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

Жил Диониса новый свет...
Чрез Альпы, льды сарматские с поэтом
Перекликается поэт.
[Friend, our two fates are not in vain
Linked by a visible thread:
My talent with your far-reaching lucent talent
The gods saw fit to join,
In order that in the youngest tribe as a testament
The new light of Dionysus should live…
Across the Alps and Sarmatian ices a poet
Exchanges calls with another poet.] 34
Ivanov addressed Zelinskii as a friend, humanist, and fellow poet, in much the
same way as he later addressed Bowra in his letters and Latin and Greek poems.
Zelinskii was a cognate spirit from the same background, who shared his understanding
of the religious significance of the Dionysian revival; in the case of Bowra, however,
Ivanov was initiating a dialogue with a stranger, whom he hoped to win round to his
position. It was entirely fitting, therefore, that he decided to include his late poem to
Zelinskii as well as his ‘Palinode’ of 1927 in Svet Vechernii, the publication of which
was made possible by Bowra, another ‘humanist friend’.
Ivanov’s correspondence with Bowra was divided from his earlier exchanges of
the 1920s and 1930s with Buber, Curtius, Du Bos, Pellegrini, and Zelinskii by the rise of
fascism in Germany and Italy and the second world war. Between the wars, Ivanov was
seen as a Russian European, a survivor of the Revolution and émigré fugitive from an
33 For bibliographical details and Russian translations of these essays, see ibid., 186-7, 257-76.
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