A Journal of the Plague Year

Main Ideas

• An immersion into the atmosphere of plague-stricken London, where fear and despair become an inseparable part of daily life, and the city itself turns into a living being, suffering and struggling to survive.
• An exploration of human nature under extreme circumstances: the clash of selfishness and compassion, the emergence of both base and noble traits of character, as disaster becomes a test for every soul.
• The embodiment of loneliness and alienation, when even in a crowd a person finds themselves alone before a universal threat, and familiar social bonds collapse under the weight of fear and distrust.
• A meditation on faith, fate, and divine providence, where the plague appears not only as a physical ordeal but also as a spiritual trial, compelling people to seek meaning and solace in religion.
• A detailed depiction of daily life, customs, and routines of the era, where the chronicle of disaster becomes a record of human resilience, ingenuity, and adaptability.
• The problem of credibility and subjectivity of testimony: the narrator balances between personal observation and rumor, between fact and conjecture, creating a complex mosaic of memory and time.