A way out of hell: Dante and the philosophy of personal salvation in post-Soviet Russia

Studies in East European Thought 75 (4):709-724 (2023)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

This article examines the transformation of Dante’s image in post-Soviet scholarship. The author shows how Russian philologists Vladimir Bibikhin, Olga Sedakova, and Georgii Chistiakov introduced a new image of Dante to post-Soviet readers in fresh translations of his work, scholarly writings, and lecture courses that revealed previously obscured philosophical and theological dimensions of his texts. The post-Soviet reader came into contact with a more complex image of Dante than previously portrayed in official Soviet literary scholarship: Dante the philosopher, the Christian humanist, the spiritual guide who calls upon individuals to embark upon a difficult but crucial existential journey. The author also shows how the unstable and transitional decade of the 1990s was a time of a particularly active study of Dante’s philosophical and poetic anthropology. Dante’s main themes (personal salvation, activism, living in tradition) resonated profoundly with intellectuals during the late Soviet and early post-Soviet years, which were marked by a special soteriological attitude and a belief that individuals and society not only can but must change.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 103,486

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2023-01-06

Downloads
20 (#1,099,492)

6 months
3 (#1,096,948)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations