Faust as a state of indebtedness

The story of Faust represents one of the oldest and most important European myths, the relevance of which is currently increasing every day (which is good news for the myth, but – considering the point of the Faustian stories – a warning for us). Vladimír Just, who has been lecturing on the Faustian myth and its transformations for three decades at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague, has therefore collected and edited studies from 1994–2013 for the book, with which he attempted to gain insight into its essence from various angles. The set of studies thus guides us through the very bowels of the myth, told from various aspects, but with one common denominator: This is the scene of contact and eventual contract between man and evil. It is this scene of immediate profit and indefinitely postponed maturity, a scene without which no Faustian story would be a Faustian story, that gave the entire collection its collective title, with which the author clearly points to today' s reading of the ancient story: Faust as a state of indebtedness. This updated edition is expanded by one later Faustian study from 2018, written after the first edition of the book and reflecting the ideological distortion of Faust during the time of normalization.