Vyacheslav I. Ivanov’s Poem “Nudus Salta!” and The Purpose of Art 1

How painful to walk among people And pretend to those who have not perished, And talk about the game of tragic passions To those who have not lived as yet. And, peering into one’s own dark nightmare, To find order in the disordered whirlwind of feelings, So that by art’s pale glow They would learn of life’s fatal fire!

[Kak tiazhelo khodit’ sredi liudei I pritvoriat’sia nepogibshim, I ob igre tragicheskoi strastei Povestvovat’ eshche ne zhivshim. I, vgliadyvaias’ v svoi nochnoi koshmar, Stroi nakhodit’ v nestroinom vikhre chuvstva, Chtoby po blednym zarevam iskusstva Uznali zhizni gibel’noi pozhar!] —Alexandr Blok, May 10, 1910

I heard a call from heaven: “Abandon, priest, the temple decorated by devils.” And I fled . . .

[Ia slyshal s neba zov: “Pokin’, sluzhitel’, khram ukrashennyi besov.” I ia bezhal . . .] —Vyacheslav I. Ivanov, “Palinodiia,” 1937

1 From Russian 44 (October, 1998): 289-302. 306 Critical Perspectives

“Nudus salta! The purpose of art— Uncovered, unfettered To show what you are, To relate the dark sensations Of hidden sanctuaries— All that swarms in potholes Under the glittering, smooth ice— To unseal the dead house, Where hides from light of day Unconscious Sodom.” Sacred to me is the enclosure of the Muses. To the fires of pure altars My gift—the best lamb of the herd And fruits, the first of the garden, Not a nest of bats. Dear to the Muses are the mountain rock spring And in the deserts of nature Caraway and thyme and wild grass. Pour purifying waters, After turning away, into the underground darkness.

[“Nudus salta! Tsel’ iskusstva— Bez pokrovov, bez okov Pokazat’, kto ty takov, Temnye povedat’ chuvstva Zapovednykh tainikov— Vse, chto v omutakh roitsia Pod blestiashchim, gladkim l’dom— Raspechatat’ mertvyi dom, Gde ot bela dnia taitsia Podsoznatel’nyi Sodom.” —Mne sviashchenna Muz ograda. Zharu chistykh altarei Dar moi—agnets luchshii stada I plody, perviny sada, Ne gnezdo netopyrei. Muzam gornyi kliuch porody Mil i v pustyniakh prirody Chobr i tmin, i dikii zlak. Lei chistitel’nye vody, Otvratias’, v podzemnyi mrak.] —Vyacheslav I. Ivanov Vyacheslav I. Ivanov’s Poem “Nudus Salta!” and The Purpose of Art 307

Ivanov’s untitled poem “Nudus salta! Tsel’ iskusstva” (“Dance naked! The Purpose of Art”) appears in his Roman Notebook (Rimskii dnevnik, 1944) and is dated February 18, 1944.2 Three earlier versions of the poem date from February 15 through February 17, 1944.3 In those few days, the poem underwent some small, but significant, changes. “Nudus salta!” consists of four stanzas of five lines each. On the semantic plane, the poem may be divided into two parts, each consisting of two stanzas (referred to in this discussion as parts one and two). The first two stanzas of the poem appear in quotation marks. At the opening of poem, an unnamed speaker, the ’s antagonist, issues a command, “Nudus salta!” (Dance naked!), declaring in sum that the “purpose of art” is to disclose without inhibition the carnal underground of human nature.4 Art in this perspective engages in a kind of erotic danse macabre. In part two of “Nudus salta!” that is, the third and fourth stanzas of the poem, the poet himself steps forth, and without engaging in any direct polemic with his unnamed antagonist on the question of

2 See Ivanov’s collection of poems entitled Rimskii dnevnik (1944) in Vyacheslav Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols. (Bruxelles: Foyer Oriental Chrétien, 1979), 3:594–595. 3 The original variants may be found in the archives of Vyacheslav I. Ivanov in . 4 Ivanov’s allusions in the first two stanzas of “Nudus salta!” are unmistakably to the ancient Greek “Mysteries of ,” a religious cult of suffering and sacrificial death; this cult was characterized by orgiastic passion rites in which music and dance and drink liberated worshippers from inhibitions and restraints, social and sexual, and plunged them into a state of Dionysian “rapture” and “madness.” Ivanov discussed, and in a certain sense, celebrated the Dionysian cult in his series of lectures The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God: An Essay in a Religious and Historical Description (Ellinskaia religiia stradaiushchego boga: Opyt religiozno-istoricheskoi kharakteristiki”) published in Novyi put’ in 1904, and later in his unpublished manuscript of the same title and work in 1917. Ivanov embraced the Roman Catholic faith in Rome in 1926, and in the 1920s and 1930s underwent a religious-spiritual renewal. In his poem “Nudus salta!” composed during World War II, Ivanov casts a critical eye at the darker side of the Dionysian cult, even as he remains captivated by transcendental elements of the Dionysian cult. Citations in this essay to Ivanov’s important study Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God refer to a (in process) of this work by Dr. Carol Anschuetz. The Russian original manuscript is in the archives of Vyacheslav Ivanov in Rome. 308 Critical Perspectives

the purpose of art, announces his devout commitment to the Muses and to both a classical and pastoral world where art and the artist are characterized by their sacrificial and devotional functions. In the final line of the poem, the poet returns to the theme of the underground and suggests that the artist can play a role by tempering underground passions. Part one of the poem posits a Dionysian netherworld of “dark . . . sensations” (temnye . . . chuvstva), a chthonic realm of passions out of sight and off limits. The unknown speaker calls for a kind of artistic bacchanalia in which one would dance “uncovered” (bez pokrovov) and “unfettered” (bez okov) and would “show what you are” (pokazat’, kto ty takov). He alludes darkly to a “hidden sanctuary” (zapovednyi tainik),5 roiling “potholes” (omuty)6 under the ice (pod l’dom),7 and finally, to a “dead house” (mertvyi dom), where lies hidden from light of day “unconscious Sodom” (podsoznatel’nyi Sodom)—a reference that would seem to encompass both the notion of a repressed subconscious world of unbridled sexual impulse and desire and the idea of almost anthropomorphic Sodom. Ivanov’s end rhymes in the second stanza (l’dom, mertvyi dom, Sodom), foregrounding the sound and word “dom” (house) lead the reader to the nethermost house of debauchery: Sodom. In an early draft of “Nudus salta!” the “dead house” is in fact a place where “where an unconscious Sodom is hiding from punishment” (gde ot Bozh’ikh kar taitsia / podsoznatel’nyi Sodom). In a second version of the poem, “a spellbound Sodom” (zakoldovannyi Sodom) is hiding from God’s punishment. In the final version of the

5 For a discussion of Ivanov’s concept of “Zapovednyi tainik,” see footnote 12 of this essay. 6 “Omut”—pothole, whirlpool, deep hollows at the bottom of a river where currents swirl. A well-known Russian proverb runs “V tikhom omute cherti vodiatsia,” literally, “in a quiet hollow under the water devils are at play”; figuratively, “a quiet, reserved person is capable of doing things that one would never expect of them.” 7 “Pod l’dom” (under the ice): the phrase “l’dom” may be an indirect reference to the once popular historical novel, The Ice Palace (Ledianoi dom, 1835) by Ivan I. Lazhechnikov (1792–1869). The “ice house” or “ice palace” actually existed. In Lazhechnikov’s novel, it is is a symbol of the despotic reign of Empress Anna Ioannovna; it casts a shadow on all aspects of the novel’s intrigue and passions. The veiled allusion to the “ice palace,” then, is a fitting image for Ivanov’s dark and ominous underworld. Vyacheslav I. Ivanov’s Poem “Nudus Salta!” and The Purpose of Art 309 poem, Ivanov replaces the words “from God’s punishment” (ot Bozh’ikh kar) with “from the light of day” (ot bela dnia), thus veiling the notion that “Sodom” is perhaps the devil, the great antagonist of God, and that our violent sexual unconscious or subconscious has been confined here in some kind of spellbound state. These suppositions are echoed in somewhat different imagery in Ivanov’s early study, The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God (Ellinskaia religiia stradaiushchego boga, 1904; 1917), where he writes that “the principle of cosmos and order in everything, having effected a profound transformation of our inner primeval chaos yet not transformed it altogether, has outwardly subdued it and confined it to the sphere of the subconscious, whence it breaks out volcanically in destructive eruptions.”8 Our violent carnal instincts, Ivanov suggests in “Nudus salta!” have been committed to a deep dungeon or “dead house.” Art’s purpose, according to the unnamed speaker, is explore and celebrate its interior. On the esthetic plane, his command to “unseal the dead house” (raspechatat’ mertvyi dom) is a call to depict the human nature in a wholly naturalistic way, that is, to show people what they are. The corollary of this naturalism on the plane of human behavior is that everything is permissible. Naturalism for Ivanov, as for Dostoevsky, posits a thoroughly despiritualized view of the world; it is evidence of moral-esthetic bankrupcy. The image and concept of a “dead house” in Ivanov’s poem, of course, signals Dostoevsky’s strong moral and literary presence. The call to unseal the “dead house” and to awaken the unconscious Sodom brings to mind Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead (Zapiski iz mertvogo doma, 1861–1862), where a world of violence and moral degradation is disclosed in a variety of ways. Yet in a more direct way, the poem echoes the lubricious and lugubrious world of “contemporary corpses” in Dostoevsky’s fantasy-grotesque, “Bobok. The Notes of a Certain Person”—a sketch first published in hisDiary of a Writer in 1873. It is a tale that satirizes the materialism and so-called realism or naturalism of contemporary art and society.9 The still-living, but decaying and dying “contemporary corpses” that the narrator of “Bobok” overhears in his visit to the cemetery

8 See “Hellenic Religion,” 226. 9 See my discussion of “Bobok” in The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 288–303. 310 Critical Perspectives

and tomb stones find their most typical representative in the Sadean figure of the engineer Baron Klinevich. He invites his expiring fellow corpses in the time remaining to them unashamedly to engage in a kind of literary and everyday debauch of sensuality. Like the Marquis de Sade, Klinevich has a keen sense of the role of narrative art in the breakdown of moral-spiritual culture. He proposes first of all that “nobody be ashamed of anything” (“Oh, yes, yes, let’s not be ashamed of anything!” respond the voices of many corpses). He follows with a proposal for a symposium, a kind of Decameron of the dead, in which nobody will lie:

We’ll all tell our stories out loud to the others and not be ashamed of anything. I’ll tell you about myself first of all. I am, you see, an animal sensualist. Up above everything was bound by rotten ropes. Down with ropes, and let’s live out these last two months in the most shameless truth! Let’s become naked and bare outselves! “Let’s bare ourselves,” cried all the voices. “I terribly, terribly want to be naked,” squealed Avdotya Ignatievna . . . “The main thing is that nobody can stop us.”

Shamelessly telling all is the literary corollary of nakedness, a symptom for Dostoevsky of social and cultural disintegration. (If everybody spoke their mind, he once remarked, the world would drown in a sea of muck). The narrator of “Bobok” himself, Ivan Ivanych early in his narrative complains that he has lost control of his language, his “style” is changing, it has become “hackneyed.” Of the painter who meticulously depicts the warts on his, Ivan Ivanych’s face, he remarks, “They have no ideas, so they go to town on phenomena. But what a job he did on my warts in the portrait—they’re alive! They call this realism!” “Bobok” ends in a whirling danse macabre of “contemporary corpses.” It is noteworthy that Ivanov foregrounded the motif of shamelessness in an early draft of the poem:

“Nudus salta! The purpose of art, Freeing oneself from all chains, Not being ashamed of what you are . . .”

[Nudus salta! Tsel’ iskusstva, Svobodias’ ot vsekh okov, Ne stydias’, chto ty takov.] Vyacheslav I. Ivanov’s Poem “Nudus Salta!” and The Purpose of Art 311

Ivanov dropped the words “not being ashamed” in the final version of his poem, yet shamelessness remains implicit in the celebration of being uncovered, or without cover (bez pokrovov). The word “pokrov” means “cover,” but it also suggests “Pokrov’,” “protection,” “veil,” as in the Orthodox Feast of the Intercession, known as “Pokrov’” or “Protective Veil of the Holy Virgin.” Thus, an esthetic or art that takes away all “cover” is also intrinsically without spiritual or religious patronage. In the second part of Ivanov’s poem, the action shifts from the profane world of Sodom to the sacred world of the Muses, from a world of darkness to the light of day. This division between night and day echoes formally and semantically the Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev’s poem, “Day and Night” (“Den’ i noch’,” 1839), a poem of great importance to Ivanov. The “glittering, smooth ice” that covers the abyss in “Nudus salta!” recalls Tyutchev’s “Day—that brilliant cover” (“Den’—sei blistatel’nyi pokrov”) which hides the “nameless abyss” (bezymiannaia bezdna). Tyutchev’s “day” animates the “earth-born” and heals the “suffering soul.” Night, however, tears away the “beneficent fabric of cover” (tkan’ blagodatnuiu pokrova) and bares the abyss with its “terrors and fogs.” The theme of “baring” (obnazhenie) is common to both Tyutchev’s and Ivanov’s poems. What night does in Tyutchev’s poem is what the unnamed speaker calls upon art to do: tear away the “pokrov” (cover), the sacred veil, and bare the abyss. What is ominous and terrible about the abyss of night in the poem “Day and Night,” as Tyutchev puts it, is that “there are no barriers between us and it” (net pregrad mezh nei i nami). Ivanov in “Nudus salta!” distances himself from his abyss. His quotation marks serve to fence in or quarantine the unnamed speaker’s literary manifesto. Part one ends with the concept of an unconscious Sodom. In the last analysis, Sodom is not an external, visible, enemy, a monster of the day, but an internal, intangible, nocturnal one who inhabits the dungeon of human spirit and who attacks by stealth. The explicit motif of “turning away” from the abyss is apparent not only in the final line of the poem, but in the opening line of part two where the poet decisively separates himself from the profane world of Sodom and declares his personal allegiance to a different world where art and spirituality are united. “Sacred to me is the enclosure of the Muses” (Mne sviashchenna Muz ograda); the poet's habitation is the “enclosure of the Muses.” The poet chooses the protection and 312 Critical Perspectives

patronage of the classical Muses, those who preside over poetry and , divinities of the open spirit as opposed to the demons of confinement. The “enclosure” (ograda) of the Muses, as Ivanov wrote in Hellenic Religion, are the grounds where “great art” was born.10 Ivanov writes about a specific part of the ancient Greek Acropolis:

This enclosure (ograda) which housed a theater and two temples of different antiquity . . . was the most important arena of Dionysiac art. Here the tragic muse first revealed herself to the human spirit in beauty’s unfading forms.

[Eta ograda, vmeshchavshaia teatr i dva khrama razlichnoi drevnosti, byla vazhneisheiu v Gretsii arenoi dionisiiskogo iskusstva. Zdes’ tragicheskaia muza vpervye otkrylas’ chelovecheskomu dukhu v neuviadaiushchikh formakh krasoty.]11

Dionysiac worship or resulting in the art form of is, in Ivanov’s presentation, a conflation of both Apollonian and Dionysiac elements, of both suffering and harmony. “A fine line divided the redemptive from the destructive effects of the terrible Dionysiac element,” Ivanov wrote in Hellenic Religion. “They found rapture on the edge of the abyss, in the whirlwind of orgies, in the breath of a frenzied god.”12 A very firm line separates the “redemptive” from the “terrible Dionysiac element” in “Nudus salta!” Few hints of this vision of paradoxical and paroxysmal Dionysiac religious ethos are to be found in Ivanov’s “Nudus salta!”13 Certainly, the implied esthetic of the

10 “Hellenic Religion,” 47. 11 Ibid., 43. 12 Ibid., 82. 13 One detects in “Nudus salta!” a hint of the “breath of a frenzied god.” Ivanov’s mysterious underground “zapovednyi tainik” (translated here as “hidden sanctuary”) seems to allude to Dionysiac “rapture at the edge of the abyss.” “Zapovednyi tainik” does not lend itself to easy translation. “Tainik” has the meaning of “hiding place,” “cache,” of “recess.” The adjective “Zapovednyi” is often used in the sense of reserve, e.g. “zapovednyi les”—“forest reserve,” “preserve” or “sanctuary”—a place where one may be forbidden to go, or one that is reserved or preserved for other than everyday use. “Zapovednyi” carries with it the idea of prohibition, but also Vyacheslav I. Ivanov’s Poem “Nudus Salta!” and The Purpose of Art 313 poet-persona of “Nudus salta!” leaves no room for creative interaction between “day” and “night” in the esthetic process of the contemporary writer or artist. In an early essay, “Testaments of ” (“Zavety simvolizma,” 1910), however, Ivanov posits a certain “dualism” in the artist’s consciousness and creative work, in his spiritual self, precisely a kind of “symbolic dualism of day and night.” “Do these worlds exist in a state of enmity?” he asks. “In poetry,” he answers, “they are both together. We now call them Apollon and Dionysus, we know their inseparable and undivided nature.” In that same essay, Ivanov writes that the artist “limits his thirst to merge with the ‘limitless,’ his striving for ‘oblivion,’ ‘annihilation.’” He turns rather to the “clear forms of daytime existence, to the patterns of the ‘gold-cloth veil’ (zlatotkannogo pokrova) thrown by the gods onto the mysterious world of the spirit, onto the ‘nameless abyss,’ that is, the abyss that does not find its name in the language of daytime consciousness and eternal experience.” “All the same,” he writes, “the most valuable moment in experience and the most prophetic in creation is submergence in that contemplative where there are ‘no barriers’ (net pregrady) between us and the ‘naked abyss’ opening up—in Silence.”14 It is a sober and somber Ivanov that composes in 1944 the very cautionary “Nudus salta!” In his poem, as we have seen, there are strong barriers between the poet and this naked abyss; above all, there is no “submergence” in contemplative ecstasy: the form stark antitheses. The silent abyss is manifestly a “dead house.” The “dead house” and the “enclosure of the Muses”

the notion of the “sacral” or the “holy” (see, for example, “zapoved’”— precept, commandment, as in the Ten Commandments). The notion of a “zapovednyi tainik,” then, presents a disturbing ambiguity of meaning. In the context of the stanza, the phrase suggests something sinister: a secret hiding place or dwelling where reprehensible things take place. In the Dionysiac context, however, this same hiding place may be a holy place, recess or grounds where primitive rites, or sacrifices, may take place. “Zapovednyi tainik,” in this interpretation, takes on the of a secret, yet sacred place of corruption, where the borders between holiness and pollution are still undefined. 14 See “Zavety simvolizma” in Vyacheslav Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols. (Bruxelles: Foyer Oriental Chrétien, 1979), 2:590–591. 314 Critical Perspectives

(ograda) stand in stark contrast each another, despite the identification of the “ograda” with Ivanov’s beloved sacred grounds of Dionysus. “Dionysus is more mighty in the soul of Tyutchev than Apollo,” Ivanov had written in “Testaments of Symbolism,”15 In “Nudus salta!” one may say that Apollo is more mighty in the soul of Ivanov than Dionysus, although the poetic power of “Nudus salta!” nonetheless rests on what Ivanov had called the “symbolic dualism of day and night” in the artist's creative consciousness. Here poetry, as Ivanov had anticipated in “Testaments of Symbolism,” remains at variance with ideology in the broad sense of the term. The magic of the ancient classical world, its language and imagery, however, continues to exert its power over the Ivanov. Pushkin in his poem “Poet” (1827) speaks of Apollo as one who calls upon the poet to participate in “sacred sacrifice” (sviashchennaia zhertva). In “The Poet and the Crowd” (Poet i tolpa, 1828), he refers to the poet’s art as “service, altar, sacrifice” (sluzhen’e, altar’, zhertvoprinoshenie). The fires of Ivanov’s “pure altars” (chistykh altarei) in “Nudus salta!” appear ready for ritual cleansing and purification. Yet these sacred fires stand ready for another affirmative symbolic offering:

Zharu chistykh altarei Dar moi—agnets luchshii stada I plody, perviny sada, Ne gnezdo netopyrei.

[To the fires of purifying altars (Go) my gift—the best lamb of the herd, And the first fruits of the garden, Not a nest of bats.]

The poet’s “dar,” his “gift,” the lamb, and the fruits of the garden, contrast strikingly with the “nest of bats,” creatures of the night who dwell beneath the sacred grounds of the Muses.16 The poet’s “gift” (dar), of course, is also his talent (dar), the art he dedicates to the Muses.

15 Ibid., 591. 16 The negative connotations of this image are manifested in the thrice- repeated syllable “ne, ne, ne” (in Russian “not” or “no”) in the phrase: “Ne, gnezdo netopyrei.” In literature, myth and folk saying, bats are typically associated with darkness and the damned. Dante’s Lucifer is buried in Vyacheslav I. Ivanov’s Poem “Nudus Salta!” and The Purpose of Art 315

The transcendental habitation of the Muses is symbolized not by the roiling waters of the potholes under the ice, but by a spring that comes out of the bedrock of a mountain. The mountain spring alludes to the Castalian Spring, sacred to the Muses and Apollo, on the slopes of Parnassus in Greece. The mountain there has two peaks, both frequented by the Muses: one sacred to Dionysus, and the other to Apollo, the god of Greek prophecy and healing. The final stanza of Ivanov’s poem opens in the mountains of the muses. The poem then descends to the “deserts of nature” with their spices and wild grass, a point midway between the depths of Sodom and the heights of the Muses. The images of garden, fruits, waters, spices, and wild grass seem to carry intimations of the Biblical Song of Solomon or Song of Songs (Song of Songs 4:14–16) where pastoral paradise cradle a lyric eroticism—one far removed from the frenzied Dionysian eroticism of part one of “Nudus salta!” The poem that begins with the abrupt command, “Nudus salta!” ends with a gentle imperative:

Pour purifying waters, After turning away, into the underground darkness.

[Lei chistitel’nye vody, Otvratias’, v podzemnyi mrak]

Here is the poet’s most direct response to the unknown narrator’s esthetic manifesto in part one. It sums up his view of art, an old one, as one involving ritual cleansing and purification. The emphasis on “turning away” suggests not only moral revulsion and perhaps a turning away from temptation, but the poet’s own need for spiritual purification. In this sense, Ivanov’s miniscule poem presents itself as a testi- monial, an initiation, and an act of redemption. The poem, a didactic one, projects itself—to borrow words from Ivanov’s Hellenic Religion

ice. His wings, in Dante’s description, were “mighty ones.” “They had no feathers, but were like a bat’s” (Non avean penne, ma di vispisrello era lor modo). See Charles S. Singleton, Dante, Inferno. Bollngen Series 80 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970) Canto 35: 49–50. 316 Critical Perspectives

forty years earlier—as a kind of “spiritual re-education which the con- temporary psyche undoubtedly needs.”17

In Ivanov’s poem, “Palinodiia” (1927), the poet envisages himself as one who had served as an acolyte or assistant (sluzhitel’) in the temple of Dionysus. In the final lines of poem he describes a moment of temptation when, drawn to the old “rebellious longing/ Of indomitable night,” he heard a “call from heaven: ‘Abandon, priest, the temple decorated by demons.’ And I fled,”/ the poet recalls, “and I eat [now] in the foothills of Thebaid/ the wild honey and coarse locusts of silence.” In “Nudus salta!” Ivanov completes a movement from Hellenic Religion through “The Testaments of Symbolism” and “Palinodia.” Old passions, old idols, have been cast out, old syntheses outgrown. Not the tormented, divided, Dionysian, Bacchic underworld, but a softened Dionysian and Apollonian realm of “service, altar, and sacrifice” is celebrated. What emerges in the poem, too, are gestures of solidarity with Dostoevsky’s morally and spiritually-infused realism and Pushkin’s abandonment of classical idols for “stern,” but transcendent “beauty” (“At the Beginning of Life I remember School” [“V nachale zhizni shkolu pomniu ia”, 1830]). Finally, there are hints in “Nudus saltas!” of a new synthesis of a purified classicism and Christianity. Of Christianity, nothing is directly said in the poem, but what is indicated is unmistakeable: “My gift is the best lamb of the herd.”

17 “Hellenic Religion,” 224–225.