The Un Divine Comedy

Count Henryk, is an conflicted poet, who find himself leading, together with his fellow aristocrats, a defense of the Holy Trinity castle, against revolutionary forces professing democratic and atheist ideals.

Accepting Dante's prophetic truth claims on their own terms, Teodolinda Barolini proposes a "detheologized" reading as a global new approach to the Divine Comedy. Not aimed at excising theological concerns from Dante, this approach instead attempts to break out of the hermeneutic guidelines that Dante structured into his poem and that have resulted in theologized readings whose outcomes have been overdetermined by the poet. By detheologizing, the reader can emerge from this poet's hall of mirrors and discover the narrative techniques that enabled Dante to forge a true fiction. Foregrounding the formal exigencies that Dante masked as ideology, Barolini moves from the problems of beginning to those of closure, focusing always on the narrative journey. Her investigation--which treats such topics as the visionary and the poet, the One and the many, narrative and time--reveals some of the transgressive paths trodden by a master of mimesis, some of the ways in which Dante's poetic adventuring is indeed, according to his own lights, Ulyssean.

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The main theme is sociopolitical conflict -- in Krasiński's words, "[between] aristocracy and democracy". The plot of the drama takes place in the near future, where Krasiński used recent contemporary events, such as the French Revolution, and the ensuing power struggle between the Jacobins and other factions as inspiration and extrapolating a number of social trends, describing a fictional pan-European revolution against the Christian aristocracy. The protagonist of the drama, Count Henry (in Polish, Henryk), is a conflicted poet, who find himself leading, together with his fellow aristocrats, a defense of the Holy Trinity castle, against revolutionary forces professing democratic and atheist ideals, commanded by a leader named Pancras (in Polish, Pankracy). In the end, both sides are portrayed as a failure: while the revolutionaries take the castle, their leader increasingly doubts the righteous of their cause, and the drama ends with him seeing the vision of the Christianity being triumphant after all.