In Gorky’s play, the pandemic as a disruptive event reveals a number of tensions and divides, between science and society first of all, but also between socio-economic classes and subcultures, which become interconnected through globalisation but evolve at an uneven pace. 
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The cholera epidemic revealed, as Maxim Gorky phrased it, the co-existence of incompatible ‘civilisations’, increasingly close to one another, and yet evolving along diverging paths: the local world of rural existence and the global world of bourgeois civilisation.

Hub Zwart