Abstract
From a contemporary perspective, the current COVID-19 pandemic is undoubtedly an extraordinary event, but historically speaking pandemics are periodically recurring phenomena and intimately connected with socio-economic processes of globalisation. Therefore, history may serve as a backdrop for coming to terms with the present, by comparing current challenges with previous events that are both sufficiently similar and sufficiently different. In this article, the COVID-19 crisis will be assessed from a humanities perspective, using a pandemic drama entitled Children of the Sun (written by Russian novelist and playwright Maxim Gorky in 1905) as a critical mirror. In Gorky’s play, the pandemic as a disruptive event reveals a number of tensions and divides, between science and society first of all, but also between socio-economic classes and subcultures, which become interconnected through globalisation but evolve at an uneven pace. Thus, Gorky’s drama addresses a number of themes that are still relevant for COVID-19 controversies, such as the relationship between basic and applied research, global competition and vaccine development, science and suspicion, and the socio-economic unevenness between the global North and the global South.
Highlights
Whereas from a contemporary perspective the current COVID-19 pandemic is undoubtedly an extraordinary event, historically speaking there are many telling precedents.Law, Culture and the Humanities 00(0)Pandemics are periodically recurring phenomena and intimately connected with socioeconomic processes of globalisation
The COVID-19 crisis will be assessed from a humanities perspective, using a pandemic drama written by Russian novelist and playwright Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) more than a century ago as a critical mirror or point of reference
The COVID-19 pandemic and the interaction between viroscience and society will be studied via a literary detour
Summary
Whereas from a contemporary perspective the current COVID-19 pandemic is undoubtedly an extraordinary event, historically speaking there are many telling precedents. Maxim Gorky, a Marxist author (whose adopted surname means ‘bitter’),[5] uses cholera to address issues such as globalisation, technological innovation and the multiple tensions involved in uneven (‘non-simultaneous’) socio-economic development. He wrote his play while being imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress (Saint Petersburg) during the ‘first’ (abortive) Russian Revolution in 1905, charged with inciting the people to revolt. The current pandemic is caused by a virus (the SARS-CoV-2 virus) while cholera was caused by a microbe (the Vibrio Cholerae bacterium), from a critical (dialectical) humanities perspective, some striking parallels may be noticed between these disruptive events, and triangulation (a historical and literary detour) may help us to come to term with the socio-cultural impact of the current COVID-19 crisis
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