VI. the God-Loving Roman Vyacheslav Ivanov

VI. The God-Loving Roman Vyacheslav Ivanov o other Symbolist poet had ties with Rome as numerous, strong, complex, and formalized as Vyacheslav Ivanov. He Nspent crucial periods of his life in the city of Rome, and his classical scholarship had a tremendous impact on his poetic output. It is only natural that in Ivanov’s most prominent poetic statements these factors interacted at the highest level. At times a religious or amatory inspiration experienced at some impressive Roman site, aided by the poet’s profound knowledge, culminated in great poems.1 Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov, whom Mirsky calls “an uncrowned king of Petersburg poets,”2 and whom Shestov nicknamed “Vyacheslav the Magnificent,” was born in Moscow in 1866, and died in 1949 in Italy an exile and a converted Catholic. A scholar of classics and ancient history, he knew Greek and Latin as intimately as Russian, was attracted to the great poets of antiquity, and was influenced by Dante, Goethe, Nietzsche and Solovyov. His erudition and mystical anarchism made him a leader of the Petersburg literary circle. In his apartment, which has gone down in history as the famous “Tower,” the intellectual elite met every Wednesday for seven years. Married three times, once divorced and twice widowed, Ivanov moved back to Moscow in 1912; nine years later he was appointed professor of Greek at the State University in Baku, Azerbaijan, from where in 1924 he left Russia forever with his two children. 98 Vyacheslav Ivanov Rome played a significant role in the awakening of Ivanov’s poetic gift. Moreover, it touched all the vital areas of the poet’s life: love, religion, scholarship, and literature. Chronologically his scholarship came first. Long before his first visit to Rome, Ivanov had spent nine semesters in Berlin studying under the world-renowned Theodor Mommsen and preparing his dissertation, “On the Tax- Forming Companies of the Roman People,” in Latin. He began these studies in late 1886, completed his dissertation in 1895, but decided against defending it. He abandoned his plans for an academic career, though not his scholarly interest in Rome.3 In 1897, in the British Museum, he researched the historical roots of the idea of the universal mission of Rome, a central theme of his public lecture “On the Russian Idea” (O russkoi idee), published in 1909 in Zolotoe Runo (The Golden Fleece). In the course of an historical analysis of the notion of nationalism, the poet formulated his own view of the pax Romana: The Roman national idea has been worked out by the complex process of collective myth-making: the legend of the Trojan Aeneas, along with Greek and eastern Sibylline prophecy, was needed to establish gradually in the national consciousness a vivid sense of Rome’s global role-task to unite the early Roman tribes into one political body, in a spirit of universal harmony that the Romans called pax Romana.4 In the same lecture Ivanov expressed his conviction that Virgil “asserts not a national egoism, but the providential will and idea of sovereign Rome, which was becoming a world. The idea of the empire, as it developed in Rome, was forever severed by Rome itself from the national idea.” And the poet stresses that in contrast to Russia: “‘Rome’ is always a universe.”5 V. Rudich points out the significance of this distinction in Ivanov’s mind: For all his tremendous knowledge of things Roman, he could in no way identify himself with the Roman spirit. In contrast to many Russian thinkers, he was indifferent to the imperial ideal, so crucial in Roman experience. If he had any profound concerns related to Roman culture, they were eschatological: hence his interest in Virgil and in the emergence of Christianity.6 The poet’s attitude toward his own scholarship in this field was at best ambivalent,7 though it did help him later to survive the difficult, .

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