Last update:
24-Jan-2024

Pandemics and epidemics constitute a social phenomenon that has marked art throughout time. Art, like clear water and access to quality health care, is an indicator of the civilization of any society. Painting, photography, sculpture, music and literature in the case of illness present different aspects of the disease and represent not only the suffering body, but also the pain of the soul. Music evokes memories, whereas images depict not only the suffering body but also the feelings of suffering. The Spanish flu was depicted in Edvard Munch's self-portrait and in a sketch of the dead Gustav Klimt by his dear friend Egon Schiele. In literature, masterpieces of world and modern Greek literature depict epidemics and pandemics that lead to the collapse of the body, loss of health and life, but also of compassion, empathy and, ultimately, the essence of moral human existence. From Daniel Defoe's "A journal of the plague year", Edgar Allan Poe's "King pest", Jack London's "The Scarlet plague", Nobel laureate Albert Camus' iconic allegorical "The plague", to Orhan Pamuk's "Nights of plague", a novel published in 2022, the context is the same; fear, panic, apathy, and the attempt to escape death. The Black Death of the Middle Ages is Dracula and the Vampire himself. In modern Greek literature, isolated Greece experienced another Middle Ages, that of leprosy and Spinalonga. To this day, epidemics lead to racism, stigmatization and dehumanization. The virus of COVID-19 is the Chinese virus, the foreign virus that comes from afar. In the years of the modern pandemic, books related to this topic are now best sellers.

Key words: Epidemics, Greek literature, Pandemics, World literature.