Decameron. Boccaccio. Review.

Laughter through death, words through plague

How to survive when the world is collapsing? How to preserve your soul when there is the smell of the dead, fear and silence outside the windows? How not to go crazy when the rules have disappeared, the cities have fallen, the gods are silent? Giovanni Boccaccio gave the answer in the 14th century, and it is amazingly accurate even today:

There are a hundred stories to tell. You need to talk while you're alive. You need to laugh - seriously.

A book born against the backdrop of the end of the world

The Decameron was written in Florence during the Black Death, one of the most devastating epidemics in European history. Half the city died. Everything familiar disappeared. But it is precisely when the external perishes that a person begins to listen to the internal.

"The Decameron" is the psyche's response to the apocalypse. Not a rebellion, not hysteria, not a sermon, but therapy through words, flesh and imagination.

10 young people go into nature and start telling stories

Seven women and three men leave infected Florence for a secluded villa. There, in the garden, against the backdrop of greenery, wine, and birdsong, they tell a story every day. Thus, 100 short stories are born in 10 days.
But in reality, it is not about the number. It is about the fact that speech continues in general. That consciousness has not given up. That a person remains a person, even when all laws die.

Stories of love, flesh, cunning, fall, rapture, life

The Decameron contains all shades of humanity.

• Women cheat on their husbands - not out of malice, but out of boredom.
• The monks seduce girls and then repent, but not very sincerely.
• Merchants get rich and lose everything.
• Simpletons turn out to be wiser than philosophers.
• Intelligence saves more often than strength.
• And love is both redemption and temptation.

Boccaccio shows: man is neither an angel nor a beast. He is a man. Funny, absurd, touching, alive.

Psychology of the text: “storytelling as salvation”

Why do they tell? To keep from going crazy. To not feel like they are in the prison of death. To confirm: as long as I can talk, I am alive. As long as I can laugh, I am not a slave to fear.
Modern psychology calls it sublimation, narrative therapy. But in essence, it is an ancient magical gesture: transform chaos into history. Boccaccio knew it before all the terms.

Feminine energy at the center of the book

Seven women lead the game. They choose the themes, set up the space, become the queens of each day. They are the archetypes of mental endurance, intuition, beauty, fun.

This is a book in which a woman is not only an object of passion, but also a subject of wisdom. She can be cunning, soft, evil, funny - but she is always alive. Boccaccio pays tribute to the feminine spirit as a bearer of life in the midst of death.

Deep meanings behind the lightness

Many people mistakenly think that the Decameron is just anecdotes. But behind the fun is a thirst for life as ethics.

• This is a book about the right to pleasure in a world of suffering.
• This is a book about love without moralizing.
• This is a book about survival through laughter.
• And about the word as a force capable of preventing one from dying inside.

"The Decameron" Today: When Everything Falls Apart, Speak

For the reader of Central Planet, here's what's important to understand:

The Decameron is not about the Mi