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

years of emigration, he elaborated more detailed responses to these issues within a
broader European context.
The first stage is well represented by two key works that Ivanov wrote in the
immediate aftermath of the Revolution. In his essay on the crisis of humanism, ‘Kruchi’
(Steep Slopes, 1919), he noted that a fundamental change in the perception of space and
time had taken place, resulting in the historical upheaval of war and Revolution. After
surveying the development of humanism in classical antiquity, Christianity and the
recent ‘Scythian’ period, he came to the conclusion that humanism, when defined in
purely human terms, deserved to die and was indeed dying. Looking towards the future,
he called for a new relationship between the individual and the whole of humanity,
understood as a living, spiritual entity, through which individual sin could be
redeemed. 24
If the humanist culture of the past had not always achieved the correct balance
between the individual and the divine dimension, what was to be its role in the future?
Was it a cumbersome burden to be jettisoned, or a powerful source of future
regeneration? In July 1920 Ivanov and his friend the literary critic and philosopher
Mikhail Gershenzon found themselves sharing a room in a sanatorium near Moscow
and debated this question with considerable passion in an exchange of twelve letters,
written from their ‘opposite corners’. Gershenzon’s longing to rediscover a primeval
freshness of spirit, unclouded by the accretions of centuries of culture, led him to
advocate a ‘tabula rasa’ approach to the past. Ivanov countered this by defending the
value of culture as a sacred ‘thesaurus’, a unique repository of national memory,
comparable in its spiritual potential to the sacred ‘ladder of Jacob’. 25
24 Vyacheslav Ivanov, ‘Kruchi’, in his Sobranie sochinenii, III, 365-83 (369, 372, 382).
25 Vyacheslav Ivanov, ‘Perepiska iz dvukh uglov’, in his Sobranie sochinenii, III, 383-415 (412).
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