In the Library
Faust (Part I)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1808
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 2.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Bayard Taylor (1870)
- Original
- Original de
- Chapters
- Chapters 28
- Length
- Length 34k words
£1.99
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My worthy friend, gray are all theories, and green alone Life's golden tree.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
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- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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The reading guide, in the app
How to Read Faust
A poem with a reputation for being the most learned book in the German language, when what waits at its centre is one of the most heartbreaking love stories ever written, about a country girl named Gretchen and the scholar who ruins her.
The reputation of Faust is that it is the great untouchable monument of German literature, a vast philosophical poem so dense with myth and learning that you would need a classical education and a footnote for every line just to follow it. That reputation describes the second part of the book fairly well, and it has frightened off generations of readers who never discovered that the first part, the part everyone actually means when they say Faust, is a fast and human and devastating drama that you can read in a few evenings and never quite recover from. The legend you have half-heard, of the scholar who sells his soul to the devil, is only the doorway, and what lies past it is a story about a real young woman and what is done to her.
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About the book
Goethe's scholar has read everything and feels nothing. He stands among his books at midnight, learned past all use and dead to the world, until the devil offers a bargain and Faust names stranger terms than the legend ever dared: not his soul outright, but a wager that no single moment will ever feel so perfect he begs it to stay. Mephistopheles takes the bet certain it will be easy. Across two parts and sixty years of writing, Goethe proves it is not. Part I narrows to one ruined girl, Gretchen, tender and doomed by the love Faust brings her. Part II opens onto everything at once: an emperor's court, ancient Greece, drowned land won back from the sea, a mind that cannot stop reaching. What it finally knows is the most generous claim literature ever dared, that to strive without rest, even into wreckage, is itself the thing worth saving. Gray are all theories, Goethe writes, and green alone life's golden tree.