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

period, however, he had a strong desire to promote his native culture in the West, and this led
him to play an active role in developing his literary contacts and arranging publications (for
example, he founded and edited the Blackwell’s Russian Texts series and the journal Oxford
Slavonic Papers). His interest in Ivanov may well have been kindled by the enthusiasm of a
fellow émigré and colleague at the University of Birmingham. Nikolai Bakhtin (1896-1950) was
a classicist and a favourite former student of Ivanov's old friend and colleague, Faddei Zelinskii,
who taught him and his younger brother (the well-known literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin) in
St. Petersburg before the Revolution. 5 After leaving Russia in 1918 and serving for a few years
as a soldier in the Foreign Legion, Bakhtin settled in Paris. Konovalov was not alone in
regarding him as one of the most brilliant men of the Russian emigration. When he met up with
him in Paris in the spring of 1928, he invited him on the basis of his reputation to come and
study in Birmingham for a few months. Bakhtin subsequently received a diploma from the
School of Oriental Languages in Paris and completed a Ph.D. thesis on ancient Thessaly at
Cambridge. 6 In 1935 he took up his first academic appointment as Assistant Lecturer in classics
at University College, Southampton; he then moved to the University of Birmingham, where he
held a lectureship in classics from 1938, followed by a lectureship in linguistics from 1945 until
his untimely death in 1950. His posthumously published lecture on the Symbolist movement in
Russia contains a remarkable tribute to Ivanov, based in part on personal recollection: ‘V.
Ivanov was not only a great poet, but a great philosopher and Greek scholar as well, and above
Konovalov’s style of academic life. In his inaugural lecture of 1946, Konovalov recorded his debt of gratitude to
Professor Paul Vinogradoff for starting him off on his undergraduate days at Exeter College in 1919 and to
Professor Nevill Forbes for encouraging him to pursue an academic career. See S. Konovalov, Oxford and Russia:
An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 26 November 1946 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1947), 4.
5 On the relationship of the two brothers see O.E. Osovskii, ‘“Neslyshnyi dialog”: Biograficheskie i nauchnye
sozvuchiya v sud’bakh Nikolaya i Mikhaila Bakhtinykh’, in K.G. Isupov (ed.), M. Bakhtin i filosofskaya kul’tura
XX veka (Problemy bakhtinologii): Sbornik nauchnykh statei (SPb.: Obrazovanie, 1991), 43-51.
6 Noted in Nicholas Bachtin, Introduction to the Study of Modern Greek (Cambridge, 1935), 30.
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