Philosophical Tales

The heroes of Voltaire’s novellas appear “from the outside,” and the freshness of their perception sharply highlights the ugliness of reality. In this reality, priests take up against Zadig for the fact that he persuades widows not to burn themselves on their husbands’ corpses. The naive one doesn’t understand why, for marriage with a beloved person, approval is needed from the Roman pope living in another country and speaking a foreign language—and why the actions of the religious people so often diverge from what is written in the Bible.

Micromegas the giant is asked not to trouble himself with destroying the Earth, since people handle that themselves, and the optimistic Candide faces cruelty and violence as the natural state of the world. Voltaire was not a revolutionary, however his mind and talent made him unmistakably find the “pain points” of society. His stories, created in the second half of the 18th century, are still often read as if they were written yesterday.