Similarly to his contemporaries Hugo von Hoffmannsthal and Max Reinhardt in the Germanosphere, Ivanov was a hugely influential avant garde dramatic theorist and sought, under the influence of Ancient Greek, Medieval, and Spanish Golden Age theatre, to blur and even to erase the fourth wall and make the audience into participants in the dramas they attended.

Ivanov spent the remainder of his life in Rome as a professor at both the Pontifical Oriental Institute and the Russicum, where his students included future Martyrs and confessors under Stalinism Bishop Theodore Romzha, Fr.

Born in Moscow, Ivanov lost his father, a minor civil servant, when he was only five years old and was subsequently raised within the Russian Orthodox Church by his deeply religious mother.

[4] Through their shared descent from 17th-century Afro-Russian military officer and aristocrat Abram Petrovich Gannibal, Lidia was also a distant relation of Russian national poet Alexander Pushkin.

Influenced by his recent discovery and enthusiasm for the philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Ivanov and Zinovieva-Annibal surrendered to their mutual attraction, "during a tempestuous night at the Colosseum, which he described in verse as a ritualistic breaking of taboos and regeneration of ancient religious fervor.

[5] Despite the rejection of Christian morality represented by both the adulterous beginning of his relationship with Lidia and their decision, similarly to many other members of Tsarist Russia's literary bohemia, to have an open marriage, Ivanov would paradoxically recall, "Through each other we discovered ourselves - and more than ourselves: I would say that we found God.

Eliot, Ivanov drew heavily, according to literary scholar Robert Bird, upon, "epigraphs from a host of languages ... and in a variety of alphabets", while also experimenting, "in grafting Classical Greek metres and syntax onto Russian verse", and revelling, "in obscure archaisms and recondite allusions to antiquity.

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."[10] According to his close friend Nikolai Berdyaev, "Ivanov succeeded in combining an intense poetical imagination with an amazing knowledge of Classical philology and Greek religion.

"[11] Nicholas Zernov later wrote about both Ivanov and the meetings in the Tower, "He attracted the intellectuals and the artists who discussed religion, philosophy, literature, and politics; they listened to music and the recitation of poetry.

Berdyaev usually presided over these gatherings, but the lead was taken by Ivanov, a man who brought people of the most diverse views and convictions into one fold; Christians and sceptics, monarchists and republicans, Symbolists and Classicists, occultists and mystical anarchists.

[13] Ivanov regarded drama as having the potential to be the most powerful of the arts and as capable of taking over the liturgical function of the Russian Orthodox Church and restoring religious belief to a society that had lost its faith in Christianity.

[14] Ivanov wrote in an early essay, "Let us take a look at drama, which in modern history has replaced the spectacles of universal and holy events as reflected in miniature and purely signifying forms on the stages of the mystery plays.

Decades later, while living in Paris as an anti-communist White emigre who had returned to her ancestral religious roots, Skobtsova felt deeply ashamed as she recalled the hedonistic atmosphere among the intellectuals at the Tower.

According to Symbolist conviction, divisions between various fields of knowledge and artistic disciplines were artificial: poetry was intimately linked not only to painting, music, and drama, but also to philosophy, psychology, religion, and myth.

[19] The ideas of Aleksei Remizov (who was the literary manager of Vsevolod Meyerhold's New Drama Association at this time), Fyodor Sologub, and the Mystical Anarchism of Georgy Chulkov were all part of this second phase of Russian Symbolism.

[20] Ivanov proposed the creation of a new type of mass theatre, which he called a "collective action," that would be modelled on ancient religious rituals, Athenian tragedy, and the medieval mystery play.

[14] This would be achieved by overcoming the separation between stage and auditorium, adopting an open space similar to the classical Greek orchêstra, and abolishing the division between the actors and the audience, so that all became co-creating participants in a sacred rite.

Writing in Po zvezdam in 1908, Ivanov argued: The theatres of the chorus tragedies, the comedies and the mysteries must become the breeding-ground for the creative, or prophetic, self-determination of the people; only then will be resolved the problem of fusing actors and spectators in a single orgiastic body.

Let's suppose we go into the temple-theatre, robe ourselves in white clothes, crown ourselves with bunches of roses, perform a mystery play (its theme is always the same—God-like man wrestles with fate) and then at the appropriate moment we join hands and begin to dance.

Thereafter the dazzling Byzantine texture of his poetry wore thin, as he insensibly slipped into theosophy and spiritualism, while being preyed upon emotionally and financially by a fraudulent medium who claimed the ability to summon Lydia from the afterlife.

Leonid Feodorov, a priest of the strictly illegal Russian Greek Catholic Church who was on his third secret visit to Russia, to a meeting of the Society of Lovers of the Artistic Word and introduced him to Ivanov.

"[37] In his diary Cursed Days, Ivan Bunin later recalled, "Once in the spring of 1915, I was walking in the Moscow Zoological Garden and saw a guard... beating a swan with his boot and smashing ducks' heads with the heel of his shoe.

"[40] For this reason, according to Robert Bird, "Eloquently conversant in all the major European languages, with erudition of rare breadth and depth, Ivanov allied himself with representatives of the religious and cultural revival that occurred in many countries between the wars.

[43] On 17 March 1926, Ivanov pronounced a prayer for reunification composed by his hero Vladimir Soloviev followed by a standard abjuration under oath of all theological principles upon which Russian Orthodoxy differs from Catholicism.

[36] In a 1930 open letter in French explaining his conversion to Charles Du Bos,[44] Ivanov recalled, "When I pronounced the Creed, followed by a formula of adherence, I felt Orthodox in the full sense of the word for the first time in my life, in full possession of the sacred treasure that had belonged to me since my baptism, the joy of which had, however, been encumbered for many years by a sense of growing anguish and by the consciousness that I had been severed by the other half of this living treasure of sanctity and grace, that, like a consumptive, I had been breathing with only one lung.

Constantin Simon, Ivanov's, "services as a translator, whose golden pen deftly transformed elegant Latin into an equally refined Church Slavonic, were eagerly sought by the Jesuits of the Russian Apostolate as well as by the Vatican.

Though his reputation never reached the heights that it had in Russia, these essays attracted a highly literate, if small coterie of admirers, including Martin Buber, Ernst Robert Curtius, Charles Du Bos, Gabriel Marcel, and Giovanni Papini.

Furthermore, "The late reawakening of Ivanov's poetic muse in 1944 serves as an eloquent reminder that, in the final analysis, he remained, first and foremost, a lyric poet held captive by eternity and struggling to define a place in history.

[51] Copies of the poems Roman Diary contained secretly made their way back to the Soviet Union through the medium of Samizdat, where Eugenia Gertsyk embraced them as the fulfillment of her long standing hopes that Ivanov, like his hero Goethe, "would achieve... clarity and wisdom in old age.