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

to promote this analogy. 32 Bowra knew George's poetry very well and once glimpsed
him in Heidelberg. He was a close friend of a member of George’s circle, the German-
Jewish historian Ernst Kantorowicz, who came to Oxford as a refugee in 1934 (when
Isaiah Berlin introduced him to Bowra) and then moved to America. Through
Kantorowicz, Bowra met Ernst Morwitz, the central surviving member of the George
circle, in Berlin in 1934, as well as other disciples of the Master. 33 It is very likely that
his close acquaintance with George's writings and followers influenced his later
perception of Ivanov. Given these various areas of close overlap, it comes as no surprise
to find that Ivanov read the copy of The Heritage of Symbolism sent to him by Bowra in
1947 with great interest and responded in detail on several points related to the origins
and character of Symbolism. 34
Underlying these shared academic and literary concerns, there was a further,
somewhat elusive but, in the final analysis, highly significant dimension, which goes a
long way towards explaining the dynamics of this unusual relationship. Ivanov and
Bowra both shared a similar temperament, characterised by an unusual combination of
scholarly erudition with a highly romantic (and at times subversive) poetic disposition.
Ivanov was quick to recognize this duality in Bowra; in the draft of a letter to him
written soon after their first meeting, he commented on his discovery of the poet behind
the mask of the scholar: ‘Je crois avoir découvert la clé de l'énigme: vous êtes poète.
Poète lorsque vous êtes philologue, poète dans vos explorations et dans vos essays – et
surtout quand vous avez affaire à d'autres poètes pour les transposer en anglais.’ 35
Ivanov, whose scholarship and translations were always informed by his poetic
32 See Michael Wachtel, Russian Symbolism and Literary Tradition: Goethe, Novalis, and the Poetics of
Vyacheslav Ivanov (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 16-17.
33 See Bowra, Memories, 286-91, 294. Bowra’s papers, WCA, contain an interesting collection of
Kantorowicz's letters to him from America.
34 See Chapter 5, letter 9.
35 Draft of letter 9 in Chapter 5, note 73.
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