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

verse or Andrei Belyi’s novel Peterburg (Petersburg) without taking this influence into
account. 20 Ivanov’s views also found wide support among his fellow classicists. His
most ardent advocate in this respect was the above-mentioned Faddei Zelinskii (1859-
1944), a prominent classicist of Polish origin, who first met Ivanov at one of his lectures
in 1905 and kept up a close relationship with him throughout their years in Russia and
later in emigration. In the same year as Berdyaev and Shestov published their critical
essays about Ivanov, Zelinskii wrote an article which offered nothing but positive
support for the poet’s contribution to the revival of classical antiquity in Russia. He
began by quoting a passage from an earlier essay of 1899, in which he had advocated the
ideal of a ‘fusion between the Greek and the Slavonic spirit’, based on Nietzsche’s Birth
of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. At the time he had known nothing of Ivanov’s
existence, but when Kormchie Zvezdy appeared a few years later in 1903, he attributed
‘prophetic’ significance to his earlier words and welcomed the poet’s work as the
fulfilment of his ideal. 21
Zelinskii was the editor of Nietzsche’s works in Russian translation and shared
Ivanov’s enthusiasm for applying Nietzsche’s ideas on the revival of the Dionysian spirit
to Russia in a religious context. In his comments on Kormchie Zvezdy he identified
Dionysus as Ivanov’s main pilot star and explained his particular way of developing
Nietzsche’s thought. He gave an enthusiastic appraisal of the Greek motifs in Ivanov’s
verse and tragedy ‘Tantalus’, drawing attention to his achievements in reviving ancient
Greek forms of versification and to the value of his Symbolist style as the most natural
and appropriate form of expression for this ‘prophet of Dionysus’. He also highlighted
20 On Blok’s debt to Ivanov’s view of Dionysus, see Pamela Davidson, ‘Dionysus and the Demon: Ivanov
and Blok on Art as Luciferian’, in Sergei Averintsev and Rozemari Tsigler [Rosemarie Ziegler] (eds.),
Vyacheslav Ivanov i ego vremya: Materialy VII Mezhdunarodnogo simpoziuma, Vena 1998 (Frankfurt:
Peter Lang, 2002), 175-95. Belyi first read Peterburg at the Tower, Ivanov suggested its title to him, and
later wrote an influential essay on its Dionysian qualities in 1916.
22