Vyacheslav Ivanov's work

The creative legacy of Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949) includes a large corpus of original and translated poetic works, journalism, philosophical essays, literary and antiquarian monographs.

In literary studies, this book is placed on the same level as "Gold in Azure" by Andrei Bely and "Verses on the Beautiful Lady" by A. Blok — it was a transition to the aesthetic contemplation of the highest sphere of the spirit in Russian poetry.

The poetic intentions in this book go back to the European quests of the scientist Ivanov, but his own theoretical insights are presented as deeply intimate inner experiences, in which mind and sensual flash are indistinguishable.

In 1902, when Vyacheslav Ivanovich was introduced to the work of Verlaine, Lydia Dmitrievna emphasized that they were "beautiful poems"; on the same basis Ivanov then praised Minsky and Balmont: he liked them for themselves, not for their "novelty".

In E. Zeller's book on Greek philosophy (preserved in Ivanov's library), a large section was devoted to the Pythagoreanism, whose union was defined as "an organization of mysteries" held in the form of an orgy.

Ivanov introduced the concept of the symphonic principle, by which he understood the architectonics of the whole, organized by the variation of themes, leitmotifs, sound repetitions, and the creation of rhythmic dynamics with the dominance of the collective choral beginning or the leading "voice" in the dialogue, as in ancient tragedy or lyric.

The reason for writing the sonnets was the hospitalization of his wife Vera and son Dmitry in the sanatorium "Serebryany Bor", which was located outside the city at that time, and Vyacheslav Ivanovich had to travel a considerable distance by sleigh in the winter cold and off-road to visit them.

Russian Symbolism, according to Ivanov, did not want to and could not be "only art", its mission is theurgy, but before the realization of the theurgic task the symbolists will have to test "antithesis" (the sensitivity of Vrubel's nature in general led him to madness).

Ivanov's report was probably connected with his cycle of lectures on Dostoevsky, in which he argued about the agiology and demonology of Fyodor Mikhailovich and the doctrine of the rebirth of the state into the Church (Conversation in Zosima's Cell, The Brothers Karamazov, book 2, ch.

[38] In the second half of 1911, the activities of the RPS and the Ivanov Section began to arouse the suspicion of the authorities, and according to the available data, only three lectures were read in the 1911-1912 season, including one by Andrei Bely.

In the Roman years Ivanov himself characterized his views as "pagan humanism" and "the heresy of the dark kings", but, according to R. Bird, many of his ideas are of considerable interest to Orthodox theology.

The medievalist E. Ananyin, who communicated with Ivanov in Italy, left the following judgment about his religiosity:His religion was something luminous, without a shadow of cruelty, and he called his creed, following some Renaissance thinkers, "docta pietas," which harmoniously combined religious intuition with ancient philosophy.

[55] The act of conversion itself took place on March 17 of the Julian calendar, the feast of St. Vyacheslav, at his altar in the transept of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, in the presence of a Russian Catholic priest, Father Vladimir Abrikosov.

Moreover, judging from his correspondence with S. Frank in 1947, in the last years of his life Ivanov still argued about the unity of "Greek" and "Latin" and pushed subjectivism in the ritual understanding of religion to the limit.

Segal, commenting on this fragment, drew attention to two aspects: neither for Shor nor for Ivanov there is an Anglo-American world, and Vyacheslav Ivanovich's remark, despite its brevity, was partly a prediction of the direction of the culture of developed Stalinism.

The formation of Ivanov's views on ancient Dionysianism was equally influenced by academic studies in Germany, work in Athens in 1901-1902, translations of Aeschylus, and orgiastic manifestations in Soviet Russia and Shiite Azerbaijan.

[70] He first turned to this problem as a philologist in Germany, when he himself had to define himself in the discussion about Nietzsche von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf and Rohde, then it became a constant source of his poetic work in different dimensions, with the invariability of the ideas about Dionysianism compensated by the multiplicity and variability of the addressees.

Ivanov was "fatally unprepared" to accept a historical approach to the religious cults of the Eastern Mediterranean, he wrote in a review of Kerenyi's book on Hellenistic syncretism (1928), and failed to see the development of his own ideas.

On the contrary, he tried to prove that the Hellenic religion of the suffering God was an indigenous Greek phenomenon and even a guarantee of the triumph of this doctrine, without noticing that in the academic mainstream the question of the "independent" or "borrowed" character of the cult has long since been replaced by problems of content and interpretation.

Ivanov's position here was strictly idealistic: "to establish, describe and interpret in all its uniqueness a certain creative act of the Hellenic spirit"; esotericism turned out to be more important for him than the socio-cultural dimension of orgiastic religions.

Accordingly, in the Roman period, the concept of Dionysianism in Vyacheslav Ivanovich turned into an instrument of search for spiritual community "among his own", which was openly confessional and ideological in nature (von Vilamomitz was a Protestant).

[77] In the 1910s, the methodological turn in the study of Dostoevsky was directed along the path from psychologism and discrete analysis of characters and their ideologies to the principle of form — a consistently teleological consideration of the artistic work as a whole.

Secondly, it is the thesis that Dostoevsky's novels do not contain "things of the world" but exclusively "people — human personalities", which precedes Bakhtin's assertion of the dominant role of self-consciousness in the construction of the hero's image.

[86] Talking to M. Altman in Baku, Ivanov spoke unfavorably of Zelinsky's translations of "Sophocles", and was dissatisfied both with their literary merits and with the fact that the text was "drowned" in commentary.

As early as 1913, Sabashnikov personally visited Ivanov in Rome, and as a result they reached a new agreement: in addition to Aeschylus, Vyacheslav Ivanovich undertook to translate Dante's text "La Vita Nuova".

Ivanov with his Italian interests tried to realize three projects - translations of selected sonnets of Petrarch's "Il Canzoniere", the whole poetic corpus of Michelangelo and the "Divine Comedy".

Lo Gatto's main project was the translation into Italian of "Eugene Onegin", which he had published in prose in the 1920s, and then he set about creating a poetic equivalent, in which he was constantly consulted by Ivanov.

[106] The most important semantic layer of the narrative is the unbroken thousand-year tradition of Russian literature, from the "Primary Chronicles" and "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" to A. С. Pushkin and F. M. Dostoevsky to the Symbolists and Futurists (V. Khlebnikov).

For Ivanov the whole Russian culture appeared as something integral and complete, and in the period when he was actively writing the "Tale", Holy Russia has gone to "the rest of the Lord", and those who remain on earth could only hope for its coming resurrection.

Since the early 1980s, international symposia devoted to Ivanov have been organized at the universities of Yale (1981), Rome (1983), Pavia (1986), Heidelberg (1989), Geneva (1992), and Budapest (1995), each of which (except for the Roman one) was accompanied by the publication of a collection of articles.