Dante and His Poem as Perceived by Boris Zaitsev

The present article analyzes the last work written by Boris Zaitsev before emigrating from Russia: the article Dante and His Poem dedicated to Divine Comedy. At first glance, the article may seem to be a collection of sundry thoughts about Dante and his work. At the same time, its deeper meaning comes to the fore when one examines the main points made by the author and incorporates the article into his oeuvre as a whole. In the article, Zaitsev focuses on Dante as a human being (“history of the soul”) and on Divine Comedy as a fruit of his creative genius. Having lost his native country even before emigrating from it, Zaitsev desperately began to search for the “truth” in both life and work. In this quest, the exile and truth-seeker Dante served as Zaitsev’s Virgil in his voyage through unknown and often hostile territories. From this standpoint, Divine Comedy acquired a unique meaning for Zaitsev, who began to treat it as a Gospel of sorts. A comparison of this article with Zaitsev’s next work, the essay Saint Sergius of Radonezh that he wrote in emigration, shows the unified perspective of the writer’s work: the connection between truth and the Truth, between poetic word and the Word- Logos. Dante and Saint Sergius are shown as beacons and waymarks in the “gloomy forest” of life. Their life experience, described in the context of their difficult times, served as a source of strength and solace for Zaitsev and offered models of existential behaviour that helped him to break out from horror and gloom towards light and Truth.