Feast of Plato

Plato's "Feast" is a central work for world culture, interpreting love not only as a natural, but also as a social and creative principle. Many customs of falling in love and love relationships, as well as ideas about the value of a creative personality, go back to the "Feast". Bright and relief images of Socrates' interlocutors, heightened drama, playing with a variety of poetic and prose styles and now make the "Feast" an inexhaustible resource of the "novel" style of thinking. In a sense, "Feast" is not just a project of a novel as a literary work, but of a novel as a social institution. The meaning of Plato's complicated dialogue is far from being reduced to the glorification of idealized love, which is involuntarily suggested by outdated translations and interpretations. The text of the Feast is given in the translation by Professor Alexander Markov of the Russian State University of Economics, taking into account the latest philosophical and philological interpretations of Plato's central work.