It is August 16, 1772, and a traveling theater company has stopped on the Römerberg in Frankfurt.

In front a colorful crowd, behind the facade of the Roman, between boards and cloth curtains director and poet in conversation about art between ideal and reality.

To locate Goethe's “Prelude in the Theater” and the beginning of “Faust” in this location goes back to Alexander Pavlenko.

The draftsman, who was born in the Soviet Union, lives in Limburg, but he has worked on the Main for 15 years and has a lot left for the city: "It's a declaration of love to Frankfurt." In one of his next projects, illustrations for ETA Hoffmann's story "Meister Floh" , he wants to develop the little love greeting a little further by showing Frankfurt in the 19th century.

Florian Balke

Culture editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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In “Faust”, his graphic novel based on Goethe's first tragedy, the poet's hometown only appears at the beginning. The early modern era, which the artist, who was born in Ryazan in 1963 and who moved to the Federal Republic of Germany at the age of thirty, designed for the band, is set in a city full of medieval buildings that cannot be specified. When Pavlenko allows himself to refer to the outside world, it is not about components of reality, but about the way they are designed. In keeping with the genre of the drawn novel, the reader encounters Renaissance paintings such as Albrecht Altdorfer's "Battle of Alexander", whose high sky and dwarf mountain landscape can be recognized in a full-page illustration, on which Mephisto flies to earth after his wager with the Lord Approach fist.

"Only the speech bubbles are missing"

He used the large-format pictures as an “exclamation point”, says Pavlenko.

Only occasionally do they interrupt the flow of the pages, on which usually three landscape format pictures are placed on top of one another or up to six squares determine the rhythm.

You can't think enough about the speed, says Pavlenko, who initially thought his drawings were in black and white.

But this version turned out to be too "nervous".

Two colors gave the story a different pace, but also in the harmony of warm blue and cold yellow it still ran too fast for him.

Now the yellow has the colors of "old paper" - perfect: "Now you linger a little longer on each side." But too long is not good either: "Just not too many details."

Without the Frankfurt author Jan Krauss, none of these decisions would have come about.

In 2007 he visited the exhibition “Goethe's Faust - Metamorphoses of a Sorcerer” in the Goethehaus am Großer Hirschgraben, fell in love with the illustrations by Charles Delacroix and thought: “The only thing missing is the speech bubbles.” At home he went to work and wrote that Drama into a script, for him the second, the first was devoted to the Prometheus myth.