Góry i wspinaczka w „Boskiej komedii” Dantego

The study uses a variant of the geocritical methodology combined with humanistic mining studies. It was pointed out that in Dante’s poem there were numerous references to the realities of real space (the Alps and the Apennines, which, appearing as a separate part of the mountain world, in the poem at the same time constitute a kind of props room of mountain motifs, used in the construction of Purgatory Mountain). Also, the journeys of the heroes, Dante and his guide Virgil, can be perceived realistically as an actual journey, made in a difficult mountain terrain. It was specified in the realities of Hell, Purgatory Mountain, and Paradise. In this way, using specific Earth realities, Dante created a powerful vision largely made of mountain realities. Mount Purgatory, the target of Dante’s ascent, created when Lucifer, thrown from the heavens, struck the depths of the Earth deep into its center, which changed the hemisphere and pushed up the land masses, throwing them over the surface of the ocean covering the southern hemisphere. Locating the Mount of Purgatory in the center of the southern hemisphere, and at the antipodes of Jerusalem, as a mountain rising on a small island from the vastness of the seas covering this part of the world, Dante used elements of the Muslim tradition (perhaps known to him) with its notions of a lofty, pyramidal shape, which is considered to be the holy Mount of Adam (2243 m) in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The poet, however, never once described the Purgatory Mountain as a whole, creating a vision of its enormity seen from under its steep walls, but he introduced into the poem numerous details about the surface of this mountain and how to climb it. He filled his abstract vision with real details. From the very first songs of Purgatory, the narrative runs in the order of the characters’ ascent towards the summit Paradise. The work hypothesized that the famous poet Bismantova became the prototype of the Dante Mountain of Purgatory, such a judgment is almost universally approved. That Dante saw this mountain is certain: he was in Lunigiano and Casentino (Bismantova rises right next to it) in 1306, and certainly before 1315, at the time when Divine Comedy was being written. For the accuracy of this hypothesis, the shape of this vast rock mass (culmination in 1047), rising above the level of the surrounding valleys by about 400 m in height with almost vertical rock walls, is of great importance for the accuracy of this hypothesis. The peak landscape largely corresponds to the ideas of an ancient idyllic grove. These realities of the mountain landscape meant that the thought about them found literary expression in the pages of Dante’s poem, which prompts me to share my opinion that the sight of the boatswain and his presence in it gave Dante a vision of the Purgatory Mountain as a “hybrid” creation, partially a description of a real landscape and in part a fantastic, syncretic vision based on elements of ancient literary tradition. The description of climbing this mountain leads us through a narrow chimney, overhang, and other rock formations, forming terraces in the structure of the mountain. The conclusion of the work are the words of Italian literary researcher Filippo Zolezzi, who wrote that “Mount Purgatory appears as an absolute ideal of a mountain, because on its top there is an earthly Paradise — a space of direct contact with the divine, hence even the most beautiful earthly mountains are merely a copy of them. However, the very fact that a poet — a man — to reach this summit, has to climb, climb, makes it an ideal prototype for mountain climbing”.

FRANKO’S POETIC CYCLE “MOURNING SONGS”: ASPECTS OF POETICS

Franko’s poetic cycle “Mourning Songs” became the third in his collection “From the Heights and Lowlands” (1893), however, this cycle was not included in the first edition of the collection in 1887. Nine lyrical poems of the cycle “Mourning Songs” mainly belong to the genre of reflective-meditative lyrics, in which the author (lyrical subject) reflects on social structure, ontological and existential problems. The articulation of the mental state of the lyrical hero, his inner suffering, loneliness, social vacuum, feeling of being unwanted in the world are important motives here. Franko purposely doesn’t arrange poems in chronological order but instead develops the inner plotline of the cycle with the following motives: guilt for the mournful mood of his muse, inner rebellion against social evil, apocalyptic vision of destroying the old world order, declaration of his solidarity with the humiliated, obsession with the idea of service, emotional despair, resignation and passive reconciliation with one’s own misfortune, statement of one’s social credo, the experience of loneliness and marginality, optimistic vision of the earthly paradise against the background of prison-like gloom. As a result, eschatological motives appear: the domination of evil on earth inevitably will lead to its destruction for the sake of a new life and restoration of just law and order. In mood and stylistically, Franko’s jail poetry corresponds to the prison lyrics by Taras Shevchenko. Each of the nine poems in the cycle has been considered in terms of poetics, genre, imagery, literary means, versification, as well as intertextual parallels at the level of reminiscences and allusions. The researcher paid attention to the character of the lyrical hero, the internal plot of the cycle, chronotopic organization, leitmotifs, folklore structures. The philosophical meditations of the cycle “Mourning Songs”, perceived in the context of Franko’s biography, reflect the parallelism of the lyrical hero’s existence and the author’s psychobiography of the period marked by the first two arrests.

Envisioning Paradise

The majority of the murals at Dunhuang that depict Maitreya are dominated by his three assemblies, thereby emphasizing the salvific power of the future Buddha after he has descended to earth. This article examines scenes from the Maitreya murals, highlighting details appearing across the murals that allow us to understand how adherents imagined life in an earthly paradise. Most scenes in the murals accentuate the magnificence of life in Maitreya's terrestrial Buddhaland, characterized by manageable yet rewarding labor and a long life that never ends suddenly, all in a clean urban environment. Hence, in this realm some labor is still required and social hierarchies are maintained. Unlike the celestial realm of Amitābha Buddha, Maitreya's land is ruled by an ideal leader, the Wheel-Turning King Saṅkha. The article concludes by examining the tension between the power of the religious leader and the political ruler, evident even though the paintings do not include representations of Saṅkha himself. Rather, they depict his regalia, his gift, and his family in prominent positions, near Maitreya, thus suggesting that the future Buddha absorbed Saṅkha's political power, which parallels contemporaneous political and religious developments.

Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great inspired a body of literature that grew throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages by accumulating various episodes and local contributions across a host of languages, cultures, and appropriations. This extraordinary transmission of texts resulted in an ever evolving and often contradictory figure. In some accounts, Alexander’s ambition was a defining characteristic, in others benevolence; some writers idealized while others condemned Alexander; and in texts classified as histories from a modern perspective Alexander built an empire as the son of Philip of Macedon, while in texts classified as romance or legend Alexander was the illegitimate son of an Egyptian sorcerer and traveled to exotic lands populated by the creative lens of storytelling. Medieval writers engaged with a core set of plotlines inherited from their predecessors in Antiquity. These provided the narrative framework of Alexander’s childhood in Macedon, expansion of an empire stretching to India, and death in Babylon. However, countless adaptations and interpolations ensured the vibrancy of this narrative and created a version of Alexander dependent on availability of texts and authorial agenda. For example, writers and scribes in southern Italy had access to episodes that emphasized the limitations of Alexander’s ambition—how the intrepid explorer constructed a flying machine that the gods turned back to land and received prophecies of mortality in the far reaches of an earthly paradise. Under the influence of such accounts, they emphasized the temporality of Alexander’s career in allegorical terms that were, at least until these accounts traveled westward, quite different from the idealized warrior portrayed in French romances. The textual corpus that accounted for Alexander’s reception thus comprised a vast network founded on Greek and Latin but shaped by the vernacular. Navigating this network is a formidable task, and this article is written with a guiding principle in mind: to assist readers in finding their starting points for engaging with the medieval Alexander. It includes texts that were largely or exclusively devoted to Alexander’s exploits, and it identifies scholarly works intended for readers in the early stages of their navigation; more specialized research can be found in the scholarship cited. Finally, it organizes the medieval reception of Alexander the Great into two broad categories: Greek and Latin texts (both foundational accounts of Late Antiquity and medieval Latin literature) and the vernacular texts based on them.

Sull’umiltà nella Commedia

Dante deals specifically with the theme of humility only in the canto of the superbs ( Purgatory, X–XII). Still, the topic permeates the entire poem, from the moment Vergil invites Dante to follow him. Obedience is the predominant form that humility takes in Inferno. In Purgatory, it determines the choral forms of the language (prayer and singing), but it manifests itself most spectacularly in the Earthly Paradise procession, which takes the shape of a Cross, the highest symbol of humility in Christ and of Christianity. In Paradise, it is present in some key episodes (that of Cato, of St. Francis, and Dante’s theological exam). Yet, it is continuously signified in the language of image-symbols’ configuration that the blessed souls take in each heaven. Finally, it is humility that allows the Pilgrim to see God with his physical senses, which provide the lowest and most concrete form of knowledge, and yet the most sublime one.

Fra Ovidio e Brunetto, nel fiume del tempo

This article attempts to show how Dante Alighieri, in defining the image of humankind as inspired by values of innocence and harmony in an earthly paradise, draws a condition of defective beatitude just before a burst of even superior joy. So in the aim of outlining a beatitudo huius vitae still valid for a Christian Eden, the poet appeals to the text of Ovid’s Fasti through which in many occurrences he is building a harmonic image of human living that, in the shadow of forebears’ sin, only a future intervention of Grace will dispose for Dante’s words. Through exact allusive quotations, Dante opposes to the absolute time of Eden the idea of an imperfect time, tied to the pattern of an all-human knowledge, which Dante himself connected to the teaching and character of Brunetto Latini.

The Veronica (Tipped-in)

This chapter explores the significance of Dante’s use of the Veronica in the final chapters of the Vita nuova. Beginning with a tipped-in illustration from Botticelli in an early twentieth-century Spanish translation, this chapter uses the Veronica to highlight the work’s entanglement in the world and Dante’s desire to share the miracle of Beatrice with a larger public. Making Beatrice into a substitute Veronica, Dante draws on the unusual relation between original and copy that is already present in the Veronica itself, which is the impress of Christ’s face. Although the copy is honored as an original, the point of the image to produce copies, just as Dante wants later readers to reproduce his book. To copy Dante’s book gives Beatrice new life. Returning to Botticelli’s image, the chapter examines how Dante reprises many of the Vita nuova’s features discussed in the preceding chapters for his encounter with Beatrice in Earthly Paradise. The chapter concludes by taking up the controversial identification of Botticelli’s painting as a representation of Philology to argue for the connection between this lush and flowering figure and the conjunction of philology and world literature explored in this book.

The Interruption (Picture Frame)

This chapter uses Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s reframing of his painting The Salutation of Beatrice to consider the significance of Dante’s decision to present Beatrice’s death as an interruption that cuts off his composition of a canzone with the beginning of Jeremiah’s Lamentations. Exploring the adaptations of Dante’s fracture in Barthes, Glück, and Goodman, this chapter highlights Dante’s formal innovation which also interrupts the rhythm of reading that Dante uses the divisions to establish and then upset after Beatrice’s death. The chapter also explores the larger political implications of Dante’s quotation of Lamentations, which were controversially elaborated by Gabriele Rossetti, but anticipate Dante’s bold presentation of Beatrice in Earthly Paradise, where he overcomes his personal mourning by situating Beatrice in a broad political procession of world history.