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

Zelinskii remained the classical scholar who could best understand and comment
on Ivanov’s path from pagan to Christian humanism. After the Revolution he settled in
Warsaw, met up with Ivanov a few times in Italy, and kept up a busy correspondence
with him; forty-two of his letters to Ivanov, written between 1924 and 1940, have
survived and were recently published with an interesting introductory article by Elena
Takho-Godi. As he observed in a letter to Ivanov of 1933, the main thrust of his
scholarly work during this period was to prove his thesis ‘that the religion of classical
antiquity is the true Old Testament of our Christianity’. 32 In this context he continued to
extol Ivanov’s achievements as a pioneer of the Slavonic renaissance of classical
antiquity. Parts of his original essay of 1916 were recycled in 1926 in his Polish and
Italian reviews of Ivanov’s study Dionis i pradionisiistvo (Dionysus and Pre-
Dionysianism, 1923), and again in 1933 and 1934 in further essays on Ivanov, also
published in Polish and Italian. 33 These articles played an important role in extending
the Slavonic ideal of a classical revival into a wider European context. Despite some of
the errors they contained, Ivanov clearly welcomed the continuing support of such a
dedicated kindred spirit in emigration. On New Year’s Day in 1933 he wrote a second
poem to Zelinskii, entitled ‘Drugu gumanistu’ (To a Humanist Friend), ending with the
following stanza:
Друг, наши две судьбы недаром
Связует видимая нить:
Мой дар с твоим широкосветлым даром
Изволилось богам соединить,
Дабы в юнейшем племени заветом
32 Elena Takho-Godi, ‘“Dve sud’by nedarom svyazuet vidimaya nit’” (Pis’ma F.F. Zelinskogo k Vyach.
Ivanovu)’, in Daniela Rizzi and Andrej Shishkin (eds.), Archivio italo-russo II (Salerno: Europa Orientalis:
2002), 181-276 (239).
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