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

form of Christian humanism was a gradual and indirect one: at first he simply sought to
uncover the religious element latent in classical antiquity and to suggest some of its
affinities with early Christianity. In his retrospective account of his student years, he
represented this new departure as a fated outcome, stressing that his extended period of
studying Roman history in Berlin had delayed him from pursuing his true vocation and
love, the ‘study of the Hellenic soul’. It was only when he eventually got to Athens and
switched to philology and the cult of Dionysus that he was able to realise his true calling
and explore the religious significance of Hellenism. 9 His study of Dionysus was initially
dictated by a pressing inner need to ‘overcome Nietzsche in the sphere of questions of
religious awareness’. 10 The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music acted as a
powerful springboard from which he launched his own alternative reading of the cult of
Dionysus as the religion of a sacrificial, suffering god, sharing many features with
Christianity. This interpretation eventually led to the creation of a new syncretic version
of the Russian idea, in which the mystic teachings of Christian thinkers such as Fedor
Dostoevskii, Aleksei Khomyakov and Vladimir Solov’ev were grafted onto the fertile
soil of classical antiquity, viewed through the prism of Dionysus in its tragic, catharthic
aspect. In this way, strange as it may seem, the Dionysian strain in Hellenism was
presented as an alternative ‘Old Testament’ for Russians, as the key source destined to
bring about a renewal of their religious awareness and self-definition.
From this time onwards, Ivanov’s explicit agenda was therefore to bring about a
revival of the Dionysian dimension of classical antiquity and to integrate it as fully as
possible into contemporary Russian culture. To achieve this goal he drew on all his
manifold talents as a charismatic role model, teacher, translator, poet, dramatist, literary
critic and scholar. First and foremost, we should note the importance of
9 Ibid., II, 16-17.
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