“Putin’s terrible crimes in Ukraine should be prosecuted, but he’s still not the worst war criminal alive today.” —Khalil Bendib, “Cartoon: Dante’s Inferno, War Crimes Edition,” Otherwords, April 5, 2023 (retrieved March 6, 2024)
“Seven Long Centuries Ago, Dante Imagined the End of War and the Unity of Humankind”
“It’s difficult to imagine any sort of connection between the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and something that occurred in an unremarkable bedroom in Italy almost exactly 700 years prior. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the deep historical connections between Russia and Ukraine, at many times one and the same state, during the preceding seven centuries. But last autumn marked the 700th anniversary of the death of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri, from malaria, in Ravenna, on September 14, 1321. His bones lie there still.
“And though it’s almost wholly unknown today, Dante was arguably the first great political philosopher to make a systematic case that all wars between nations might someday be eliminated entirely, and that it is within the power of human ingenuity to cast war forever onto the rubble heap of history. Dante showed us the pathway out of the Ukraine war. Dante anticipated both federalism and democracy.
“And Dante showed us how someday humanity might abolish war.” —Tad Daley, “Seven Long Centuries Ago, Dante Imagined the End of War and the Unity of Humankind,” Jewish Journal, August 8, 2022 (retrieved February 6, 2024)
In the Valley of Tears by Dawn of Winter
The 1998 metal album, In the Valley of Tears, by the Ukrainian band Dawn of Winter uses Gustave Doré’s illustration, Paramours and Flatterers as its album art.
“Almost two hours’ worth of superbly crafted and passionately expressed doom metal from the German underground! No frills, no fads, no gimmicks, no asinine image! This is TRUE DOOM the way it’s meant to sound. A formula enduring in the hearts of real genre fans until the end of days.” – I HATE
Find the album here.
Find the illustration here.
Contributed by Gianluca Giuseffi Grippa.
“In Kyiv, I saw Dante under sandbags – a modern image of the hell of war”
“I took quite a lot of phot
os on my phone when I was in Ukraine this year, but this one jumped out at me as I was scrolling through them. Here we have Dante – the Italian poet, philosopher, writer – with his marble head poking up out of the sandbags. It’s in a park on Volodymyr Hill in the centre of Kyiv.”
“It’s not just an arresting image. Dante is a harbinger of the Renaissance; he’s a symbol of culture and learning. And that is the opposite of war, which is a regression to dark times. This is what Ukraine and Kyiv are having to labour under – and so Dante finds himself stifled by sandbags. Of course, one also thinks of the Divine Comedy and the seventh circle of hell, which is violence. That’s what the people of Ukraine have been enduring: a modern circle of hell.”
“The fact that Dante had to be covered with sandbags tells you everything – the Russians are attacking things that are nothing to do with a military campaign. That is a particular hell, when civilians are seen as legitimate targets for an advancing army. And as soon as I see this image, all of this floods into my mind.” –Clive Myrie, The Guardian, December 12, 2022
