A Socialist Faust?

Abstract

N 1901 an anonymous article published in the Revue Blanche made the following striking declaration: Gcethe, ce matin, avec une certaine solennite, m'a rv616l un grand projet congu dans ces dernieres annies : il veut &crire un troisihme With these words its author, the young critic and politician, Leon Blum)( 1872-1950), began to sketch the portrait of a socialist Faust. Although socialist critics had taken an early interest in interpreting Goethe's Faust, it was not until the twentieth century that socialist versions of the drama first began to appear.2 Five years after Blum's depiction of Faust as an agitateur socialiste in his Nouvelles Conversations de Gocethe avec Eckermann, Anatolij Vasil'evi6 Luna'arskij (1875-1933) began work on his own socialist version of the Faust myth, which he completed in one month in 1908. After some revision, it was finally published in 1918 as Faust and the City: A Drama for Reading (Faust i gorod: Drama dlja c'tenija). In comparing these two works with Goethe's Faust, I do not mean to suggest that they are of equivalent artistic value. My purpose here is rather to compare ideas: to examine the ways in which two twentiethcentury socialist writers have adapted Goethe's work to their own political and artistic purposes, and to determine to what extent the resulting creations are basically unrelated to Goethe's story. Despite differences in conception, both Blum's and Luna'arskij's versions of the Faust myth raise similar issues: what happens when a cosmic drama is translated into the terms of political struggle? when a Faust more or less closely allied with Evil is replaced by a hero unambiguously perfect and worthy of emulation? when an unpredictable future which demands perpetual individual striving is transformed into a future which is predetermined and which therefore requires no further struggle ? Although most interpretations of Goethe's Faust have stressed the