SOURCE: Barta, Peter I.¹ “Superfluous Women and the Perils of Reading ‘Faust.’” Irish Slavonic Studies, no. 14 (1993): 21-36.

In the following essay, Barta analyzes the role of women in “Faust” and considers the story in relation to Turgenev's critical essay on Goethe's drama Faust.

Both Turgenev's fiction and his criticism reveal an unusually strong interest in great literary works of the past: Hamlet, Don Quixote, King Lear and Manon Lescaut mark important stages in Turgenev's career. At times, Goethe's Faust in particular preoccupied Turgenev. He translated part of the drama into Russian, wrote a detailed review of Mikhail Vronchenko's translation of the first part of Faust in 1844 and published his own story, entitled ‘Faust’, in the literary magazine, Sovremennik.² ‘Faust’ appeared in 1856, the same year as Rudin. The volume of Sovremennik in which it was published also contained A. Strugovshchikov's translation of the first part of Goethe's Faust.

Turgenev's...