FAUST | I EDIZ. 1989 | FERNANDO PESSOA

Faust by Fernando Pessoa is a fragmentary dramatic poem that Pessoa himself called a “tragedia soggettiva” (subjective tragedy). It was composed over a long span (1908-1934) and never completed. The text reconstructs a solitary, introspective Faust figure, one who embarks on a search within his own consciousness rather than via external pact or deal. The work is permeated by existential anguish, the limits of knowledge, introspective doubt, metaphysical longing, the confrontation with death. Rather than an external devil, the enemy is internal: an intelligence at odds with itself, emotion, action, with the self. Pessoa’s Faust abandons ambitions of transcendence or pact with the diabolic; instead the drama lies in the conflict between the ideal and the real, between being and knowing, between wonder and nihilism.