Dante Alighieri and the Theatre of Fate

Readers always perceive classical texts as something given—as if the very form in which they arose were the only possible one. I suggest the reader asks an interesting question: why was Dante’s “Divine Comedy” written? Why did it take precisely that form? What genre does this text belong to?

To get closer to answers, we will turn to the intellectual tradition of the ancient Mediterranean and medieval Iran, discover a new genre of philosophical text—“a journey into oneself”—enter Dante’s inner theater, examine his staging, and evaluate the performances of the actors in this peculiar monodrama. But that’s not enough. To make a guess about the reason for the emergence of the “Divine Comedy,” we need to consider all of Dante’s texts as a system, as one single text, and understand how it relates to the life strategy of the Florentine poet. Only then, at the end of the journey, a shadow of understanding will appear before us—of the thoughts, forces, and circumstances capable of producing in a person that “forced genius.”