Essays on literary works - 2024
My Impressions of Dante's “Divine Comedy” (Inferno)
Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet, writer, scholar, and philosopher, is the creator of the Italian literary language and the author of the "Divine Comedy," a work that continues to be read and analyzed to this day.
Dante is renowned worldwide not only for his literary achievements but also for his profound love for Beatrice Portinari. It was this love, which filled Dante's life with meaning, that inspired the "Divine Comedy."
This is undoubtedly the crowning achievement of Dante's entire life and work. This was the consensus among Dante himself, his contemporaries, and subsequent generations. The epithet "Divine" attached to the "Comedy" only many years after the poet's death attests to its high esteem. The "Divine Comedy" reflects the entire epoch of the early Renaissance in Italy. The plot of the "Divine Comedy" is simple, yet it can be interpreted in many ways.
After the death of his beloved Beatrice, Dante Alighieri found himself in a "dark wood" of doubt, torment, and sorrow. Beatrice's purity and love had kept him from sin, but now sin had triumphed. Dante portrays this as his own encounter with three wild and terrifying beasts: a lion, a leopard, and a she-wolf. Only Beatrice can save him from death at the jaws of these beasts. She asks God to show Dante the torments of sinners in hell while he is still alive, so that he may cease to sin. The Roman poet Virgil, whom Dante considers his mentor in poetry, becomes Dante's guide through hell.
In the poem, we find a very realistic and vivid description of hell. This is the most striking part of the "Divine Comedy." A deep funnel leads from the surface to the center of the Earth, its walls forming nine circles of hell - the kingdom of the devil and demons. The hellish funnel was formed by the fall of Lucifer to Earth when, as punishment for the sin of pride and rebellion against God, he was cast down from heaven.
Following Virgil, Dante crosses the underground river on the boat of the demon Charon, together with the souls of dead sinners, and descends to the very bottom of hell, where Lucifer himself resides.
As I read the "Divine Comedy," it felt as if I were seeing everything with my own eyes, along with Dante. I feared the terrible demons with him. But I also felt sorry for the sinners, because their torments, in my opinion, did not correspond to their sins in life.
I remember several episodes and characters from the "Comedy." This is the tragic story of Francesca and Paolo, similar to the love of Romeo and Juliet, and Ulysses, who, even while suffering in hell, appears as a true human being - strong, courageous, and inquisitive.
Dante makes his account of the sinners of hell very realistic. He uses ordinary words to describe his fear or anger, and his comparisons of the afterlife to real, everyday life make his poem scarier and more vivid. For example, Dante compares the demons who drown sinners in cauldrons of boiling pitch to cooks who skillfully wield ladles.
Dante is an impartial man, and he places all his political opponents in hell, some of whom were even still alive at the time! This includes Dante's enemy Farinata degli Uberti, whose powerful and unyielding soul, tormented but unbowed, commands the respect of both Dante and all readers.
It seemed to me that people have not changed much over the centuries: we still love and cause pain, we struggle, we betray; people commit suicide, envy, drink, and overeat. We all have our flaws and vices. But the ability to see our reflection in the ancient "Comedy" of the Italian Dante Alighieri helps us draw conclusions and try to become a little better.