Georgy Ivanov
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Georgii Vladimirovich Ivanov
(Russian: Гео́ргий Влади́мирович Ива́нов
) (1894–1958) was a leading poet and
essayist of the Russian emigration
between the 1930s and 1950s.
As a banker's son, Ivanov spent his
young manhood in the elite circle of
Russian golden youth. He started writing
pretentious verses, imitative of
Baudelaire and the French Symbolists, at
a precocious age. Although his technique
of versification was impeccable, he had
no life experience to draw upon. The
favourite subjects of his early poetry
were Rococo mannerisms and gallant
festivals. Unsurprisingly, he named two
of his books "The Embarkment for
Cythera", alluding to Watteau's great
painting.
After dallying with a puerile variety
of Russian Futurism, as promoted by Igor
Severyanin, Ivanov came to associate
himself with the Acmeism movement.
Although not considered a major talent,
the 20-year-old was addressed or
mentioned in the poems by Osip
Mandelshtam and Anna Akhmatova. Georgii
Ivanov was also considered to be one of
the best pupils of the informal Guild of
Poets school organized by Nikolay
Gumilyov and Sergei Gorodetsky.
Ivanov was the only prominent member
of this circle who emigrated to the
West. His natural arrogance and
peremptory judgements easily won him
respect and admiration from his younger
contemporaries. He self-consciously
promoted himself as the only remnant of
the highly sophisticated milieu of the
Russian Silver Age. To augment his
standing, he issued a book of memoirs,
entitled Petersburg Winters, which
contained a fictionalized or widely
exaggerated account of his experiences
with the Acmeists. The book alienated
Ivanov from his elder contemporaries but
won instant acclaim from his disciples.
Together with the fellow critic
Georgy Adamovich and his own wife Irina
Odoyevtseva, Ivanov became the principal
arbiter of taste of the emigrant
society, forging or destroying literary
reputations at will. However, their
literary taste was somewhat deficient:
they inadvertently dismissed
Tsvetayeva's genuine lyrics (when
anonymously submitted by her to a poetry
contest) as a crude imitation of
Tsvetayeva's manner. They
enthusiastically feuded with Berlinese
Russian litterateurs, with Vladimir
Nabokov becoming the favourite target of
their attacks. Nabokov revenged himself
by satirizing Ivanov in one of his best
known short stories, Spring in Fialta,
and by subjecting them to a clever
mystification, which resulted in
Adamovich's immoderate praise of
Nabokov's verses printed under an alias.
Afflicted with alcoholism and
suffering from despondency, Ivanov sank
ever lower. It was in conditions of
abject penury and total despair that
Ivanov's best poems were created. The
more he let himself go down as a person,
the more he rose as a poet. His art
culminated in his last cycle of poems,
written in the days preceding his death.
In one of his last pieces, Ivanov
prophetically promised "to return to
Russia as poems". Actually, his wife
returned to Leningrad during the
Perestroika and died there in 1990.
Following Ivanov's death, his
reputation has been steadily augmented.
His "poetry of brilliant despair", as
one critic put it, is taken by some to
presage the tenets of French
Existentialism.
