Evaluating Negative Representations of Reading: Ivan Turgenev’s Faust (1855)

Towheed, Shafquat (2025). Evaluating Negative Representations of Reading: Ivan Turgenev’s Faust (1855). In: Attar, Karen and Nash, Andrew eds. Books, Readers and Libraries in Fiction. London, UK: University of London, pp. 95–110.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14296/ufnt1799

Abstract

In this chapter, I look at some of these negative representations of reading in Turgenev’s novella Faust, and interrogate a central paradox: can a work of literature in all honesty represent the act of reading (or refusal to read) a ‘bad’ book in a positive light? Can literary fiction ever endorse an individual’s refusal to read another work of imaginative literature on moral, ethical or philosophical grounds? I do this through three complementary approaches. First, by outlining the extent to which Goethe’s Faust, Part I (1828) serves as intertext and metanarrative in Turgenev’s Faust, a novella which reinterprets several of the key themes of the earlier work. Second, I offer a detailed close reading of the representations of negative responses to reading – and resistances to reading – in Turgenev’s Faust, teasing out the complex ways in which different types of readerly interpretation are modelled and critiqued in the novella. Finally, I place Turgenev’s discussion of the potentially disastrous impact of inadequate critical reading in the context of the wider discussions and moral panics about the rise of literacy and popular reading in the 1850s

Plain Language Summary

This chapter looks at the negative representations of reading in the novella 'Faust' (1855) written by Ivan Turgenev.

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