An Appreciation of Turgenev's story Faust

 

 Turgenev’s story, Faust : A story in nine letters shows how a pure soul can suffer from coming into contact with  disturbing emotions which can  prove fatal. In the original story of Faustus, he mortgages  his soul to Mephistopheles for worldly pleasures and power and suffers the inner torment  in the last hour. In the present story, the narrator Pavel Alexandrovich B. reveals in a series of letters to his friend Semyon Nikolayevich V.  his reunion with Vera whom he loved as young man but lost her due to her mother’s refusal to allow marriage after ten years. Pavel who has come back to his native place  after nine years  was invited by Vera’s husband Priimkov  to visit them in neighbourhood . Pavel remembers his old flame Vera , slowly becomes close to her who is already married with a surviving child namely Natasha   in the name of reading of Faustus to her which disturbs her  deeply about her inner feelings and the ensuing tension causes fatal illness.

Turgenev’s mastery of description of nature , heart moving moments, unsuspecting villany and irreparable loss of  life leaving a sense of sadness are present here.

  While describing his garden the writer evokes a sentimental note. 

 The turtle -doves cooed ceaselessly, an oriole whistled now and again a finch was doing its sweetly intricate piece, the blackbirds chattered angrily, a cuckoo called in the distance , and suddenly a woodpecker screamed so piercingly as if it had gone mad.

Pavel  also  recollects how he met Vera Nikolayevna Yeltsova and her mother in a party given by his uncle. After Vera’s  father’s death, the mother rings her child in a strict manner to the extent of forbidding her to read poetry . mother’s desire was to protect the child from the turbulence of the world and develop a hard realistic sense in her which made her  read only geography, history and natural history. Pavel’s attempts to introduce literature to Vera and slowly fell in love with her. The writer describes delicately the feeling aroused in the narrator. “Only once I thought I detected something strange in the very depths of her clear eyes, a soft tenderness .But may be I was mistaken”(112)   He felt “as if whirls of mist were wandering in my soul”(112) .  But his proposal for marriage to Vera were spurned by the mother who thought him as unsuitable .

Turgenev describes Vera’s innocence as follows ; ,

         She did not seem to fuss or worry about  anything. She answered simply and intelligently , and listened attentively.  The expression of her face was candid and truthful like child’s; true, it was somewhat cold an unvarying , but not pensive. She was seldom gay , and then not like other girls; sweeter than any show of gaiety was the way her whole being lit up with the radiance of her innocent soul.  (110)

In letter three, we find how Pavel in his reunion tries to rake up the pleasure of reading poetry. She says that she was not acquainted with poetry and Pavel refers to her mother’s ban on reading literature, she says that has been frees since her marriage. Here Turgenev beautifully expresses Vera’s innocence. “She regarded me with he calm look. Birds look like that when they are not afraid.” (117)

 Pavel suggests  the reading of Goethe’s Faustus to her, a German tutor called Schimmel, the tutor of neighbour’s daughter  and Priimkov, Vera’s husband in the China house in the latter’s garden. Turgenev is never found wanting in describing nature.  While visiting the garden , they find

     She and I came out into an open glade. Right overhead a large pin cloud hung suspended high up in the sky; grey streaks trailed from it like smoke; a finy star shimmered on the very edge of the cloud, now peeping out, now hiding behind it again, and a little distance away  the white crescent moon could be seen against the blue that was already taking on a crimson hue. (120)

In the entire effort to awaken the soul of Vera to the beauty of poetry, Pavel has been nurturing vicarious retaliation against her mother who had forbidden reading of  literature by her daughter.  poetry. 

We find gradual increase of feeling in Pavel which he denies but the reader can know easily it is only evading his real feelings .  In letter two written to his friend by Pavel,  he says, “You are probably laughing at me , you beast, ensconced in the director’s chair , but I shall write you in anyway about my impressions of her.” In the next letter he denies that he is about to fall in love, he has had enough experience and he never went in for that type of woman. At the end of fourth letter he tells that  ‘ If  I did awaken that soul who can blame me ?” and not to mock him as they are old friends. Then in next letter he confesses his obsession for her , then expresses his mental torment, self-pity  , her admission of   love for him,  their first and last kiss, Vera suffers from pangs of guilt,  thinks she has seen her mother’s apparition, falls ill and dies leaving   Pavel in deep sorrow ,  reveals  his   withdrawal from society and philosophizing about the Unknown , expresses remorse for breaking an invaluable alabaster as he did in his childhood    renunciation and the need to prefer  duty to freedom as dreamt by  the young. It is awareness of hidden springs of love in  her  that disturbs  Vera and  his romantic  imagination that  makes Pavel act like Mephistopheles. Turgenev’s skill in taking the reader into a world of imagination and    recreating horrible and eerie mental state of Pavel who could not meet Vera  in the garden as agreed  at the end is  superb. Marlowe's  play  Doctor Faustus brings out the anguish of Faustus in his last moment after enjoying material pleasures and recalling Helen from the dead. Turgenev too portrays the tragedy of Vera , the pure soul in succumbing to the snare of love ridden with guilt due to transgression of her mother's restrictions. A writer who leaves an abiding impression upon the minds of the reader is a writer who is immortal in literary world!