From parody to polemical pamphlet: Gombrowiczian deformations of Dante

The chapter traces the presence and use of Dante's name and work in Gombrowicz's work, and then focuses on the pages of his October 1966 Diary, later published separately in a scandalous French-Polish booklet (Sur Dante), in which Gombrowicz criticised the first two tercets of Canto III of the Inferno, proposing a supposedly better rewriting of the same. The methodological approach to the text in question is both philological and hermeneutical: which version of the Divine Comedy does Gombrowicz rely on? How does he manipulate Dante's text? And for what purpose? The structure of Gombrowicz's writing seems to contain useful elements to understand the deep reasons behind it. In just a few pages, in a style that mixes philosophical seriousness and iconoclastic provocation, dramatic experience and programmatic immaturity, Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" blends with Augustine's reflection on evil and with the age-old debate on theodicy, while pain stands out as the ultimate, ineliminable and unacceptable essence of human life.