At six o'clock that evening the dancers were in their dressing-room. They talked and laughed and put on their red and black dresses for Faust. But Meg Giry was very quiet.
The two men then talked about the opera for that night. It was Faust, and usually La Carlot ta sang Margarita. La Carlot ta was Spanish, and the best singer in Paris. But today, La Carlotta was ill.
In the spring of 1863 Tolstoy was re-reading Goethe, and wrote of Faust as " the poetry of the world of thought; the poetry which expresses that which can be expressed by no other art" .
文学百科 The Literature Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained)
The tone was set in Germany by Goethe's play Faust and the short stories by E.T.A. Hoffman, but the genre was most eagerly adopted by English novelists, such as Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein.
Though he still loves her, he's been forced to move on due to his world-saving work with the IMF, which leads to his newly budding romance with Ilsa Faust.
In the most commonly known versions of Faust, he makes a pact with the devil where he gives up his soul in exchange for worldly riches and supernatural knowledge.
He could not frankly discuss the matter with the young women themselves, although they would have gladly discussed it, because Faust was helpless in the tragedy of woman.