“The Divine Comedy” of the Florentine genius Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), his magnum opus, rightfully belongs to the bright constellation of the greatest literary monuments of humanity. Its value is by no means exhausted by the encyclopedic picture of medieval Western culture and worldview.
Dante's poem was and remains provocative; the judgments that the poet pronounces on the colossi of human history and mythology: Julius Caesar and his murderers Brutus and Cassius, Achilles, Alexander the Great — and his contemporaries, tormented by passions: the unfortunate lovers Paolo and Francesca, political opponents — may seem too harsh to us today, yet they demonstrate the coherence and strict beauty of medieval thought, aimed at the salvation of all mankind. “The Divine Comedy” can also be read as the greatest confession of love: of all the ways to glorify his beloved Beatrice, Dante chose the most exalted, granting her immortality in paradise alongside God and in human memory. But above all, it is an odyssey of the human soul, a journey to its depths and heights in search of renewal and rebirth to a new life.
Centuries later, Dante becomes our very own Virgil and invites us on a journey not without its challenges — through our own inner hell, purgatory, and paradise. And yet even there, where the harsh dichotomy of good and evil reigns, there is still room for hope and comfort: Dante's hell is dizzyingly deep, but it is not bottomless, and it is precisely through the darkest depths that the path leads upward, toward the light. The text is published in a magnificent classical translation by Dmitry Minaev and illustrated with legendary engravings by Gustave Doré.
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