The tale, which was depicted by such artists as Rembrandt ("Philemon and Baucis") and Peter Paul Rubens ("Stormy Landscape with Philemon and Baucis") was taken up and revised by Goethe in Part II, Act V of Faust, a passage which provides a vital intertext for the interpretation of Calvino's Baucis, especially for the implications of Goethe's rewriting of Ovid as a cautionary tale about modern urban planning.
The bell undermines Faust's sense of power and he desires to remove Philemon and Baucis: Faust....
Philemon and Baucis die as a sacrifice to the earthly desire of a man supported by a pact with the devil.
According to Muramoto, the decisive insight that Philemon imparted to Jung was that after Philemon and Baucis, whose earthly home was destroyed by Faust, there is no space for the reception of the gods but in his [Jung's] soul.
And
Philemon and Baucis entwine for a final, eternal kiss as they turn into trees.
In the second part of Goethe's Faust,
Philemon and Baucis are an old couple who refuse to sell their home at any price.
In "
Philemon and Baucis," the title story of the other volume of Muravyova's stories under review, a former labor-camp commandant with a history of infidelity finally turns on his aging wife completely when her mental faculties begin to decline.
The present collection by Muravyova contains three stories: "The Nomadic Soul," "Lala, Natasha, Toma," and "Philemon and Baucis." The longest of the three, "The Nomadic Soul," is set primarily in Moscow during World War I and the Russian Civil War and considers the shifting fortunes of several members of an upper-class family.
The last of the stories, "Philemon and Baucis," is set decades later at a dacha outside Moscow, whose aging inhabitants are a caricature of antiquity's devoted spouses.