The Un-Divine Comedy by Zygmunt Krasiński
Published 1835 · 25,000 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Drama, Classic Literature, Political Fiction
How hard is The Un-Divine Comedy to read?
The Un-Divine Comedy scores 79 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 74 out of 100
- Romantic Polish prose-poetry with biblical, classical and revolutionary vocabulary, and passages of visionary rhetoric.
- Sentence structure: 72 out of 100
- Elevated dramatic prose with long apostrophes and unmarked shifts between speech, vision and stage direction.
- Abstraction: 80 out of 100
- A philosophical drama about revolution, poetry and providence in which the characters function as positions in an argument.
- Information density: 74 out of 100
- Two full social orders, a revolutionary programme, and a theological argument, all compressed into four short parts.
- Narrative indirection: 76 out of 100
- The play refuses to endorse either side, its visions are unexplained, and the final apparition is given no interpretation.
- Symbolic density: 84 out of 100
- The phantom of Beauty, the blind poet-child, the fortress of the Holy Trinity and the closing vision form a dense allegorical scheme.
- Ironic distance: 78 out of 100
- The aristocrat defending a doomed order is drawn as a destroyer of everyone near him, and the revolutionary who wins is destroyed by the sight of what he denies.
- Resolution withholding: 90 out of 100
- The victorious revolutionary dies before a vision the play declines to explain, and neither side's cause is judged.
- Structural complexity: 72 out of 100
- Four parts split between a domestic tragedy and a revolutionary epic, in prose-poetry with lyrical prologues and no conventional act structure.
How The Un-Divine Comedy is regarded
The Un-Divine Comedy holds a literary regard score of 71 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.