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

Russians, including Bryusov, to his ideas on the religion of the suffering god. When he
took over from the deceased poet Innokentii Annenskii as Professor of Greek Literature
at Raev’s courses for women (1910-12), or later, when he was appointed Professor of
Classical Philology and Poetics at the newly founded University of Baku (1920-24), he
continued to spread his ideas on the revival of classical antiquity and to widen his circle
of dedicated disciples.
Ivanov saw translation and poetry as two closely related forms of creativity and
used both as a powerful tool for the assimilation of classical antiquity into Russian
literature. In his translations from ancient Greek verse and tragedy (Pindar, Bacchylides,
Alcaeus, Sappho, Aeschylus) he always strove to dissolve the boundaries between the
worlds of ancient Greece and modern Russia by ‘russifying’ the Greek originals and by
‘Hellenizing’ the Russian language. In his preface of 1899 to his first published
translation from Greek (Pindar’s first ode) he explicitly defended the practice of
introducing ‘church and old folk elements’ into his Russian version. 13 At the end of his
second book of lyric verse he included his translation of Bacchylides’s dithyramb
‘Theseus’ together with an extensive note on the musical principles underlying his
method of translation in order to render the Dionysian character of the original. 14
In his original poetry Ivanov made extensive use of ancient Greek themes and
experimented with the Russian language and its verse forms to facilitate this revival. His
first collection Kormchie Zvezdy (Pilot Stars, 1903) included several sections on ancient
Greek themes (‘To Dionysus’, ‘The Hesperides’, ‘Thalassia’, ‘The Oreades’),
juxtaposed with sections on Russian, Italian, French and Latin subjects. Greek themes
and verse forms continued to permeate his subsequent collections, Prozrachnost’
13
Ivanov, Vyacheslav, tr., ‘Pervaya pifiiskaya oda Pindara’, Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo
prosveshcheniya, 324, July-August 1899, 49.
14
‘Primechanie o difirambe’, in Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, II, 816-18.
18