Vyacheslav Ivanov and C.M. Bowra: a ... - UCL Discovery

evival of classical antiquity. Throughout the nineteenth century German scholars
carried out ambitious archaeological expeditions to various corners of the ancient world
and regularly transported trunkfuls of remains back to Berlin; after painstaking
reconstruction these relics were then put on display to the public in the city’s newly built
neo-classical museums. As part of his course of studies, Ivanov inspected all the Greek
and Roman antiquities collected in these secular temples with one of his University
professors, Ernst Curtius (1814-96). 4 It would be difficult to imagine a setting that could
have presented him with a more tangible representation of the desire to revive classical
antiquity in the modern world. The complex relationship that he observed between the
passionate cult of antiquity and the rise of German nationalism affected the formation of
his own vision of the Russian national idea, likewise based on a renaissance of the
classical past. It is no coincidence, therefore, that one of his earliest statements on the
special character of the Russian people, ‘Russkie i evrei’ (The Russians and the Jews,
1888-89), was composed during his student years in Berlin. 5
Ivanov was also aware of a darker side to the link between classical studies and
German nationalism. The troubled relationship between nationalism and anti-Semitism
had caused serious rifts between University academics, including two of his teachers,
Theodor Mommsen and Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-96). In his
‘Avtobiograficheskoe pis’mo’ (Autobiographical Letter, 1917) Ivanov recalled his
disgust with the ‘self-satisfied and yet still unsated nationalism’ of Germans at that time,
as well as his reservations over Mommsen’s enthusiastic cult of statehood and
Treitschke’s ‘extreme chauvinism’; although he did not sympathise with these attitudes,
4
Ivanov, ‘Avtobiograficheskoe pis’mo’, in his Sobranie sochinenii, II, 17; Wachtel, ‘Vyacheslav Ivanov –
student Berlinskogo universiteta’, 364.
5
Konstantin Lappo-Danilevskii, ‘Nabrosok Vyach. Ivanova “Evrei i russkie”’, Novoe literaturnoe
obozrenie, 21, 1996, 191-3.
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