Mass epidemics that claim many lives, create an impassable divide between the history of «before» and «after» the pandemic, and conceptualize a new worldview have always been the focus of literature. These days they get their visual resolution in cinema too. In light of recent events, colored by the new COVID-19 global pandemic, the theme of global epidemics is becoming more relevant and entering a new stage in literary, dramatic, and cinematic subjects. The subject of this article is the phenomenon of a pandemic in literature, in particular in the dramas of Wilson, Pushkin, Vodolazkin, united by the common theme of the plague as a metaphor for the destruction of established canons, the decline of the world order, morality, and traditional social relations and values, as well as the pandemic theme in cinema, based on direct or indirect references to well-known literary subjects. The purpose of the article is to give the most comprehensive representation of the artistic reception of the pandemic, based on examples of dynamic visualization (drama, film plot). The limited academic discussions of this topic determine the novelty of the article, which is based on the widest possible range of literary and cinematic references to epidemics throughout history.
epidemic; plot; visualization; drama; disaster films.