Vol. 15 (2021): XV International Symposium Contemporary Issues of Literary Studies : Literature and Pandemic. Historical and Thematic Experience
Conditions and Goals of Creating Literary Masterpieces During Pandemic

The idea of the Black Death in the Fiction

Ketevan Elashvili
Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature

Published 2021-12-20

Keywords

  • Pandemic,
  • Edgar Allan Poe,
  • Red Death,
  • Colors

Abstract

 

Georgian literature has one unusual feature – it reserves the right of artistic silence in relation to the fatal disease.

Edgar Allan Poe’s “Red Mask of Death” is just such a fierce pandemic illustration, but with a very mystical character.

It evokes a shocking feeling of excruciating emotion – the “red death march to the country”, from which any attempt to divert itself is in vain.

The “horror chain” is created with a virtual gradation of colors, where the symbolic collision of different, irrelevant tones in the “pandemic labyrinth” will lock the reader and find him in the face of the “red death”.