К изданию курса лекций А.Н. Веселовского «Введение в “Божественную Комедию” Данте».

Abstract

This article presents the results of the publication project of A.N. Veselovsky’s last surviving lithographic course: “An Introduction to Dante’s Divine Comedy”. It is well-known that critics paid insufficient attention to such texts: on the one hand, because of Veselovsky’s negative statements about them and, on the other, because different compilers took part in their creation. However, the research that was made for this publication revealed how Veselovsky’s lithographic courses and, in particular, the course on Dante occupy an important place in his legacy. In particular, it was demonstrated that he makes extensive use of fragments of his own and of others’ texts to give a convincing picture of the historical and social environment, as well as of the development of literary traditions that underlie the Divine Comedy. In this course Dante is presented as the real founder of the Renaissance and of humanism as he summed up almost the entire Medieval tradition, consisting of a mixture of Christian and classical elements, and he used all this so to express his own worldview. Therefore, according to the authors of this article, the “Introduction to Dante’s Divine Comedy” is a necessary element not only for a better understanding of Veselovsky’s views in Italian studies, but also for the clarification of some premises concerning the theory of his “Historical Poetics”. Particular attention is then paid to the problem of establishing the written sources of hidden quotes within this series of lectures. By means of a thorough analysis of these quotes, it was demonstrated that Veselovsky employed them, in the same way as the entire content of his teaching, quite accurately during his lectures. This conclusion is also confirmed by the crucial and previously unknown witnesses of Evgeny V. Anichkov – one of Veselovsky’s first students. Essentially, the final conclusion of the reported work is that the series of lectures on Dante published further by the journal “Solovyov studies” can be confidently ranked among the legitimate corpus of works and the scientific heritage of Academician Alexander Nikolayevich Veselovsky. The final conclusion of this article is that the series of lectures on Dante, which are published in this edition of “Solovyov’s Studies”, can be certainly recognized as a legitimate part of Aleksandr N. Veselovsky’s works and academic heritage.