Dante's life. Boccaccio J.

The greatest poet of Italy Dante Aligieri gained many admirers among the descendants, but, of course, the most devoted of them was Giovanni Bokkaccio. The library of the author of the immortal “Decameron” had his own copies of “New Life” and “Comedy”, for which he introduced the epithet “Divine”. Carefully studying these works, Bokkaccio compiled comments on the first seventeen songs of “Ada” and established in Florence, from where Dante was once expelled, a special department to explain his monumental poem.

a kind of panegyric Bokkaccio became a “small treatise In the praise of Dante, ”or“ Dante's life ”. As a biography, this book is very unusual: from extensive information, the author chooses only a few - representing the character of Dante, his scientific and poetic classes, philosophical and creative doctrine. Undoubtedly familiar with the other aspects of his life, Bokkaccio writes the “spiritual biography” of the great genius, simultaneously asserting his own aesthetic principles, ascending the praise of true poetry.

“Dante's life” came to us in three editions: one, more lengthy, more extensive created between 1357 and 1362, and two other, shorter and later ones. This publication reproduces the text of the first of them in the talented translation of Elga Linetskaya - “Akhmatova Russian translation”, according to the expression of Mark Donskoy.