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

details of his meetings with Akhmatova to Bowra, including her views on Ivanov, before they
visited the poet in Rome.
When Berlin first saw Ivanov in Rome, he was struck by his white fluffy hair and ‘very
Catholic’ appearance; he also noted his remarkable mental alertness at the age of eighty-one.
Ivanov evidently adjusted his conversation to suit his distinguished academic visitors from
Oxford; he told them that he still regarded himself as a pupil of Theodor Mommsen, whose
seminar on ancient Roman history he had attended in Berlin in the late 1880s, and described his
own teaching during his brief spell as Professor of Classical Philology and Poetics at Baku
University. Opinions about the work of Bal’mont, Merezhkovskii, Blok, Akhmatova and
Pasternak were also discussed. Berlin recalled that Bowra probably conversed with Ivanov in
French, since his spoken Russian was very poor. 56 As Bowra was partial to long monologues
and did not much like to be interrupted, Berlin eventually left the floor to his friend and
retreated to the kitchen, where he chatted with Ivanov’s companion, Ol'ga Shor, and his two
children, Lidiya, a composer and musician, then aged fifty-one, and Dimitrii, a teacher and
journalist, aged thirty-five.
At the time of their visit, Ivanov was greatly excited about the recent discovery in Rome
of a Mithraic temple, displaying an eclectic mix of pagan and Christian imagery. 57 The worship
of the Persian god Mithras, identified with the sun, was introduced in ancient Rome and
attracted a large following alongside Christianity until it was officially banned in the fourth
century. Ivanov’s interest in the spread of Mithraic religion in ancient Rome arose in Berlin,
when his fellow student, the Belgian scholar Franz Cumont, shared the results of his first
56
This recollection is supported by the fact that Ivanov wrote his next letter to Bowra in French (letter 9 in Chapter
5).
57
Rome contains many such sites. The church of San Clemente, for example, near the Coliseum, is built over a
small Mithraic temple, containing an altar with a classical bas-relief depicting the ritual slaying of a bull by Mithras.
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