Vyacheslav Ivanov
Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov
(Russian: Вячеслав Иванович Иванов)
(February 16 (28), 1866–July 16, 1949)
was a Russian poet and playwright
associated with the movement of Russian
Symbolism. He was also a philosopher,
translator, and literary critic.
Early life
Born in Moscow, Ivanov graduated
from the First Moscow Gymnasium with a
gold medal and entered the Moscow
University where he studied history and
philosophy under Sir Paul Vinogradoff.
In 1886 he moved to the Berlin
University to study Roman law and
economics under Theodor Mommsen. During
his stay in Germany, he absorbed the
thoughts of Friedrich Nietzsche and
German Romantics, notably Novalis and
Friedrich Hölderlin.
In 1893 Ivanov met Lydia
Zinovieva-Annibal, a poet and
translator. Having both received an
Orthodox ecclesiastical divorce, they
married 5 years later, first settling in
Athens, then moving to Geneva, and
making pilgrimages to Egypt and
Palestine. During that period, Ivanov
frequently visited Italy, where he
studied the Renaissance art. The rugged
nature of Lombardy and the Alps became
the subject of his first sonnets, which
were heavily influenced by the medieval
poetry of Catholic mystics.
Poet and Classicist
At the turn of the 20th century,
Ivanov elaborated his views on the
spiritual mission of Rome and the
Ancient Greek cult of Dionysus. He
summed up his Dionysian ideas in the
treatise The Hellenic Religion of the
Suffering God (1904), which traces the
roots of literary art in general and the
art of tragedy in particular to ancient
Dionysian mysteries.
Somov's frontispiece for Ivanov's
book Cor Ardens (1907)
Ivanov's first collection, Lodestars,
was published in 1903. It contained many
of his pieces written a decade earlier
and was praised by the leading critics
as a new chapter in the Russian
Symbolism. The poems were compared to
Milton's and Trediakovsky's on account
of their detached, calculated archaism.
In 1905 Ivanov made his triumphant
return to St Petersburg, where he was
much lionized as a foreign curiosity. A
turreted house where he and
Zinovieva-Annibal settled became the
most fashionable literary salon of the
era, and was frequented by poets
(Alexander Blok), philosophers (Nikolai
Berdyayev), artists (Konstantin Somov),
and dramatists (Vsevolod Meyerhold). The
latter staged Calderon's Adoration of
the Cross in Ivanov's house. The poet
exerted a formative influence on the
Russian Symbolist movement, whose main
tenets were formulated in the turreted
house.
According to James H. Billington,
"Viacheslav the Magnificent" was the
crown prince and chef de salon of the
new society, which met in his seventh
floor apartment "The Tower," overlooking
the gardens of the Tauride Palace in St.
Peterburg. Walls and partitions were
torn down to accommodate the increasing
numbers of talented and disputatious
people who flocked to the Wednesday
soirees, which were rarely in full swing
until after supper had been served at 2
A.M.
Beyond widowhood
His wife's death in 1907 was a great
blow to Ivanov. Thereafter the dazzling
Byzantine texture of his poetry wore
thin, as he insensibly slipped into
theosophy and mysticism. The poet even
claimed to have had a vision of his late
wife ordering him to marry the daughter
by her first marriage. Indeed, he
married this stepdaughter in 1910; their
son Dmitry was born 2 years later.
Anna Akhmatova
According to an autobiographical
sketch written by Anna Akhmatova, Ivanov
first met her in 1910. At the time,
Akhmatova was still married to Nikolai
Gumilev, who first brought her to the
turreted house. There, Akhmatova read
some of her verse aloud to Ivanov, who
ironically quipped, "What truly heavy
romanticism. A short time later, Gumilev
left his wife for a big game hunting
holiday in Ethiopia. In the aftermath,
Ivanov tried very hard to persuade
Akhmatova to leave her immature husband,
saying, "You'll make him a man if you
do." Moreover, Akhmatova indignantly
recalled that Ivanov would often weep as
she recited her verse at the turreted
house, but would later, "vehemently
criticize," the same poems at literary
salons. Akhmatova would never forgive
him for this. Her ultimate evaluation of
her former patron was as follows, "Vyacheslav
was neither grand nor magnificent (he
thought this up himself) but a 'catcher
of men.'"
Translator and scholar
Upon their return from an Italian
voyage (1912-13), Ivanov made the
acquaintances of art critic Mikhail
Gershenzon, philosopher Sergei Bulgakov,
and composer Alexander Scriabin. He
elaborated many of his Symbolist
theories in a series of articles, which
were finally revised and reissued as
Simbolismo in 1936. At that time, he
relinquished poetry in favour of
translating the works of Sappho,
Alcaeus, Eschylus, and Petrarch into the
Russian language.
After 1917
In the abysmal years following the
October Revolution, Ivanov concentrated
on his scholarly work and completed a
treatise on Dionysus and Early
Dionysianism (1921), which earned him a
Ph.D. degree in philology. The new
Communist government didn't allow him to
travel outside the Soviet Union until
1924.
Blok has Died
A collapsed door in the deaf wall,
And the heaps of overturned stones,
And piled upon them scrap metal,
And the depths that unfurl below.
And white ashes fanned by the wind –
That's all: God's voice, “The dead will
rise.”
Vyacheslav Ivanov. 10 August 1921
Emigration
From Azerbaijan he proceeded to
Italy, where he settled in Rome. In
Rome, Ivanov found employmen as
professor of Old Church Slavonic at the
Russicum. Ivanov was received into
the Russian Catholic Church in 1937. In
an interview for the Russicum's
newspaper, Ivanov argued that, prior to
their Great Schism, Latin and Byzantine
Christianity were "two principles that
mutually complement each other." He
climaxed with the words, "The Church
must permeate all branches of life:
social issues, art, culture, and just
everything... The Roman Church
corresponds to such criteria and by
joining this Church I become truly
Orthodox." His last collections of verse
were the Roman Sonnets (1924) and the
Roman Diary (1944). Many other poems
appeared posthumously.
Ivanov died in Rome in 1949 and was
interred at the Cimitero Acattolico, not
far from the graves of Karl Briullov and
Alexander Ivanov.
