As a banker's son, Ivanov spent his young manhood in the elite circle of Russian golden youth.

After practicing a variety of Russian Futurism, as promoted by Igor Severyanin, Ivanov came to associate himself with the Acmeism movement.

To augment his standing, he issued a book of memoirs, entitled Petersburg Winters, which contained a fictionalized or exaggerated account of his experiences with the Acmeists.

Together with his wife Irina Odoyevtseva and his fellow critic Georgy Adamovich, Ivanov became the principal arbiter of taste of the emigrant society, forging or destroying literary reputations.

In 1938 he published a prose poem Disintegration of the Atom, which was denounced by most of the émigrés (including Nabokov and Vladislav Khodasevich) and praised by his admirer V. Zlobin and Zinaida Gippius.