Wędrówka Fausta
Faust’s Wanderings

Summary/Abstract: The figure of Faust, along with the motif of the desire forknowledge, self-knowledge and eternal youth, and finallyconfrontation with evil personified by Satan, belongs to thearchetypes of European culture. The author traces Faust’sjourney from the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, when heemerged as a historical figure and became the hero of folklegend, to the present day. At the end of the 16th century,the Frankfurt printer Johann Spiess dedicated a book tohim, which became extremely popular. Then ChristopherMarlowe and Johann Wolfgang Goethe wrote about him,and finally Thomas Mann. Jackiewicz describes thetransformations of this figure in the context of historicaland cultural conditions. He is also interested in how Faustwas adapted to film art, first in the silent era (by LouisLumiére, Georges Méliès and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau),and to the researcher’s contemporary times. He devotesa lot of space to the analysis of René Clair’s film Beautyof the Devil (La beauté du diable, 1950). He comparesClair’s vision with literary prototypes, but above all, heplaces him in the field of the French humanistic tradi-tion, as well as in relation to Jean Marcenac’s novella.

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