or an allegorical character from “The Classical Walpurgisnacht.” Homunculus has his own life, almost tragic, in any case ending in death. In the life and search of Homunculus, directly opposite to the life and search of Faust, we should look for the answer to this image. If Faust yearns for the unconditional, for being, not bound by the laws of space and time, then the Homunculus, artificially created in the alchemist’s laboratory, a precocious know-it-all, for whom there are no fetters or barriers, yearns for conditionality, for life, for the flesh, for the real. existence in the real world.

The homunculus knows something that is not yet clear to Faust at this stage of his development. He understands that the purely mental, purely spiritual principle, precisely because of its “absoluteness” - that is, unconditionality, unbound by the laws of life and the concrete historical situation - is capable only of flawed, inferior existence. The death of the Homunculus, crashed on the throne of Galatea (here understood as some kind of all-generating cosmic force), sounds like a warning to Faust at the hour when he imagines himself at the goal of his aspirations: to get closer to the absolute, to eternal beauty, embodied in the image of Helen.

In "Classical Walpurgis Night" we see a picture of the grandiose work of all kinds of forces - water and subsoil, flora and fauna, courageous impulses of the human mind - to create the most perfect of women, Helen. The stage is crowded with the lowest elemental forces of Greek mythology, monstrous creatures of nature, its first powerful but crude creatures - colossal ants, vultures, sphinxes, sirens; all this destroys each other, lives in constant enmity. Above the dark swarm of elemental forces, less crude creations rise; demigods, nymphs, centaurs. But they are still infinitely far from the desired perfection. And now the pre-dawn twilight of the world is cut through by human thought - the philosophy of Thaleus and Anaxagoras: the day of noble Hellenic culture is dawning. Everything heralds the appearance of the most beautiful.

Chiron takes Faust to the gates of Orcus, where he begs Persephone for Helen. Mephistopheles does not help him in this search. To blend in with the crowd of participants in the night vigil, he dresses in the outfit of the ominous Forkiades. In this outfit he will participate in the third act of the drama, at the court of the revived Spartan queen.

Helen in front of the palace of Menelaus. It seems to her as if she had just returned to Sparta from the fallen Troy. She's worried:

Who am I? His wife, the former queen,

Or destined for sacrifice

For men's suffering and disasters,

Because of me, explored by the Greeks?

That's what the queen thinks. But at the same time, memories of her past life flicker in her mind like the flame of a lamp:

Come on, was it all real?

Or did I just dream about it at night?

Meanwhile, the action continues to develop in a conventionally realistic manner. Forkiada tells Helen about her threatened execution at the hands of Menelaus and offers to hide in the castle of Faust, erected on Greek soil by the crusaders. Having received the queen’s consent, she transfers her and the choir of Trojan captives to this enchanted castle, not subject to the laws of time. There the marriage of Faust and Helen takes place.

The true meaning of the whole theme of Helen is revealed in the finale of the action, in the episode with Euphorion. Least of all should - following the example of most commentators - consider this episode as an interlude in honor of Byron, who died in 1824 in the Greek town of Missolungi, independent of the course of the tragedy, although the physical and spiritual appearance of Euphorion took on the features of a poet so dear to old Goethe, and the chorus crying for to the young hero, and turns, by the author’s own admission, “into the mouthpiece of the ideas of modernity.”

But neither this rapprochement with Byron, nor even the definition of Euphorion given by Goethe himself (“the personification of poetry, not bound by time, place, or person”) explain the episode with Euphorion as a certain stage in the development of the hero. But Euphorion is, first of all, the destroyer of Faust’s short-lived happiness.

In communication with Elena, Faust ceases to yearn for the infinite. He could now “exalt the moment” if his happiness were not only a false dream allowed by Persephone. This dream is interrupted by Euphorion. The son of Faust, he inherited from his father his restless spirit, his titanic impulses. This makes him different from the shadows around him. As a creature alien to timeless peace, he is also subject to the law of death. The death of Euphorion, who dared to leave his father’s castle against his parents’ will, restores the laws of time and decay in this enchanted kingdom, and they instantly dispel the false spell. "Helen embraces Faust, the physical disappears."

Accept me, O Persephone, with the boy! -

tragic bacchanalia of the choir. Phorkiada rises up on the proscenium, leaves the buskins and again turns into Mephistopheles.

This is the plot scheme of the action. The philosophical meaning that the poet puts into this dramatic episode boils down to the following: you can hide from time by enjoying the beauty once created, but such a “stay in the aesthetic” can only be passive, contemplative. An artist who creates art himself is always a fighter among the fighters of his time (like Byron, whom Goethe thought of when developing this scene). Faust’s active spirit, incapable of inactive contemplation, could not remain in the closed aesthetic sphere.

This is how one prepares new stage the formation of the hero, which receives its development already in the fourth and fifth acts.

Fourth act. Faust participates in the internecine war of two rival emperors thanks to the fact that Mephistopheles, at the decisive moment, introduces “models from the armory” into battle.

A whole arsenal of armor

I took them down from their pedestals in the halls.

Dried snail shells

Having put on little devils,

A relic of the Middle Ages

Now I'm taking it to the parade.

What a poignant symbol of outdated historical forces!

The victory of the “legitimate emperor” only leads to the restoration of the former state routine (as after the victory over Napoleon). Dissatisfied Faust leaves the public service, having received as a reward a piece of land, which he plans to manage according to his own understanding.

Mephistopheles diligently helps him. He performs a grandiose “negative” job of destroying the edifice of feudalism and establishing the inhumane “power of the pure”. To do this, he builds a powerful merchant fleet and entangles the whole world in a network of trade relations; It costs him nothing to put an end to patriarchal life with autocratic ruthlessness by settling, moreover, physically exterminating the helpless old people, named by Goethe after the names of the mythological couple - Philemon and Baucis. In a word, he appears here, in the fifth act, as the embodiment of emerging capitalism, its merciless predation and enterprise. Faust does not sympathize with the cruel deeds carried out by the servants of Mephistopheles who are quick to kill, although he himself partly shares his way of thinking. No wonder he exclaimed in a conversation with Mephistopheles back in the fourth act;

Glory is not the point. My wishes -

Power, property, dominance.

My aspiration is business, work.

However, this life in the name of enrichment is not to the heart of the humanist Faust, who is involved in the rapid cycle of capitalist development. Faust believes that he approached the final goal of his persistent search only at that moment when, having lost his sight, he saw the future of free humanity all the more clearly. Now he is partly a “bourgeois” of the Saint-Simon “industrial system”, where the “bourgeois”, as is known, is something of a confidant of the whole society. His power over people (again in the spirit of the great utopian) differs sharply from traditional power. In his hands it was transformed into power over things, into control of production processes. Faust has come a long way, passing through the corpse of Gretchen, and through the ashes of the peaceful hut of Philemon and Baucis, the charred ruins of an anachronistic patriarchal life, and through a series of the sweetest illusions that turned into the bitterest disappointments. All this is left behind. He sees before him not destruction, but future creation, which he now thinks to begin;

This is the thought to which I am completely devoted,

The result of everything that the mind has accumulated:

Only those who have experienced the battle for life

He deserves life and freedom.

That's right, every day, every year,

Working, struggling, joking with danger,

Let the husband, the elder and the child live.

A free people in a free land

I would like to see you on days like this.

Then I could exclaim: “A moment!

Oh, how wonderful you are, wait!

The traces of my struggles are embodied,

And they will never be erased."

And, anticipating this triumph,

I am experiencing the highest moment right now.

This brilliant dying monologue of the newfound path takes us back to the scene on the night before Easter from the first part of the tragedy, when Faust, touched by the people's jubilation, refuses to drink the cup of poison. And here, before his death, Faust is overcome by the same feeling of unity with the people, but no longer vague, but completely clear. Now he knows that the only sought form of this unity is collective work on a common task that is equally necessary for everyone.

Even though this task is immeasurably great and requires immeasurable effort, every moment of this meaningful work, consecrated with a great goal, is worthy of exaltation. Faust pronounces the fatal word. Mephistopheles has the right to consider it a refusal of further striving for an endless goal. He has the right to interrupt Faust's life according to their ancient agreement. Faust falls. But in essence he is not defeated, because his rapture was not instantly purchased at the price of abandoning the endless improvement of humanity and man. The present and the future here merge in some higher unity; Faust's "two souls", the contemplative and the active, are reunited. "In the beginning there was a thing." It was this that led Faust to the knowledge of the highest goal of human development. The craving for negation, which Faust shared with Mephistopheles, finally finds the necessary counterbalance in a positive social ideal. That is why Faust is still awarded the apotheosis with which Goethe ends his tragedy, dressing him in the magnificent splendor of traditional church symbolism.

The theme of Margarita is also woven into the monumental finale of the tragedy. But now the image of “one of the sinners, formerly called Gretchen,” is already merging with the image of the Virgin Mary, here understood as the “eternally feminine,” as a symbol of birth and death, as the beginning that renews humanity and transmits its best aspirations and dreams from generation to generation , from generation to generation. Mothers are the builders of future human happiness.

But why was Faustus made blind at the moment of his supreme insight? It is unlikely that anyone will consider this circumstance an empty coincidence.

But because Goethe was the greatest realist and did not want to convince anyone that the grandiose vision of Faust somewhere on earth had already become a reality. What is revealed to Faust's blind eyes is not the present, it is the future. Faust sees the inevitable path of development of the reality around him. But this vision of the future does not lie on the surface, it is perceived not sensually - with the eyes, but with a clairvoyant mind. Lemurs swarm in front of Faust, symbolizing those “braking forces of history... which do not allow the world to get to its goal as quickly as it thinks and hopes,” as Goethe once put it. These “demons of inhibition” do not drain the swamps, but dig the grave of Faust. But free people will work in this field, this swamp will be drained, this sea of ​​historical “evil” will be pushed back by a dam. This is the indestructible truth of Faust's insight, the indestructible truth of his path, the truth of Goethe's world-historical drama about the future social fate of humanity.

Mephistopheles, who relied on the “finitude” of Faust’s life, is put to shame, because Faust, according to Goethe, manages to live the life of all humanity, including future generations. And one has to wonder how Goethe managed to carry out the idea of ​​“Faust” in such purity and clarity through his life full of compromises and equally compromising creativity.

Most bourgeois literary critics did not like to delve into the final meaning of the “Faustian idea” and often even polemicized against it. Thus, the famous German philologist Friedrich Gundolf believed that the denouement of Faust was very un-Goethean elementary, and Hermann Türk tried to put into the ending of the tragedy a meaning that was directly opposite to the great poet’s intention. According to his concept, Faust in the fifth act simply falls into childhood, loses - along with the decline of physical and spiritual strength - “his ability as a superman” to rise above historical reality and strive for the “infinite”; Faust is satisfied with “earthly goals”, “politics” (the Türk always pronounces this word with contempt) and in fact finds himself defeated. But either God or Goethe condescendingly takes into account the hero’s former zeal and his senile insanity, and therefore Faust is still awarded apotheosis. Unfortunately, this theory also created an extraordinary sensation in some scientific circles, which, however, is not surprising: after all, it dissected Goethe for reactionary propaganda.

Another thing is that the idea of ​​"Faust", for all its ambiguity, in places

is expressed by the poet in a deliberately obscured form (especially in the scenes “Dream on Walpurgis Night”, “Classical Walpurgis Night” and in the final scene of apotheosis). The conclusions to which, having submitted to the logic of his creation, Goethe - “a rebellious, mocking ... genius” - came to were so crushingly radical that they could not help but confuse the “philistine” in him. And therefore he decided to express them only in a low voice, in hints. With the sarcastic smile of Mephistopheles, he presented to the “good Germans” his outwardly reliable, in fact explosive ideas. Such abstract allegory of thought could not but cause noticeable artistic damage to his tragedy, while simultaneously reducing its social significance. Thus, even here, in the work where Goethe triumphs his greatest victory over “German squalor,” the effect of this squalor appears from time to time.

Conclusion

"Faust" is a poetic and at the same time philosophical encyclopedia of the spiritual culture of a remarkable period of time - the eve of the first bourgeois French revolution and, further, the era of the revolution and the Napoleonic wars. This allowed some commentators to compare Goethe's dramatic poem with Hegel's philosophical system, which represents a kind of result of approximately the same historical period.

But the essence of these two generalizations of the experience of a single historical era is deeply different. Hegel saw the meaning of his time primarily in summing up the “final result” of world history. Thus, in his system, the voice of the cowardly German burghers merged with the voice of world reaction, demanding the curbing of the masses in their uncontrollable impulse towards complete emancipation. This tendency, the very spirit of such a philosophy of the result, is deeply alien to the “Faustian idea,” Goethe’s philosophy of the found path.

The great optimism inherent in Faust, Goethe’s boundless faith in a better future for humanity - this is what makes the great German poet especially dear to all those who are building a new, democratic Germany. And this same deep, life-affirming humanism makes the “greatest German” so close to us, Soviet people.

Bibliography:
1. Foreign history literature of the 19th century century / Ed. ON THE. Solovyova. – M., 2000
2. Foreign literature of the 20th century. Textbook / Ed. L.G. Andreeva. – M., 1999
3. Yakusheva G.V. Faust and Mephistopheles. – M., 1998
4. Kholodkovsky N.A. I.V. Goethe. – Chelyabinsk, 1996

“Faust” is a work that declared its greatness after the death of the author and has not subsided since then. The phrase “Goethe - Faust” is so well known that even a person who is not interested in literature has heard about it, perhaps without even knowing who wrote whom - either Goethe’s Faust, or Goethe’s Faust. However, philosophical drama is not only the writer’s invaluable heritage, but also one of the brightest phenomena of the Enlightenment.

“Faust” not only gives the reader a fascinating plot, mysticism, and mystery, but also raises the most important philosophical questions. Goethe wrote this work over sixty years of his life, and the play was published after the writer’s death. The history of the creation of the work is interesting not only because of the long period of its writing. The name of the tragedy itself opaquely hints at the physician Johann Faust, who lived in the 16th century, who, due to his merits, acquired envious people. The doctor was credited with supernatural abilities, supposedly he could even resurrect people from the dead. The author changes the plot, supplements the play with characters and events and, as if on a red carpet, solemnly enters the history of world art.

The essence of the work

The drama opens with a dedication, followed by two prologues and two parts. Selling your soul to the devil is a plot for all times; in addition, a journey through time awaits the curious reader.

In the theatrical prologue, a dispute begins between the director, actor and poet, and each of them, in fact, has their own truth. The director tries to explain to the creator that there is no point in creating a great work, since most viewers are not able to appreciate it, to which the poet stubbornly and indignantly responds with disagreement - he believes that for creative person What matters first is not the taste of the crowd, but the idea of ​​creativity itself.

Turning the page, we see that Goethe sent us to heaven, where a new dispute ensues, only this time between the devil Mephistopheles and God. According to the representative of darkness, man is not worthy of any praise, and God allows him to test the strength of his beloved creation in the person of the hardworking Faust in order to prove the opposite.

The next two parts are Mephistopheles’ attempt to win the argument, namely, the devil’s temptations will come into play one after another: alcohol and fun, youth and love, wealth and power. Any desire without any obstacles, until Faustus finds what exactly is worthy of life and happiness and is equivalent to the soul that the devil usually takes for his services.

Genre

Goethe himself called his work a tragedy, and literary critics called it a dramatic poem, which is also difficult to argue, because the depth of the images and the power of the lyricism of Faust are extraordinary. high level. The genre nature of the book also leans towards the play, although only individual episodes can be staged. The drama also contains an epic beginning, lyrical and tragic motives, so it is difficult to attribute it to a specific genre, but it would not be wrong to say that great work Goethe – philosophical tragedy, a poem and a play rolled into one.

The main characters and their characteristics

1. Faust is the main character of Goethe's tragedy, an outstanding scientist and doctor who learned many of the mysteries of the sciences, but was still disillusioned with life. He is not satisfied with the fragmentary and incomplete information that he has, and it seems to him that nothing will help him come to the knowledge of the highest meaning of existence. The desperate character even thought about suicide. He enters into an agreement with a messenger of dark forces in order to find happiness - something for which life is truly worth living. First of all, he is driven by a thirst for knowledge and freedom of spirit, so he becomes a difficult task for the devil.
2. “A piece of power that always wanted evil and did only good”- a rather contradictory image of the devil Mephistopheles. The focus of evil forces, the messenger of hell, the genius of temptation and the antipode of Faust. The character believes that “everything that exists is worthy of destruction,” because he knows how to manipulate the best of divine creation through his many vulnerabilities, and everything seems to indicate how negatively the reader should feel about the devil, but damn it! The hero evokes sympathy even from God, let alone the reading public. Goethe creates not just Satan, but a witty, caustic, insightful and cynical trickster from whom it is so difficult to take your eyes off.
3. From characters You can also highlight Margarita (Gretchen) separately. A young, modest, commoner who believes in God, beloved of Faust. An earthly simple girl who paid to save her soul with her own life. The main character falls in love with Margarita, but she is not the meaning of his life.

Themes

A work containing an agreement hardworking man and the devil, in other words, a deal with the devil, gives the reader not only an exciting, adventure-filled plot, but also relevant topics for thought. Mephistopheles tests the main character, giving him a completely different life, and now fun, love and wealth await the “bookworm” Faust. In exchange for earthly bliss, he gives Mephistopheles his soul, which after death must go to hell.

1. Most important topic works - the eternal confrontation between good and evil, where the side of evil, Mephistopheles, tries to seduce the good and desperate Faust.
2. After the dedication, the theme of creativity lurked in the theatrical prologue. The position of each of the disputants can be understood, because the director thinks about the taste of the public who pays money, the actor thinks about the most profitable role to please the crowd, and the poet thinks about creativity in general. It is not difficult to guess how Goethe understands art and on whose side he stands.
3. “Faust” is such a multifaceted work that here we will even find the theme of selfishness, which is not striking, but when detected, explains why the character was not satisfied with knowledge. The hero was enlightened only for himself, and did not help the people, so his information accumulated over the years was useless. From this follows the theme of the relativity of any knowledge - the fact that they are unproductive without application, resolves the question of why knowledge of the sciences did not lead Faust to the meaning of life.
4. Easily passing through the seduction of wine and fun, Faust has no idea that the next test will be much more difficult, because he will have to indulge in an unearthly feeling. Meeting young Margarita on the pages of the work and seeing Faust’s crazy passion for her, we look at the theme of love. The girl attracts the main character with her purity and impeccable sense of truth, in addition, she guesses about the nature of Mephistopheles. The characters' love leads to misfortune, and in prison Gretchen repents for her sins. The next meeting of lovers is expected only in heaven, but in the arms of Margarita, Faust did not ask to wait a moment, otherwise the work would have ended without the second part.
5. Taking a closer look at Faust's beloved, we note that young Gretchen evokes sympathy among readers, but she is guilty of the death of her mother, who did not wake up after taking a sleeping potion. Also, due to Margarita’s fault, her brother Valentin and an illegitimate child from Faust also die, for which the girl ends up in prison. She suffers from the sins she has committed. Faust invites her to escape, but the captive asks him to leave, surrendering completely to her torment and repentance. Thus, another theme arises in the tragedy - the theme of moral choice. Gretchen chose death and God's judgment over escaping with the devil, and thereby saved her soul.
6. Goethe's great legacy also contains philosophical polemical moments. In the second part, we will again look into Faust's office, where the diligent Wagner is working on an experiment, creating a person artificially. The very image of the Homunculus is unique, hiding the answer to his life and search. He yearns for a real existence in the real world, although he knows what Faust cannot yet realize. Goethe's plan to add such an ambiguous character as the Homunculus to the play is revealed in the representation of entelechy, the spirit, as it enters life before any experience.

Problems

So, Faust gets a second chance to spend his life, no longer sitting in his office. It’s unthinkable, but any desire can be instantly fulfilled; the hero is surrounded by temptations of the devil that are quite difficult for an ordinary person to resist. Is it possible to remain yourself when everything is subordinated to your will - the main intrigue of such a situation. The problem of the work lies precisely in the answer to the question: is it really possible to maintain a position of virtue when everything you desire comes true? Goethe sets Faust as an example for us, because the character does not allow Mephistopheles to completely master his mind, but still seeks the meaning of life, something for which a moment can really wait. A good doctor who strives for the truth not only does not turn into a part of the evil demon, his tempter, but also does not lose his most positive qualities.

1. The problem of finding the meaning of life is also relevant in Goethe’s work. It is precisely because of the seeming absence of truth that Faust thinks about suicide, because his works and achievements did not bring him satisfaction. However, going through with Mephistopheles everything that could become the goal of a person’s life, the hero still learns the truth. And since the work relates to, the main character’s view of the world coincides with the worldview of this era.
2. If you look closely at the main character, you will notice that the tragedy at first does not let him out of his own office, and he himself does not particularly try to leave it. This important detail hides the problem of cowardice. While studying science, Faust, as if afraid of life itself, hid from it behind books. Therefore, the appearance of Mephistopheles is important not only for the dispute between God and Satan, but also for the subject himself. The devil takes a talented doctor out into the street, immerses him in the real world, full of mysteries and adventures, so the character stops hiding in the pages of textbooks and lives again, for real.
3. The work also presents readers with a negative image of the people. Mephistopheles, even in the “Prologue in Heaven,” says that God’s creation does not value reason and behaves like cattle, so he is disgusted with people. The Lord cites Faust as an opposite argument, but the reader will still encounter the problem of the ignorance of the crowd in the tavern where students gather. Mephistopheles expects the character to succumb to the fun, but he, on the contrary, wants to leave as soon as possible.
4. The play brings to light quite controversial characters, and Valentin, Margarita's brother, is also an excellent example. He stands up for the honor of his sister when he gets into a fight with her “suitors” and soon dies from Faust’s sword. The work reveals the problem of honor and dishonor using the example of Valentin and his sister. A worthy deed He commands respect from his brother, but this is rather ambiguous: after all, when he dies, he curses Gretchen, thus betraying her to universal shame.

The meaning of the work

After long adventures together with Mephistopheles, Faust finally finds the meaning of existence, imagining a prosperous country and a free people. As soon as the hero understands that the truth lies in constant work and the ability to live for the sake of others, he utters the cherished words “In a moment! Oh, how wonderful you are, wait a minute" and dies . After Faust's death, angels saved his soul from evil forces, rewarding him with an insatiable desire to be enlightened and resistance to the temptations of the demon in order to achieve his goal. The idea of ​​the work is hidden not only in the direction of the protagonist’s soul to heaven after an agreement with Mephistopheles, but also in Faust’s remark: “Only he is worthy of life and freedom who goes to battle for them every day.” Goethe emphasizes his idea by the fact that thanks to overcoming obstacles for the benefit of the people and Faust’s self-development, the messenger of hell loses the argument.

What does it teach?

Goethe not only reflects the ideals of the Enlightenment era in his work, but also inspires us to think about the high destiny of man. Faust gives to the public useful lesson: a constant pursuit of truth, knowledge of science and a desire to help people save the soul from hell even after a deal with the devil. In the real world, there is no guarantee that Mephistopheles will give us plenty of fun before we realize the great meaning of existence, so the attentive reader should mentally shake Faust’s hand, praising him for his perseverance and thanking him for such a high-quality hint.

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Throughout the entire work, Faust went through an amazing journey, full of disappointments, pain, as well as joy and unexpected discoveries. This man sold his soul to the devil in order to understand the foundations of the universe. The ordinary, everyday knowledge that almost everyone has is not enough for him. He thirsts for more, strives to reveal secrets, receive new revelations. Faust learned to value knowledge. How similar this is to many representatives of humanity who want to know secrets, reveal them and are ready to give up even what is dear for it. The image of Faust is contradictory at the very beginning - he is either inspired, then he is tormented by doubts and later decides to commit suicide, thinking that life was in vain. Faust is overcome by completely different, even opposing feelings and emotions. Such a period goes through someone who understands that the surrounding reality is not the limit, there are no boundaries in it, which means that you need to take flight, dive into the depths of the unknown. Faust personifies constant movement, constant work, through all this you can understand not only the world around you, but also yourself. Faust was obsessed with knowing the truth. Many are looking for it, sometimes subconsciously, but still looking for it. It doesn’t matter what times these are - Faustian or modern, inner essence strives to free himself from lies, to gain truth and knowledge. He devoted his life to research, but realized that this would not yield anything, would not lead to the truth, since it does not consist of facts, calculations and evidence. That is why Faust decided to take such a risky act - to sell his soul to the devil. Goethe's hero is ready to pay any price, he suffers, experiences ups and downs - he is a strong and strong-willed person who, no matter what, goes to what his soul desires. But to achieve something, just inspiration and dreams are not enough, because you will have to go through a desperate path of trials and difficulties. The positive quality of this character is the desire to be free and happy, as well as to help other people achieve this. The image of Faust is inextricably linked with the theme of the meaning of life, so watching the hero, you begin to think about your own life, about its meaning and significance, is there something valuable in it that Faust saw in his? Is it possible to also surrender to dreams, the pursuit of something new and undiscovered? Faust lived carelessly, satisfying his desires, but when he had the opportunity to build a dam, he realized that he was born for this work, this is his real purpose and meaning of life. Likewise, every person has a gift that needs to be unearthed, revealed, so that it becomes a step, and then the basis for a new life. You can also learn from this hero to appreciate everything that happened in life, not to regret it, but to accept everything , for granted, to find real happiness in this. It is especially noteworthy that the name Faust translated from Latin means happy and fortunate. The life Faust lived was bright, it was not in vain for the hero himself. Of course, there is a possibility that after all the searching you will be left without the desired answers, but such a life is better than a world of illusions. But one thing distinguishes Faust from other people. He found what he was looking for, managed to achieve unity with nature, and realized that he was an integral part of it. At the end of his life, the hero is completely satisfied - “Stop a moment, you are wonderful!” Who can now boast of such an achievement? Such awareness, internal completeness and self-sufficiency? Alas, few. He showed that behind the ordinary, gray life, earthly goals and dreams, there is something that can be achieved and it is achievable, the main thing is to go towards it.

Goethe traveled a lot in his life. He visited Switzerland three times: this “paradise on earth” was repeatedly sung by Goethe’s time. Goethe also traveled to the cities of Germany, where he encountered an amazing phenomenon - puppet fair performances, in which the main characters were a certain Faust - a doctor and a warlock and the devil Mephistopheles. It is precisely with the national tradition that for Goethe the principles formulated by Aristotle lose their significance as eternal norms.

Italy was an indelible impression for Goethe. It became the starting point that defined a new – classical direction in Goethe’s work. But she enriched the poet with impressions that had already prepared him for going beyond the framework of the “Weimar classicism” system.

In Venice, Goethe became acquainted with the theater of masks. It seems to me that it was the image of this theater of masks that Goethe reproduced in Faust, or rather in Walpurgis Night in the first part and in the masquerade ball at the emperor’s court in the 2nd part. In addition, in the second part of the work, the place of all the action is some kind of classically ancient Italian landscapes, and in many scenes Goethe, stylizing, begins to express himself in the rhythm of the poems of ancient authors. And that's not to mention the plot...

As noted earlier, travels in Germany led Goethe to the concept of Faust. The theater presented the story of Doctor Faustus and Mephistopheles as a cheerful, ironically satirical comedy. But this is theater, and it always reflects the thoughts, thoughts, and the very lifestyle of the people. And Goethe turned to written sources - chronicles and legends. It was possible to learn little from the chronicles, but the legend told that a boy was once born to quite prosperous parents, but from the most early years he showed a daring disposition. When he grew up, his parents and uncle advised him to study at the Faculty of Theology. But young Faust “left this godly occupation” and studied medicine, as well as, incidentally, “the interpretation of Chaldean ... and Greek signs and writings.” Soon he became a doctor, and a very good one at that. But his interest in magic led him to summon the spirit and make a pact with it... This was a purely religious assessment of the situation; here Faust and Mephistopheles were finally and irrevocably condemned, and all those who listened were warned and taught - instructed in a God-fearing life. Mephistopheles deceives Faust throughout the entire legend, and the island conflict could be formulated as follows: “the conflict between good and evil”, without further discussion of what is good and what is evil... Mephistopheles, here representing the side of evil, offered knowledge and with it power, and Faust was only required to renounce Christianity. Mephistopheles was just one of the demons, but not special.

Goethe translated this legend into contemporary soil. In Faust, a variety of elements were organically merged - the beginning of drama, lyricism and epic. That is why many researchers call this work a dramatic poem. “Faust” includes elements that are different in their artistic nature. It contains real-life scenes, for example, a description of a spring folk festival on a day off; lyrical dates of Faust and Margarita; tragic - Gretchen in prison or the moment when Faust almost committed suicide; fantastic. But Goethe's fiction is ultimately always connected with reality, and real images are often symbolic in nature.

The idea of ​​the tragedy of Faust arose from Goethe quite early. Initially, he created two tragedies - the “tragedy of knowledge” and the “tragedy of love.” However, both of them remained unsolvable. The general tone of this “proto-Faust” is gloomy, which is actually not surprising, since Goethe managed to completely preserve the flavor of the medieval legend, at least in the first part. In "proto-Faust" scenes written in verse alternate with prose ones. Here Faust’s personality combined titanism, the spirit of protest, and the impulse towards the infinite.

On April 13, 1806, Goethe wrote in his diary: “I finished the first part of Faust.” It is in the first part that Goethe outlines the characters of his two main characters - Faust and Mephistopheles; in the second part, Goethe pays more attention to the surrounding world and social order, as well as the relationship between ideal and reality.

In form it is a drama for reading, in genre it is a philosophical poem. There are no direct author's words, everything is given to the characters: monologues, dialogues, chaotic parts. It has a rather complex, but at the same time transparent composition. It begins with two prologues: 1. prologue in the theater (why does theater exist in particular, art in general - the director: spectators pay for tickets, act: words, fame, satisfaction of vanity, the author's answer - Goethe: art exists to reveal to people the untested , an unknown way of self-expression creative personality, way of knowing). 2. prologue in heaven, serves as an introduction that pushes towards the plot. The messenger of hell, Mephistopheles, appears before God; he declares that God made a mistake by creating people, that they are evil, treacherous and need to be gotten rid of. A dispute arises between God and Mephistopheles, which results in an experiment. They conclude an agreement: to test people; the old scientist Faust is chosen as a test subject. If Mephistopheles proves that man is insignificant and treacherous, then God will destroy humanity. Faust becomes an experimental creature, but he is given responsibility for all people in the world. The prologue is followed by part 1 (a person’s personal life), part 2 (a person and society) and an epilogue.

1 part: The division is into episodes and scenes. The beginning is the office of Faust, an 80-year-old man who has lived alone almost his entire life. His life was reduced to knowledge captured in books, abstract knowledge. He knew practically nothing about the world outside the office. Faust is obsessed with the idea of ​​knowledge, he is close to death, he must admit that his life was lived in vain. Because of this fear, he turns to the spirits of the elements; they appear, but no one can answer his questions. He becomes more scared and unbearable. Under the influence of fear, Faust leaves the office. He has nothing in common with the people who live next to him. Goethe paints spring, a holiday, but no one cares about Faust. Then a memory from his adolescence comes to him. Faust's father was a doctor, and when his son was 14 years old, a terrible epidemic began. The elder Faust tried to save people, prescribed medicines, but even more people died from them. His intervention is not only useless, but also disastrous. After this, Faust the son goes into seclusion.

In order not to run into people, Faust goes out into the field. Where the poodle pesters him. The owner returns home and the poodle slips towards him. When midnight strikes, the poodle turns into Mephistopheles. He tries to agree with Faust that he will fulfill all his wishes and make him young if Faust signs an agreement with one condition: Faust will live until then. Until he says, “You are wonderful for a moment, stop, wait!” Faust is not subject to the same temptations that Mephistopheles experiences him with. Faust is seduced by the image of eternal femininity and signs an agreement with Mephistopheles. Faust gets the opportunity to live a second life, a fundamentally different one. But he can be above people, watch them. He returns to the office, but only to leave forever. His student Wagner settled in his house. After concluding the agreement, they go to the city, to the tavern, where students gather. Seduced by wine and fun, Faust does not give in (the song about the flea is an denunciation of favoritism). Then they go to the Witch’s kitchen, where the cauldron is boiling, an owl and a cat are watching. Faust drinks this potion and his youth returns to him. He pays attention to city holidays, he meets Margarita (Gretchen). She is an unhappy person, lives in the suburbs, pretty, modest, well-mannered, pious, caring, she loves children very much. She has a younger sister. When a rich young man approaches her, compliments her, and wants to see her off, she tries to deflect, saying that she is not a beauty and she becomes even more desirable to Faust. Mephistopheles advises giving an expensive gift (a box with stones), but the mother saw it first and she ordered her daughter to take it to church. The second time, the casket was given not to Margarita, but to the neighbor Martha, who becomes Faust’s accomplice and gives the jewelry to Gretchen when her mother was away. The donor becomes mysterious and interesting to her, she agrees to an overnight date with him. The girl is virtuous, as evidenced by the song “The Ballad of the Ful King” that she sang. Love, as Goethe shows it, is a test for a woman, and it is also destructive. Margarita unrequitedly loves Faust and becomes criminal. She has 3 crimes on her conscience (she dooms herself to complete loneliness) - she pours sleeping pills into her mother, one unfortunate day her mother does not wake up from an overdose of sleeping pills, the duel between Valentin and Faust, Valentin turns out to be doomed, he is struck down by the hand of Faust, Margarita turns out to be the cause of her brother’s death, Margarita drowns Faust's baby daughter in a swamp (chthonic environment). Faust abandons her, he is interested in her only while he is pursuing her. Faust forgets about her, he does not feel obligations to her, does not remember her fate. Left alone, Margarita takes steps that lead her to repentance and forgiveness. Her murder becomes known, and she is put in prison; as the mother of a child killer, her head must be cut off.

At the end of part 1 appears important episode"Walpurgis Night". At the height of the fun, the ghost of Margarita appears before Faust, and he demands to be taken to her. Mephistopheles carries out and transfers Faust to Margarita's dungeon; he is overwhelmed by remorse and wants to save his beloved. But Margarita refuses, she does not want to follow Faust, since Mephistopheles is with him. She remains in prison, the night is already ending, and the executioner must come first light. Mephistopheles persuades Faust to run away and then obeys. At this time, a voice from heaven “Saved” is heard. Margarita takes full responsibility and pays for her soul with her life. When Faust dies, among the righteous souls sent to meet his soul will be the soul of Margarita.

Physical, cosmological aspect, aspect associated with the category “ideal”. When Faust utters this phrase, the moment stops, time is torn, the axis of the earth shifts, the movement of the Sun changes, a great cosmic catastrophe has occurred, Faust does not notice this trap. To stop a moment means to achieve the absolute, to know the ideal. And the nature of the ideal lies in this. That it cannot be realized, one can only strive for it. Thus, Mephistopheles violates the law of the universe (“philosophical trap”). Love turns out to be far from simple. What happens between Faust and Margarita is harsh and cruel.

Image system

Faust image is contradictory at the very beginning - sometimes he is inspired, then he is tormented by doubts and later decides to commit suicide, thinking that his life was in vain. Faust is overcome by completely different, even opposing feelings and emotions. Such a period goes through someone who understands that the surrounding reality is not the limit, there are no boundaries in it, which means that you need to take flight, dive into the depths of the unknown. Faust personifies constant movement, constant work, through all this you can understand not only the world around you, but also yourself.

Faust was obsessed with knowing the truth. Many are looking for it, sometimes subconsciously, but still looking for it. It doesn’t matter what times it is - Faustian or modern, the inner essence strives to free itself from lies, to receive truth and knowledge. He devoted his life to research, but realized that this would not yield anything, would not lead to the truth, since it does not consist of facts, calculations and evidence. That is why Faust decided to take such a risky act - to sell his soul to the devil.

Goethe's hero is ready to pay any price, he suffers, experiences ups and downs - he is a strong and strong-willed person who, no matter what, goes towards what his soul desires. But to achieve anything, just inspiration and dreams are not enough, because you will have to go through a desperate path of trials and difficulties.

The positive quality of this character is the desire to be free and happy, and also to help other people achieve this. The image of Faust is inextricably linked with the theme of the meaning of life, so watching the hero, you begin to think about your own life, about its meaning and significance, is there something valuable in it that Faust saw in his? Is it possible to also surrender to dreams, the pursuit of something new and undiscovered? Faust lived carelessly, satisfying his desires, but when he had the opportunity to build a dam, he realized that he was born for this work, this is his real purpose and meaning of life. Likewise, every person has a gift that needs to be unearthed, revealed, so that it becomes a step, and then the basis for a new life.

Image Mephistopheles in Faust is quite complex - along with the fact that it is a spirit of negation, a negative spirit, it is also at the same time a spirit that is a true creator. And in this era, as Goethe says, what we call light and are accustomed to consider Creation appeared. The universe is not some kind of closed unity, where the parts fit well together; the universe is initially imbued with the principle of development, the principle of creation, creativity. The one-sided world of Lucifer was corrected by introducing a luminous principle into it; the presence of light corrected the world of matter and the world of nature created by Lucifer. Lucifer's business would have ended in fiasco if the Trinity had not illuminated his activities and given them meaning. This activity inside matter, inside life is, as it were, illuminated by the light of three hypostases and, thus, Lucifer and his beginning, his messenger on earth Mephistopheles, constantly give movement to the action. At the same time, they want to create, create a kind of destruction, going into matter, going into darkness - and at the same time they create for the deity the opportunity to illuminate human activity and give it meaning. 9 This is the philosophical construction, the mythological concept that Goethe puts into Faust. He divides creative activity into two principles - on the one hand there is Faust, on the other there is Mephistopheles, who actually moves the action, he becomes the driving principle of Goethe's tragedy.

Faust sees for the first time Gretchen leaving the cathedral. The girl has just confessed, and we immediately understand that the most important feature of Goethe's heroine is her piety. She believes in God sincerely and with all her heart. The moral and religious are united for her, but at the same time it is impossible to find anything in Gretchen’s character that would in any way resemble hypocrisy. And at the same time, it is an absolutely worldly nature. Goethe's heroine is well aware of her class position, evidence of this is her first brief conversation with Faust. Morality and worship of God go hand in hand with the established order of things in the world. It is unthinkable for a girl to go beyond her class. Although Faust is not a nobleman, Gretchen accepts him as one, instantly realizing the difference between them13. This detail serves not only to faithfully convey the historical flavor, it is the essence of the character of Gretchen herself. Faust is delighted with the beauty of the girl, the physical attractiveness of the heroine is enough for him, and the first thing that overcomes him is simple lust. It does not occur to the educated hero that Gretchen is a person and that her attention must be earned. Faust wants to possess Gretchen, and Mephistopheles is infinitely glad that lust has finally awakened in Faust, that area of ​​the human psyche, which, in his opinion, is completely controlled by Mephistopheles himself. But in this situation, the devil finds himself in an unenviable position, because Faust wants to use him as a banal pimp, to force him to engage in one of the most despicable professions in the Middle Ages. Faust is inexorable, pimping, he tells Mephistopheles, is a devilish activity. The devil, of course, is humiliated, although he perfectly grasps the nature of Faust’s request. Everything goes according to his scenario, but it turns out that Mephistopheles has no power over the girl, because Margarita, who has just left the temple, is under the shadow of divine blessing. There. where the legislation of God is fully implemented, where creation is under the complete control of the divine mind, there is no room for the activity of demonic forces. And Mephistopheles indignantly states that Gretchen is an absolutely pure and innocent creature.

Martha- this is a complete contrast to Gretchen, she does not grieve at all about the death of her unlucky husband and, having learned that he did not leave her anything, quickly forgets him. In addition, Mephistopheles, with his rather gallant behavior, attracts her attention to himself. In order to confirm the death of the husband, according to customs and legal norms, a second witness is needed, and he appears - this is Faust. The whole scene is a kind of quartet, it is played by two couples - Gretchen and Faust, Mephistopheles and Martha. Mephistopheles poses as a red tape, trying to hit on Martha, and she is ready to marry him. The whole situation looks like a mixture of scenes - either Martha appears with Mephistopheles, or Gretchen with Faust. Gretchen falls in love with a handsome young gentleman. In the dating scene, Faust does not yet have complete love, for now it is only an erotic feeling, but in the next scene - in a forest cave - Faust's passion merges with the feeling of nature. Nature has an influence that elevates his senses.

Elena- the ideal embodiment of beauty transferred to tragedy from Greek mythology. The acquisition of E. marks the triumph of Faust in his search for the absolute ideal. The images of E. and Paris are evoked by Faust through magic, but the aesthetic ideal presented to him reveals new era in his existence. The belief in beauty, correlated with antiquity, inspired Goethe himself, who believed that, by instilling in people a sense of beauty, art would arouse in them the desire for freedom. E. in Goethe is the personification of the highest beauty, sought by the hero, who will have to go through stages of approaching it, corresponding to the evolution of the concept of beauty among the Greeks. Faust is presented with three stages of development of images of ancient fantasy. The lowest group consists of images of fantastic creatures (vultures, sphinxes, sirens). On the middle there are images of demigods, half-humans (centaurs), fantastic forest inhabitants (nymphs). At the third, highest stage, Faust meets the philosophers Thales and Anaxagoras, who are trying to understand the origin of the world. Only as a result of this journey is Faust prepared to meet E., symbolizing the highest beauty and spirituality. The third act of the second suit depicts the union of Faust and E., magically resurrected at the moment of her return after the defeat of Troy. In the scene “Before the Palace of Menelaus in Sparta,” E. recalls episodes of his past life, as they are described in the Iliad. The union of Faust and E. is a symbol of the combination of classical ancient and romantic medieval ideals, the union of beauty and intelligence. The fruit of this union is the boy Euphorion (in ancient myth this was the name of the son of E. and Achilles), combining the features of his parents: harmonious beauty and a restless spirit. According to Goethe, the modern poet who achieved such unity was Byron.

Homunculus- the image is unique, since only he alone manages to read Faust’s thoughts and see his dreams. Only he is capable of leading the natives of the European North, Faust and Mephistopheles, through Hellas, and in it he, born in a dark laboratory, feels at home. Unlike the devil, who knows about ancient Greece only by hearsay, and the Christian medieval interpretation, where the ideal of beauty, Helen, appears as a she-devil worthy of taking part in obscene madness on Blocksberg, the Homunculus knows everything about antiquity. knows Elena's pedigree. Greece is his native element.

The philosophical understanding of the image of the Homunculus as a symbol of human entelechy, a free spiritual essence, a monad endowed with the gift of anticipation, the ability to comprehend the world before any experience, entered German studies already in the 10s of the last century thanks to the works of G.V. Hertz 1. Actually, this interpretation was suggested by Goethe himself, as evidenced by Riemer’s entry dated March 30, 1833: “To my question, what did Goethe think when creating the Homunculus. Eckermann replied: Goethe wanted to represent entelechy, reason, spirit in this way. what it enters life before any experience: for the human spirit already reveals a higher talent; we have not learned everything, we bring a lot with us. Peace be upon him A. G. Astvatsaturov Spirit flying in a flask. The figure of Homunculus in the second part of Goethe's Faust opened up very early, he saw it, even before experience convinced him 2.” How the entelechy of the Homunculus was interpreted by Fritz Strich, finding the roots of Goethe's understanding of the entelechy monad in Plato and Plotinus. Giordano Bruno and Canta, and. of course, from Leibniz. Entelechy and monad are interchangeable concepts for Goethe. By monad Goethe meant

entelechy, manifested under certain conditions. Monad - limited

individuality entelechy.

There is no doubt that such an interpretation represents an ideological extract, to which, of course, the image of the Homunculus cannot be reduced; on the contrary, a comprehensive analysis will also contribute to the ideological deepening of this image, and if Goethe understands it as entelechy, then its connection with others becomes especially important for her figures of tragedy.

The homunculus is born after Faust's unsuccessful attempt to magically bring Helen and Paris back to life. After the explosion, which threw Faust to the ground, he was transferred by Mephistopheles to his office, to the one he hated. and exhausted, remains in oblivion. At this time, Wagner begins the decisive stage of his alchemical experiment, the goal of which is to create a person artificially. The theme of alchemy arises again in the tragedy.

12. The genre of fairy tales in any romantic literature (at least three authors of the student’s choice).

Romanticism(French romanticisme) - phenomenon European culture V XVIII-XIX centuries, representing a reaction to the Enlightenment and stimulated by it scientific and technical progress; ideological and artistic direction in European and American culture the end of the 18th century - the first half of the 19th century. It is characterized by an affirmation of the intrinsic value of the spiritual and creative life of the individual, the depiction of strong (often rebellious) passions and characters, spiritualized and healing nature. Since the further development of German romanticism is distinguished by an interest in fairy tales and mythological motives, which was especially clearly expressed in the works of the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm and Ernst Hoffmann, we will take a closer look at Heidelberg romanticism.

Heidelberg Romanticism(German: Heidelberger Romantik) - the second generation of German romantics. The main representatives are Achim von Arnim, Clemenzo Brentano, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Ernst Hoffmann. Writers turned to the idea of ​​“folk spirit” and showed increased interest in the national cultural and historical tradition. The idea of ​​national unity and the dissolution of individuality in the “people's body” dominates. The problem of overcoming the dualism of matter and spirit, nature and consciousness, feeling and mind is resolved in the artist’s appeal to the national past, to mythological forms of consciousness, to deep religious feeling. Representatives of the school turned to folklore as the “true language” of the people, contributing to their unification. Growth national identity associated primarily with the rejection of government reforms imposed by Napoleon in the territories he captured. Within the framework of the Heidelberg School, the first scientific direction in the study of folklore - a mythological school, which was based on the mythological ideas of Schelling and the Schlegel brothers.

The question of the relationship between literature and life is still controversial. It is hardly possible today to accept the metaphor of Stendhal, who likened literature to a mirror. However, it is also impossible to deny that a writer’s work is determined in a complex and sometimes unexpected way by the life around him. The history of romanticism as a literary movement is an excellent confirmation of this.

The era of romanticism is one of the most interesting and most eventful periods in human history. French revolution, the formidable campaigns of Napoleon, which redrew the map of Europe, the breaking of the old way of life and centuries-old human relationships - such was the time that the first romantics found.

However, the discrepancy between the ideals that the new reality put forward and the reality in which the romantics lived forced them to retreat into the world of subjective experiences and contrast the beautiful and imaginary with the prose of life. Hence - an irresistible, enticing interest in everything mysterious, unusual, enigmatic and mystical. Hence the appeal to a person’s personality, the desire to influence, first of all, his feelings, to capture the imagination. A literary fairy tale, along with the laws of the genre, which it cannot but follow, often borrows from folk tradition certain of its features in one or another set; This, in particular, explains the diversity of literary fairy tales. So, a literary fairy tale is a multidimensional phenomenon, on the one hand, preserving, thanks to the laws of the genre, continuity in relation to the folk tale, and on the other, subject to all sorts of influences, among which the most important are the influence of the historical era and the influence of the author's will.

Studying folklore, Propp noticed that in a fairy tale there are constant and variable quantities. The constants include the functions of the actors and their sequence. By function, Propp understands the action of a character in terms of his relationship to the course of action. In total, Propp identifies 31 possible functions in a fairy tale. Moreover, many functions are arranged in pairs (prohibition - violation, struggle - victory, pursuit - salvation, etc.). Also, the functions are logically combined according to the circles of actions of the characters in a fairy tale, i.e. In the fairy tale there are only seven characters: the hero, the saboteur, the sender, the donor, the helper, the princess, and the false hero.

Writer Brothers seen in oral works folk art its aesthetic models, sources of modern literature and its basis national character. Their literary tales are characterized by the combination of the magical, fantastic, ghostly and mystical with modern reality.

"German Retellings" of the Brothers Grimm, like “Children’s and Family Tales,” brought to life the vigorous activity of the collector in many countries. The concept of “fairy tale” was assigned to a folk tale, but at the same time it also meant a literary fairy tale. At the same time, attempts were made to determine the date of the literary fairy tale. The priority belongs to J. Grimm, who saw the difference between a literary fairy tale and a folk tale in the conscious authorship and in the humorous nature inherent in the first.

Division of fairy tales into genres. The collected works of the Brothers Grimm present fairy tales that belong to different genres:

Fairy tales(“Rapunzel”, “Three Snake Leaves”, “Mistress Blizzard”), which tell about various miracles, transformations, and spells.

Tales about animals (“The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats”, “The Town of Bremen and the Street Musicians”), where, as in fables, animals are given certain human character traits.

Everyday fairy tales (“Hansel and Gretel”, “The Clever Peasant’s Daughter”), stories that tell about various incidents from real life.

Hoffman was a romantic artist. The nature of the conflicts underlying his works, their problematics and system of images, the artistic vision of the world itself remain within the framework of romanticism. Just like the Jena people, at the heart of most of Hoffmann's works is the conflict between the artist and society. The original romantic antithesis of the artist and society is the basis of the writer’s worldview. Despite all his attempts to break out of its boundaries into the world of art, the hero remains surrounded by real, concrete historical reality. Neither a fairy tale nor art can bring him harmony into this real world, which ultimately subjugates them. Hence the constant tragic contradiction between the hero and his ideals, on the one hand, and reality, on the other. Hence the dualism from which Hoffmann’s heroes suffer, the dual worlds in his works, the insoluble conflict between the hero and the outside world in most of them, the characteristic two-dimensionality of the writer’s creative manner.

Hoffmann's fairy tales, such as “The Golden Pot” (Der goldne Topf), “Little Zaches” (Klein Zaches), “The Lord of the Fleas” (Meister Floh), etc., mark the further development of romantic self-awareness. The romantic flight of fantasy slowly but surely approaches the earth, to earthly problems. The idea of ​​universal harmony here is consistently destroyed by the recognition of the disharmony of everyday reality. Its depressing but undeniable stability, felt every hour in every detail, extinguishes hopes, gives rise to anxiety, and overwhelms with fear. The artist's eye is no longer able to grasp the comprehensive connection of things. Before his eyes, the world is splitting into two unmerged spheres. Hoffmann's famous “two worlds” comes from the fatally and finally realized opposition of ideal and reality, their practical incompatibility. What Tick only guessed about becomes an immutable truth for Hoffmann.

Boy's magic horn(Des Knaben Wunderhorn. 1806-1808) - a collection of folk songs published by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, which played no less important role in the history of German culture than famous fairy tales the Brothers Grimm and the collection of German legends and folk books carried out by Görres. Like all the folkloristic activities of the German romantics, the undertaking of Arnim and Brentano was not inspired by indisputable ideological premises; the flavor of nationalism (generated by anti-Napoleonic pathos) and the cult of patriarchy (opposed to the bourgeois way of life) are clearly felt in the collection. However, folklore turned out to be stronger than folklorists. “The Boy’s Magic Horn” is a true treasury of German folk art, unique both in volume and genre diversity. Along with tendentiously selected religious spiritual songs of the 16th-17th centuries. (among them are the psalms of Luther, the Catholic song of Jacob Balde and Friedrich Spee) the collection contains songs expressing the people’s love for their fatherland, soldiers’ songs and songs of social protest, which embody the centuries-old hatred of the common people for the oppressors: feudal lords and churchmen. Many songs are ballad in nature, their heroes are noble robbers like Robin Hood, defenders of the poor and champions of justice. Wonderful love ones folk songs, authentic in their artlessness and marked by the depth of feeling. Collections of folk songs began in the 18th century. (the most famous are the works of Herder and Burger in this area). The appeal of German poetry to emotional spontaneity and song melodicity, manifested in the works of Uhland, Mörike, Lenau, Kerner, Storm, is decisively predetermined by this collection.

Introduction

The figure of Faust first appeared in the German “folk book” of the 16th century. - a book created on the basis of folk tales and legends. And then the image of Faust became, like the mythological titan Prometheus, who gave people fire, one of those images that, once arising, appear in art again and again. In addition to Goethe, the image of Faust was addressed by: the English playwright Christopher Marlowe, the German enlighteners Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Maximilian Klinger, the English romantic poet George Gordon Byron and the Austrian Nikolaus Lenau, the great Pushkin, the German novelist Thomas Mann, etc.
As V. Zhirmunsky notes, "The symbolic form of philosophical mystery drama created by Goethe in Faust on the model of the medieval folk drama, is becoming widespread in European literatures romantic era. Byron's "Manfred" (1817) reproduces the original dramatic situation of "Faust" and is most directly connected with Goethe's tragedy... Byron's "Cain" (1821) retains the same symbolic interpretation of the plot... In France, Alfred gives a romantic interpretation of the image of "Faust" de Musset in the dramatic poem "The Cup and the Mouth". Who is Faust? What attracts writers, artists, composers from different times and peoples so much in this image? What is new about this image for Goethe’s era?

Genesis of the image of Faust

Faust is a historical figure, a medieval scientist who, according to legend, was also involved in magic, “witchcraft,” and astrology.
The first known literary adaptation of the tale of a man selling his soul to the devil is the 13th-century miracle. Parisian trouvere Rutbeuf "The Miracle of Théophile", dating back to an eastern legend, processed in the 10th century. in Latin verse by the German nun Hrosvita of Gendersheim, in French - in the poem of Gautier de Quency (12th century) and in dramatic form in the miracle of Trouvère Ruetbeuf. Based on the legend of Theophilus, other demonological legends became widespread. However, as V. Zhirmunsky notes, "demonological legends of this type, despite their popularity in medieval literature, cannot be considered direct sources of the legend of Faust, with the exception, perhaps, of individual motifs of the legend of Simon the Magician. They show only the general direction of thought and development of poetic images within the framework of the medieval church worldview.".
The heroes of these legends were often medieval scientists who tried to achieve an independent synthesis of philosophical wisdom with theological dogmas. Both aroused distrust, fear and condemnation among medieval people, being associated with the machinations of the devil. Almost simultaneously with the book about Faust, a folk book similar in content was published in England: “The famous history of Brother Bacon, containing the amazing deeds he accomplished during his lifetime, also about the circumstances of his death, together with the history of the life and death of two other sorcerers, Bungay and Vandermast.” . This book served as the source of Green's comedy "The History of Brother Bacon and Brother Bungay", written simultaneously with Marlowe's tragedy of Faust. During the Renaissance, the old belief acquired new features. At a time when science was still combined with mysticism, free-thinking with superstition, “black” magic with “natural” (“natural”) magic, when the experiment pursued pseudo-scientific goals: to make gold, to create the “elixir of life” or the “philosopher’s stone”, and the search for truth was intertwined with earthly goals: to have success, wealth, fame, in the superstitious ideas of people of the 16th century. scholars of this type usually received the reputation of sorcerers, and their universal knowledge and their studies were attributed, as before, to a “contract with the devil.” The same demonological legends were formed about them as about their predecessors, the medieval scientist-magicians. Many of these stories, which are traditional in nature and typical of the “warlock folklore,” were later transferred to the popular personality of Faust (see, , ,). The favorite hero of the era was the scientist Doctor Faustus, who sacrificed his soul in exchange for Mephistopheles’ promise to reveal to him the secrets of nature and show him heaven and hell. The first book was published in 1587 in Frankfurt am Main by the Lutheran cleric I. Spies. The source of the book, in addition to oral legends, was modern works on witchcraft and “secret” knowledge. The book also interweaves episodes associated at one time with various sorcerers (Simon the Magus, Albert the Great, etc.).
The first literary and dramatic treatment of the legend belongs to K. Marlowe, at the beginning of the 17th century. his tragedy is carried by traveling comedians to Germany, where it is transformed into a puppet comedy. The folk book underlies the lengthy work of G.R. Widmann on Faust (1598, Hamburg). And in 1674 Pfitzer published his adaptation of the folk book about Faust. This theme gained exceptional popularity in Germany in the 2nd half of the 18th century. among the writers of the period of “Storm and Drang” (Lessing, Müller, Klinger - the novel “The Life of Faust”, Goethe, Lenz). The so-called folk ballads about Faust date back to a later time.
The folk legend endowed Faust with a powerful thirst for knowledge, contempt for any “unshakable” authorities, and fearlessness of thought and deeds. Not afraid of the underworld, he enters into a deal with the devil for the sake of knowledge and the joys of earthly life. The courage of his mind allows him to boldly break with dependence on the prohibitions of the church in the name of knowledge of the secrets of nature and a full-blooded, active life. It was spiritual courage that made Faust a symbol of the tireless search for freer human thought. This is what attracts poets, composers, and artists to him again and again.
The title of the publication by I. Shpis indicates that the book was published “to serve as a terrifying and disgusting example and a sincere warning to all godless and impudent people.” The God-fearing Protestant Spies condemned Faust for atheism. But in the “people's book” itself there is also admiration for the scientist’s courage. For example, it contains the following words: “He took wings like an eagle, he wanted to comprehend all the depths of heaven and earth.”
In The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, written by Christopher Marlowe, Faustus is depicted as a titanic nature, a courageous seeker of new paths in science, rejecting the feudal world and its ideology.
M. Klinger wrote a novel about Faust, portraying him as a rebel against feudal orders and a defender of the oppressed peasants.
Goethe created a poem about the meaning of the existence of man and humanity, about the meaning and direction of history.

The image of Faust in Goethe's poem "Faust"

The hero of the poem is not just a warlock who cares about his own pleasures, he is a universal personality, a symbol of humanity seeking the truth and striving forward. Goethe brought the hero face to face not only with specific socio-historical circumstances, but also with all of history, with the Universe and the universe.
The audacity of this idea reveals the faith in the infinite possibilities of man, awakened by a turning point, and reveals the historical optimism inherent in the worldview of the enlighteners of the 18th century.
Goethe's Faust is an outstanding phenomenon of world culture and at the same time a deeply national work. National originality is already reflected in the very universality and philosophy of Goethe’s poetic concept. It manifests itself in the depiction of a hero tormented by the gap between dream and reality. Goethe wrote “Faust” all his life, putting into the poem everything that he himself lived, all his impressions, thoughts, knowledge.
In Strasbourg in the early 70s. 18th century Goethe created the first version of the great work - "Ur-Faust", which was imbued with the ideas of "Sturm and Drang".
Regarding this essay by N.S. Leites writes the following: "His hero is a young man who rejects scholastic knowledge and eager to meet life with all its joys and sorrows; Nature itself, the “Spirit of the Earth,” encourages him to do this. The center of “Ur-Faust” is the tragedy of natural feeling, similar to the one that Goethe spoke about in “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” The motifs of "Ur-Faust" were preserved in the first part of "Faust", the concept of which, however, was significantly enriched in the process of creation. The hero of the poem absorbed the features of the proud god-fighter Prometheus, the freedom-loving knight Goetz, and the “titan of feeling” Werther. The leading motive of “Faust” became the tireless quest of the hero (no longer a youth, as in “Ur-Faust,” but an old man), constant dissatisfaction with what has been achieved, and inescapable restlessness.”.
Goethe said about his hero: “The character of Faust at the level to which he was raised from folk tale The modern worldview is the character of a person who impatiently “struggles within the framework of earthly existence and considers higher knowledge, earthly goods and pleasures insufficient to satisfy his aspirations.” Faust himself admits:

... Two souls live in me,
And both are at odds with each other.
One, like the passion of love, ardent
And greedily clings to the ground entirely,
The other one is all for the clouds
I would have jumped out of my body.

Faust is driven by the desire to find a way of existence in which dream and reality, heavenly and earthly, soul and flesh will coincide and merge. It was eternal problem and for Goethe himself. A man by nature very earthly, Goethe could not be content with the life of the spirit, elevated above meager reality - he thirsted for practical affairs.
Thus, central problem"Faust" became the problem of connecting the ideal with real life, and the plot is the hero’s journey in search of its solution.
Goethe's goal was to lead man through various phases of development: through personal happiness - the desire for artistic beauty- attempts at reform activity - creative work. In Faust, therefore, there is no single conflict center; it is built as an endless series of conflict situations that arise again and again related to the hero’s quest. They highlight two large stages, corresponding to two parts of the work: in the first of them, the hero looks for himself in the “small world” of personal passions, in the second - in the sphere of social interests. Each episode in Faust, even if it is directly life-like, also receives a symbolic meaning. The images of “Faust” carry several meanings; behind one meaning lies another.
In Faust, as in Dante's poem, the main plot is the quest and wanderings of the hero. “Prologue in the Sky” outlines the problems of the tragedy and artistically expresses its philosophical concept. In the “people's book” there was “Prologue in Hell.” By transferring the prologue to heaven, Goethe thereby declared the novelty of his interpretation of the topic. In the vastness of the Cosmos, against the background of ever-moving luminaries and the continuous change of light and darkness, there is a dispute between the Lord and the devil - Mephistopheles - about the essence and capabilities of man. Mephistopheles considers a person’s life meaningless, and the person himself as insignificant:

...he looks like
neither give nor take the long-legged grasshopper,
which jumps on the grass and then takes off
and always repeats the old song.
And let him sit comfortably in the grass, -
But no, he climbs straight into the mud every minute

The Lord believes that a person’s mistakes do not at all prove his insignificance. “He who seeks must wander,” he objects. And on a bet he gives the person “under the guardianship” of the devil, confident in advance that the person will not allow the devil to humiliate himself:

And let Satan be put to shame!
Know: a pure soul in its vague quest
Full of consciousness of truth.

Here, in essence, the main meaning of Faust is already expressed.
The man on whose example Mephistopheles tries to prove that he is right in a dispute with the Lord turns out to be an old scientist Faust, deeply disappointed in his extensive but abstract knowledge.
His monologue opens the scene “Night”, in which Faust appears for the first time. Science seems worthless to him. Medieval knowledge, bookish, scholastic, is dead, because it does not reveal the “internal connection to the Universe”, does not help to understand what a person should do on Earth, where he “always endured need, and happiness was the exception.”

“How did you bear all this?
And he didn’t wither away in captivity.
When forcibly, in return
Living and God-given forces, -
Yourself among these dead walls
Are you surrounded by skeletons?”- Faust asks himself.

In scene 4 of the first part, Mephistopheles, teaching a student, will say about theology: “This science is a dense forest.” He will angrily ridicule the medieval scholastics who “out of bare words, in rage and argument, they erect edifices of theories.” According to researchers, this scene was written by Goethe first, even before the general concept of the work appeared. Apparently, at first it was just a mischievous joke, reflecting the mood of Goethe himself when he was a student. Here the famous Goethean phrase will be heard, which was quoted more than once by V.I. Lenin: “Dry, my friend, theory is everywhere, And the tree of life is lushly green!”.
In the mouth of Mephistopheles there was also criticism of the knowledge that the enlighteners of the 18th century brought to the world, among whom was Goethe himself. Faust strives to embrace the world in its entirety, while educators study nature, dividing it into parts:

Trying to eavesdrop on life in everything,
They hasten to despirit the phenomena,
Forgetting that if they are violated
An inspiring connection
There's nothing more to listen to.

From the cramped cell of a scientist, Faust strives for life, nature, people, although he knows that people have many vices.

We are unable to overcome gray boredom,
For the most part, hunger of the heart is alien to us,
And we consider it an idle chimera
Anything beyond everyday needs.
Liveliest and best dreams
They perish in us amid the bustle of life.

But the more important it is to confront these weaknesses both in yourself and in others, the more necessary is the search for truth. Philistine self-satisfaction is alien to Faust. Goethe endows this quality with Wagner, Faust's assistant, a bookish scholar who bows to authority and has little connection with real life. “Insufferable, narrow-minded schoolboy!” - Faust says about him irritably.
Thus, next to Faust, his antipode appears, a contrast is indicated: Faust - Wagner.
In the course of the action in the tragedy, a whole series of contrasting situations and characters arises: Faust and Wagner, Faust and Mephistopheles, Faust and Margarita, Faust and Homunculus (an artificial man), Faust and Helen, the Beautiful, Faust and the Emperor...
At the end of the 90s, after the first publication of the parts of the tragedy written by that time appeared, Goethe sketched out for himself general view plan and main ideas of the work. This entry contains the following lines: “The dispute between form and formlessness. Preferring formless content to empty form." These words directly relate to the dispute between Faust and Wagner. Wagner - "form" those. something completed, closed, stopped in its development, Faust is “formless”, i.e. open, developing. Wagner is indifferent to what worries Faust; he himself has little to worry about.
Faust does not need such learning; he cannot live while remaining outside of life. Like Werther, he comes to the thought of suicide, but unlike Werther, he abandons this thought in time. For Faust, disappointment is not a hopeless dead end, but an incentive to search for truth.
Faust, unlike Wagner, feels good among the people, as the scene “At the Gates” shows:
“Here I am a man again, here I can be!”.
The peasants greet Faust, thanking him for the help he provided them as a doctor. They see him as a friend. And Faust thinks about his duty to them.
The next scene - "Faust's Workroom" - contains an important generalization about the very essence of life. The hero, deep in thought, opens the gospel and begins to translate it from ancient Greek. "In the beginning was the Word"- he formulates, translating logos as a word. But active nature Fausta cannot accept either this formula or its variant: “In the beginning there was a Thought.” He finds another, since the word logos has several meanings: "In the beginning was the Thing": Deed, deed, labor - Faust knows that without this there is no person, there is no human life.
It is in this scene that Mephistopheles appears before Faust. Faust concludes an agreement with the devil, which ends the first stage of his quest. Goethe here noticeably deepens the conflict outlined in the “people's book.” His Faust makes a deal with Mephistopheles not only because he is driven by a thirst for the fullness of being, but also because he feels responsibility to people:

Since I have cooled down to knowledge,
I opened my arms to people.
I will open my chest to their sorrows
And joys - everything, everything.
And all their burden is fatal,
I'll take all the troubles upon myself.

The contract itself, in its terms, is also different from the contract between Faust and the devil from the “people's book”. There, the contract was concluded for 24 years, during which the devil agreed to fulfill all of Faust’s wishes, after which Faust’s soul became his property. In tragedy, the term of the contract is not specified. Another condition is determined: Mephistopheles must give Faust a moment of complete satisfaction with life and himself, when Faust could exclaim: “A moment, wait!” Only in this case will Mephistopheles take possession of Faust’s soul, because then his derogatory opinion of man as a pitiful creature will be confirmed - and he will win the bet made with the Lord (for more information about the genesis of the theme “contract with the devil” see).
But Faust cannot stop in his quest; he will always move forward. Mephistopheles will become both an assistant and a hindrance to him on this path.
Here we have a new opposition between Faust and Mephistopheles.
Mephistopheles is not just a devil from a fairy tale. IN artistic system Goethe's philosophically rich work Mephistopheles, like Faust, appears as a figure symbolizing the essential principles of life. "I am a spirit always accustomed to deny"- he says.
Mephistopheles is a symbol of negative power. But without negation there is no creation. This is the dialectic of any development, including the development of free thought. This is why Mephistopheles can characterize himself this way:

"I am part of the eternal power,
Always wishing evil, doing only good...
I deny everything – and that’s my essence.”.

These words of Mephistopheles and the following, more accurate in B. Pasternak’s translation: “Everything that exists is worthy of destruction” often cited as an example of dialectics, that is, knowledge of the world in its contradictions, in the struggle of opposites.
“It would also not be a mistake- notes N.S. Leitis, - to see in Faust and Mephistopheles two sides of a single human nature: inspired enthusiasm and mocking sobriety. It is no coincidence that Goethe gave Mephistopheles many of his own thoughts.”. Other researchers agree with this opinion. “It won’t be a mistake either,” notes N.S. Leitis, - to see in Faust and Mephistopheles two sides of a single human nature: inspired enthusiasm and mocking sobriety. It is no coincidence that Goethe gave Mephistopheles many of his own thoughts.” Other researchers agree with this opinion.
The motif of duality takes on a multi-retrospective sound in the poem.
“For Faust, the role of his double is his past life (that is, as if Faust the First), or, more precisely, the knowledge and memory of the first life he lived in vain with his image established in it, which acts as a negative version of his existence, at a distance from which, at the greatest possible distance, Faust II sees his task in life No. 2. True, Mephistopheles can also be called a certain double, personifying some qualities of the very essence of Faust, which has been repeatedly pointed out by researchers - thus, Faust has, as it were, two doubles superimposed on each other - the depth of such retrospection can, obviously, be greater. Thus, Faust himself declares: “But two souls live in me, / And both are at odds with each other,” meaning their real and ideal duality.” .
In the second part of the tragedy, where Faust turns to creation, Mephistopheles interferes with him or distorts his intentions, introducing the spirit of predation into everything he touches, the image of Mephistopheles acquires satirical features. It is Mephistopheles who becomes Faust's guide in his life's wanderings. Faust needs him because it is impossible to move forward without leaving behind what has already become obsolete. But, alien to creation, Mephistopheles is able to help Faust only to certain limits.
In the first part of the tragedy, the milestones of the hero's wanderings are Auerbach's cellar in Leipzig, the witch's kitchen, Faust's meeting with Gretchen and her tragic loss.
Mephistopheles wants to seduce Faust with the small joys of life, because “understands perfectly well that refusal of creativity, of action is the end for Faust. Therefore, he wants to make him forget his high aspirations, intoxicating the scientist with a riotous, sensual life.”. Therefore, he first brings him to the tavern (scene 5), to a company of drinking students, where one can hear “the roar of throats and the clinking of glasses,” performing various miracles there: wine begins to flow from holes in the table top, drunkards mistake each other’s noses for bunches of grapes and etc. But this is not at all what Faust is looking for, who warned Mephistopheles even at the moment of concluding the agreement:

I’m not waiting for joys, I ask you to understand!
I will throw myself into a whirlwind of painful joy,
Lover's malice, sweet annoyance;
My spirit is healed from the thirst for knowledge,
From now on it will open to all sorrows".

Faust is bored in the tavern, and Mephistopheles takes him to the witch's kitchen (scene 6). Faust likes it even less here: I am disgusted by their senseless charms

I'm asking: will there be a cure?
Here, in this darkness of madness, for me?
He, however, does not refuse the rejuvenating drink offered to him by the witch and receives a second life given by magic.
The love story of Faust and Gretchen begins. Here, finally, is the pain and bliss, that frenzy of passion that Faust dreamed of. Gretchen – the most poetic, brightest of Goethe’s creations female images. A simple girl from a poor burgher family, she is depicted as an artless child of nature, as a wonderful “natural person”, as the Enlightenment saw their ideal. Her childish spontaneity delights Faust, a reflective man of modern times. “How unspoiled, pure,” he admires.
The plot here seems to begin to take on the features of a classic comedy on a love theme. Mephistopheles' crude flirtation with Martha is a parody of Faust's love affair. But the comedy quickly turns into tragedy.
The love of Gretchen and Faust comes into conflict with the bourgeois mores of the town. And Gretchen herself cannot break free from the power of religious prejudices; she is frightened by Faust’s freethinking and his indifference to the church. Love, which Gretchen thought would bring her happiness, turns into the source of her involuntary crimes. The unfortunate woman goes to prison and faces execution. Faust tries to free her from prison with the help of Mephistopheles, but Gretchen pushes him away, being already insane.
According to N.S. Leites, “The forced separation of Faust and Gretchen has a generalized meaning associated with the main content of the central image: Gretchen is too connected with all her ideas to old Germany"to become Faust's girlfriend in his bold quest, and Faust - the very movement forward - cannot stay with her".
The love story of Faust and Gretchen, according to B. Brecht, is “the most daring and deepest in German drama.” Gretchen, like Faust, is not only a unique person with a specific destiny, her image is also a symbol of patriarchal Germany; Faust is the embodiment of seeking humanity. At the same time, Gretchen reflects the bright feminine principle - love, warmth, renewal of life, and in this she forever remains an ideal for Faust.
This is how the first part of the tragedy ends. The last scenes contain an important moral lesson: the self-assertion of one individual, a “superman,” as Goethe called his hero in Ur-Faust, can turn into a disaster for another person.
Faust realizes that he is responsible for the death of Gretchen, and this makes him feel even more responsible. When he matures he rises to new level wanderings developing in the second part of the tragedy in the sphere public life. The image here goes beyond the boundaries of a specific place and time and receives a broad, generalized meaning.
In the second part, the theme of the poem is the fate and prospects of humanity, the time of action is the whole history and Eternity, the place is the whole Earth and the Universe. Here are ancient myths, medieval tales, philosophical concepts of the 18th century enlighteners, and social-utopian ideas that were developed in the 19th century. The drama of the “stormy genius” grows into a powerful work, universal in its scope of life, the hero of which is the whole of humanity in the person of one person.
Faust's wanderings, both spiritual and physical, continue. At the same time, peculiar parallels and contrasts arise between the parts of the tragedy: the atmosphere of the German province of the Middle Ages (part one) - the atmosphere of the medieval imperial court (part two); Faust's love for Gretchen and her loss (part one) - Faust's love for Helen the Beautiful and her loss (part two); Walpurgis Night, built on the images of ancient German mythology (part one) - classic Walpurgis Night, built on the images of ancient mythology (part two). Faust seems to be moving in a spiral, passing in the second part of the tragedy along the same milestones of his path as in the first, only on a new circle.
In act one, Faust and Mephistopheles end up at the court of the German emperor, and Goethe forces Faust, at the sight of the rotten court, to turn to the idea of ​​reforms, and Mephistopheles proposes issuing paper money as security for the country's underground riches.
Disappointment and loss of hope for the possibility of reform awaken in Faust the desire to leave the Middle Ages for antiquity and give modernity the harmony of the latter.
The Homunculus grown by Wagner in a flask, lacking flesh, but possessing pure spirituality, shares an interest in antiquity and becomes for a time Faust's guide in his quest.
In act three, Faust, with the help of the Mothers (as Goethe called the fantastic characters he invented, supposedly residing in the vastness of the Universe and holding in their hands the beginnings of all things), summons from oblivion Helen the Beautiful, the heroine ancient myth about the Trojan War, and marries her. Faust's love for Helen is no longer the flame of the heart, which was his love for
Gretchen, but rather an echo of a thought.
This entire episode represents a reflection and revaluation of the fascination with antiquity experienced by the Enlightenment. But antiquity could not obscure the problems of modernity.
The marriage of Faust and Helen is short-lived. Their son Euphorion breaks away from the Earth and is carried into the heights of space. In this image, Goethe created a kind of monument to Byron.
Following her son, Elena also flies up into the sky. In the hands of Faust, who tried to hold her, only her cloak remains.
The symbolic meaning of this episode is transparent: ancient art is connected with its time, only its external forms, “clothing”, but not its spirit can be transferred to the present. And you can only escape from the present into the past with a thought. A person is given to live only in the era in which he was born. Faust's union with Helen could not be strong because she is the embodiment of harmonious tranquility, while he is all restlessness, all in earthly life, full of contradictions.
Faust has no choice but to return from the world of illusions to the Middle Ages he left behind. In the fourth act, we again see him at the court of the emperor, dreaming of a war with which Faust wants nothing to do. Mephistopheles offers to make him a general, but Faust is not at all tempted. “High rank does not suit me at all in such matters where I am a complete layman”, he answers. Instead, something else comes to his mind:

The waves roar, boil - and again aground
They will leave, without benefit and without purpose.
Led me into despair and fear
Blind elements, wild tyranny.
But the spirit strives to surpass itself:
Here to overcome, here to achieve triumph!…
And plan after plan arose in my mind then;
I feel with pleasure the courage:
Raging moisture from the shore
I will push back, I will draw a limit to her
And I myself have water in her possession!

Act five contains the denouement and its philosophical and poetic interpretation. Faust begins to implement his plan, organizes drainage work, fights Lack, Guilt, Care, Need (allegorical images). Guilt, Lack, Need recede, but Care remains. She blinds Faust, “but there, inside, brighter light is burning." In his thoughts, he calls on “a thousand hands” to work, believing that their work “will be accomplished quickly.” IN creative work for others and in anticipating the results of collective creative efforts, Faust finds his highest joy. The time for results comes for him.
The famous monologue at the end of the tragedy sounds:

Only he is worthy of life and freedom,
Who goes to battle for them every day!
All my life in a harsh, continuous struggle
Let the child and the husband, the old man, lead,
So that I can see in the brilliance of wondrous power
Free land, free my people!
Then I would say: a moment!
You're great, last, wait!
And the passage of centuries would not be bold
The trace left by me!
In anticipation of that wondrous moment
I am now tasting my supreme moment

Addressing these words more to the people of the future than to his contemporaries, Goethe expressed in them the dream of a free community of working people transforming the world.
The fifth act also includes Goethe's reflections on the contradictions of bourgeois progress, which brings disaster to ordinary people.
In the old hut, in the place where Faust wants to install a lighthouse, live quiet old people, husband and wife, Philemon and Baucis, who do not want to move from their usual place. Mephistopheles and his henchmen rudely burst into their house, and they died of fright. True, Faust is not innocent here: after all, he himself told Mephistopheles to remove the obstacles to his plans in any way; Mephistopheles, taking advantage of this, hastily destroys the old people’s hut, and the wanderer who found shelter in this hut also dies.
Mephistopheles is a bad assistant to Faust in his creative activity. The three strong men, in whose image Goethe gave a generalized image of bourgeois predation, think only of prey: “Well, this is all dust and smoke for us: We want an equal share.”. Faust wants to take a different, humane path.
It is significant that Faust finds his highest moment not in tranquility, but in moving forward, not in achieving a goal, but in anticipating its achievement. He doesn't want to stop the moment. Yes, this is impossible, just as it is impossible to stop the flow of life. The formula stipulated by the contract sounds in the mouth of Faust in the subjunctive mood: not as a statement, but as an assumption, an assumption.
In the finale, Faust is depicted as blind. Goethe makes it clear that Faust saw pictures of free flourishing native land not in reality, but in the mind's eye. In reality, death is approaching him. All dreams turn out to be in vain. Labor and the benefit it brings are an illusion, just like everything else. The sound of shovels that Faust hears turns out to be the sound of the spades of lemurs digging his grave. Mephistopheles happily fusses, believing that the formula has been pronounced, and that means he has won the argument.
He gives his characterization and understanding of Faust and his life:

Nowhere, anywhere did he have happiness,
I fell in love only with my imagination;
He wanted to keep the last thing,
Poor man, empty, pitiful moment!

But even while dying, Faust defeats him. The angels take Faust's soul from Mephistopheles. The action moves to the sky, where the action of the prologue took place. The words of the prologue, “A man wanders while he has aspirations,” echo the words of the finale: “Whose life has been spent in aspirations, we can save him.”
The tragedy receives a unique frame that emphasizes its integrity and completeness. In the heavenly spheres, the soul of Faust is met by the soul of Gretchen. The song of the mystical choir sounds, completing the work

Everything is fleeting -
Symbol, comparison:
The goal is endless
Here, in reach.
Here is a reserve
The whole truth.
Eternal femininity
She draws us to her.

The finale is the apotheosis of the immortal essence of Faust and Gretchen, the apotheosis of Man, in which nothing can destroy humanity, love, the free searching mind.
This is the outcome of the agreement between Faust and Mephistopheles. This is the result of the bet between Mephistopheles and the Lord. Having led Man through trials and temptations, through hell, heaven, purgatory, Goethe affirms his greatness in the face of nature, history, the Universe, affirms prospects free development man and humanity.

Instead of a conclusion

Faust can be called a man of a new time, a time of reason and action. To them, Goethe affirms the idea that the golden age is not in the past, but in the future, but it cannot be brought closer by beautiful dreams, one must fight for it:

“Only he is worthy of life and freedom,
Who goes to battle for them every day!”- exclaims the blind Faust.

He carries out a bold project of transforming nature when part of the sea is drained. This is no longer the medieval magician he appears to be in the folk book, but a representative of rational time, a philosopher and humanist.
True, the scene of Faust’s death can be read in a different way: external blindness correlates with the hero’s internal insight. Faust's last deed, aimed at draining part of the sea, turns out to be the same fiction, a dream, like all the previous ones. Moreover, it is a dream for which people pay with their lives. Everything in this scene turns out to be an illusion: the knocking of thousands of helping hands - the fuss of lemurs (spirits of the dead), the feeling of supreme happiness - death, a wonderful dream designed to help people - the death of three poor people. Everything is a vision that appeared before the mind’s eye of the blind Faust. So good always coexists with evil, happiness with sorrow, dreams with harsh reality.
However, this only speaks of the polysemy of the image of Faust and the ideas contained in it - it was not for nothing that Goethe told his secretary Eckermann that the life he put into Faust was too rich, colorful and varied to be strung on “a thin cord of a through idea”.
The image of Faust became endemic in the literature of Europe. And the symbolic form of philosophical mystery drama, created by Goethe in Faust on the model of medieval folk drama, became widespread in European literature of the romantic era. Byron's "Manfred" (1817) reproduces the original dramatic situation of "Faust" and is most directly connected with Goethe's tragedy... Byron's "Cain" (1821) retains the same symbolic interpretation of the plot... In France, Alfred gives a romantic interpretation of the image of "Faust" de Musset in the dramatic poem "The Cup and the Mouth".