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

covering several pages; 16 distichs also figure prominently throughout his later collections. As a
form generally associated with the development of a complete thought, the distich was well
suited to Ivanov's fondness for the epigrammatic style in poetry. 17 He would often choose
distichs for the expression of a particularly powerful experience, encapsulating a moment of
religious revelation or prophetic insight. For example, the epigraph to Cor Ardens, dedicated to
the memory of Lidiya Zinov'eva-Annibal, takes the form of a distich in Russian. 18 In the same
year as he composed his distichs to Bowra, he published an extract from his letter of 1939 to
Karl Muth entitled ‘Ein Echo’, describing a mystic experience that had occurred some thirty
years earlier and his attempt to capture this private revelation in the ‘golden ring’ of a Latin
distich. 19
In the case of his address to Bowra, Ivanov's choice of the distich served several
purposes. It underlined their affinity as fellow classicists and set their relationship within the
framework of a well developed literary tradition rooted in classical antiquity. The choice of
Latin rather than Greek emphasised the importance of Latin as the mediating culture through
which the legacy of Greek antiquity passed into the European tradition of humanism; it was the
language in which humanists such as Erasmus wrote when corresponding with their peers.
Furthermore, because of its inherent duality of form (based on the couplet), the distich was
uniquely suited to the theme of Ivanov's address, which deals with several sets of dualities: the
relationship between two people (Ivanov and Bowra, author and addressee), the dialogue
between two cultures (native and foreign), the presence of two forms in the act of poetic
16 Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, I, 635-42. In the opening distich from this cycle, ‘Veste detracta’ (the Latin title is
followed by a distich in Russian), Ivanov announced his preference for the ‘naked’ distich, not clothed in rhyme (the
true classical form of the distich).
17 See S.S. Averintsev, ‘Gnomicheskoe nachalo v poetike Vyach. Ivanova’, Studia Slavica, 41, 1996, 3-12 (on
Ivanov's use of distichs, 5).
18 Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, II, 225.
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