I read as broadly as I could during my school days. The reading often involved works in English translation. Translation is necessary to access some text, and the task of translators is challenging and admirable. There are limits for translation, however, to the extent it can convey an author's meaning in the original language. If you are seeking for example the closest access to Plato's thought, you should learn ancient literary Greek. Turgenev below, Russian.
II.
Among Ivan Turgenev's many tales, "Faust" is of the obscure. An epistolary narrative, the letters in "Faust" are between two Russian gentlemen, one living in the country, the other the city. Turgenev gives us only the letters from the country, and there lies the story. The country correspondent, Pavel Alexandrovitch, has recently moved back to his rural home after a nine-year absence. Settling in, he goes through the bookcases, and rediscovers his volume of Faust. Pavel is something of a book-lover, and his passion is great for Goethe's classic. "There was a time when I knew Faust by heart...word for word" <1>, he writes in his first letter.
One day, Pavel has a chance encounter on the country roads with an old university friend, who is now married to a woman Pavel himself once admired. This meeting brings back nostalgic memories for Pavel of Vera Nikolaevna, and her opinionated mother, the widow Madame Eltsov. Among Madame Eltsov's eccentric opinions, Pavel recalls, there was her view toward imaginative literature, the reading of which she had strictly forbidden Vera. Pressed by Pavel, she had remarked: "'You tell me, that reading poetry is both useful and pleasant...That's impossible, and leads to ruin or vulgarity'".
When Pavel meets Vera again now, she is a contented wife in her early thirties, and much to Pavel's surprise, Vera is still following her mother's advice not to read imaginative works. Pavel's not only surprised, but annoyed even. "This incomprehensible indifference to the highest pleasures of the intellect irritated me." He sets about meddling, by convincing Vera to let him read Faust to her. Turgenev makes it easy for us to surmise that Pavel's motives are informed by eros.
The reading of Faust has a startling, and as Madame Eltsov might have put it, ruinous effect on Vera. Such is the power of Goethe's words that Vera confesses "'there are things in [Faust] I can't get out of my mind; I feel as though they were simply turning my head.'" Vera's disturbance reaches its peak in a scene so fragile that it almost falls apart. A bewildered Vera questions Pavel about his reading to her. "'What have you done to me?'" [she said] "'I love you, that's what you have done to me.'"
Despite its adulterous nature, Vera surrenders to the passion between her and Pavel. As often happens in Turgenev however, eros is bittersweet. Soon, Vera begins to see the ghost of her mother, and remembers what she had once said to Vera. "'You are like ice; until you melt as strong as stone, but directly you melt there's nothing of you left'". Vera's imaginings of her dead mother increase, until beside herself, she falls into a feverish delirium which, incredibly enough, leads to her death.
III.
Could guilt have been the cause of Vera's hallucinations? Can guilt become so overwhelming that it can destroy mental and physical health? Is the power of great literature always benign? Was Turgenev just being playful with German romantic tropes? No matter the questions it raises, "Faust" dramatizes the submerged eros of art, and moreover, the ontological analogue that animates great art and thought.
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<1>Turgenev, Ivan. "Faust". Translated by Constance Garnett.
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