At the time of writing, Liv Stromquist’s comic book Yes to Life has reached second place in DagensNyheter’s (DN) critics list of the week’s best Swedish-language non-fiction and fiction. From the list one can see that DN’s literary critics believe that Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is a worse book than a comic book by a feminist activist who describes her writing as originating from the following observation: ”As long as the world, Newsmill and DN’s front page look as they do, there are enough things that already put people with sensible opinions into deep shock every day”.

While Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which first appears on the list in place four, tries to portray the essence of the European inter-war experience, the enthusiastic critics of Stromquist’s work agree that one of the most enjoyable aspects of her new book is the joke about the former Labour Minister, Sven Otto Littorin’s painting Work-First, which is going to be ”the only trace of culture that the Conservatives leave behind”, when the picture is discovered in the future at ”the excavation of Peppe’s Bodega”.

There is perhaps reason to take Liv Stromquist at her word. Anyone who considers it relevant to criticise their politicians for not having left behind other cultural traces than an abstract painting to a charity shop, should of course have some sort of idea ??how the future traces of Swedish culture of the early 2000s should look. And also ask what kind of cultural traces actually have the potential to survive – and why.

One way to answer these questions is to go back in time, and consider why the centuries-old works that still excite us today have survived. Such works are Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy. It remains an obvious reference point, both in the television series The Sopranos as in Karl-Ove Knausgard’s inferno journey through Sweden in Min Kamp (My Struggle), as well as in films such as Seven, computer games and the music of Brazilian thrash metal bands; as well as in a lot of less commercial contemporary culture.

In Dante’s case, one can assume that the admiration and interest that he continues to generate in one generation after the other has to do with the fact that he – like, for example, Goethe or Thomas Mann – managed to summarise, visualise, and for new generations accommodate and transform the essence of the rich humanist cultural tradition that runs from ancient times until today. It’s about a project that is in equal parts megalomaniacal and self-destructive, where the artist can be said to put himself in the service of civilisation’s development. He or she serves as a link in the transmission from the past to the future of culturally sophisticated and valuable heirlooms. Whose value is intensified and raised in line with the artist’s time and experiences.

But that today’s critics prefer the ephemeral and that which is bound in the present – instead of Mann, Goethe and Dante – is perhaps because it requires so much more to approach the canonical works of the Western civilisation process. It requires us to move beyond today’s worldview; that we rid ourselves of our time prejudices about what is good, beautiful, true and essential; that we for a moment try to get a handle on what unites beyond time differences and cultural differences; that we try to discern that which through centuries of cultural deposits and sediments have been shown to communicate something essential about our lives.

This is not necessarily an easy task. Eugene Napoleon Tigerstedt, Sweden’s foremost expert on Dante, who is also portrayed in this issue of Axess, has described this process in an equally curious and pertinent way in his work on the Florentine poet, Dante. The Time, The Man, The Work (1967):

Books are mirrors, even more so if it is a poet that is reflected in them. And only will a poem remain alive if generation after generation rediscovers itself in it. For, to speak to us, the dead poets and shadows in Odysseus’ Hades need to drink blood – our own.

To approach, in the Tigerstedt way, the cultural treasures of the past entails a completely different measure of sacrifice than possible from the perspective that now dominates in Swedish cultural world, from which The Divine Comedy is casually dismissed because its attitude to women (for obvious reasons) does not seem as contemporary as Liv Stromquist’s, or because of its description of Islam is disliked by Edward Said.

We hope nevertheless that the present issue of Axess will inspire more people to make this sort of sacrifice. It is, ultimately, necessary for cultures and societies to remain vital and humane: that the works of civilisation are kept alive and current.