Il destino in un nome. "Ett Faustspel" di Gunnar Beskow

The essay describes the main features of the contemporary version of the myth of Faust presented in the poetic drama Ett Faustspel (A play on Faust, 1936) by the Swedish writer Gunnar Beskow. The analaysis starts observing how the intertextual link to the model of Goethe’s Faust is explicitly thematized in the text. It then moves to studying three characters playing an essential role in Faust’s evolution from hedonistic selfishness to ethic concern and sympathy with a humankind deprived of any form of supernatural justice. These figures are the unnamed “friend”, who takes over Mephistopheles’s task, and two women: Faust’s assistant Margit, who corresponds to Goethe’s Gretchen, and his wife, the most original addition to the traditional set of characters.