Ivanov Vyacheslav Ivanovich

Main article: Writers and poets of Russia

Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov - poet, thinker, scientist, theorist of Russian symbolism, was born on February 16 (28), 1866 in Moscow.

The philosophical worldview and poetic work of Ivanov was influenced by Plato, biblical and Christian thinkers, Dante, Dostoevsky, Vladimir Solovyov on the one hand, and German romantics and Nietzsche. The main idea passing through his articles and poems is the idea of ​ ​ a religious transformation of life and art. An important place in the poetry of Vyacheslav Ivanov is occupied by the idea of ​ ​ cultural continuity, hence the constant attention of Vyacheslav Ivanov to the mythopoietic worlds of antiquity, the Renaissance, Ancient Russia. The motive of Memory as the triumph of man over death plays an exceptional role in his world vision.

After graduating from high school, Ivanov enters the Faculty of History and Philology of Moscow University, and in 1886 leaves for Germany, where he is engaged in ancient history with T. Mommsen and O. Hirschfeld at the University of Berlin and writes a dissertation on ancient Roman purchases (published in Latin in St. Petersburg in 1910). At this time, an important meeting takes place in Ivanov's life - acquaintance and friendship with a graduate student of St. Petersburg University, historian I. M. Greves, who (as Ivanov himself later recalled) "imperiously instructed me to go to Rome, to which I considered myself dissatisfied with the prepared; I am to this day grateful to him for defeating my stubborn resistance, stemming from an abundance of reverent feelings for the Eternal City, with all that was to open there... " ("Autobiographical Letter," 1917).

During the first visit to Rome, a meeting took place with Lydia Dimitrievna Zinovieva, his future second wife. A joint trip with her to Assisi in 1897 was a kind of internal rebirth for both. The mythopoietic story of Sophia's revelation of wisdom in Assisi, surrounded by a "crystal of the Umbra mountains," formed the basis of the poem "Beauty," the aesthetic and philosophical manifesto of Ivanov the poet. This poem opens his first poetic book, "The Feeding Stars" (1902), and is dedicated to Vl. Solovyov: continuing the Solovyov path, the poet comes to the formula "a realibus ad realiora" ("from real to more real," Latin), which defines his concept of symbol and symbolic art in general and underlies his own poetic creativity. A separate part of the book "Feeding Stars" is the cycle "Italian Sonnets" (22 poems) dedicated to the antiquities, cities and artists of Italy, and the lines from Dante's "Purgatory" were chosen as the epigraph for the whole book. The installation on Dante in the aspect of both form (in particular, adherence to the forms of the Italian sonnet) and content (Ivanov already saw Dante's principle "a realibus ad realiora") was repeatedly declared in the later theoretical works of Ivanov; the specific complexity and richness of Ivanovo poetry, as well as its insufficient accessibility and clarity for some contemporaries of the framework, was precisely it.

After returning to Russia in 1905, Vyacheslav Ivanov settled in St. Petersburg and soon became a major figure in the circle of symbolists. Almost all writers, philosophers, artists, musicians of the Silver Age visited the literary "mediums" in the St. Petersburg apartment of Vyacheslav Ivanov ("Tower") in 1905-1911.

Since 1913, Ivanov has been living in Moscow, and in the fall of 1920 he leaves with his family in Baku, where he is elected professor at the new Baku University.

In August 1924, Ivanov left the USSR, having received a business trip abroad; among Ivanov's tasks in Italy was "the creation of the Russian Institute of Archeology, History and Art History," but these plans were not destined to come true.

In November-December 1924, Ivanov created a poetry cycle in Rome, entitled by him in the first edition of "Ave Roma" (subtitled "Roman Sonnets"). This cycle occupies a significant place in the mature work of the poet himself, in the Russian emigrant myth, and in general in the European Roman text of the twentieth century.

From 1926 to 1934, Ivanov took the place of lecturer and lecturer in foreign languages ​ ​ at the "College of Borromeo" in Pavia and at the same time taught courses in Russian literature at Pavia University. Finally returning to Rome, Ivanov from 1936 began to teach Church Slavonic at the Vatican collegium Russikum. At the same time, Ivanov also teaches courses in Russian literature, in particular, in Dostoevsky.

The last poetic book created by Ivanov in Italy, "Roman Diary of 1944," the first of 114 poems marked on January 1, the last on December 31; a motley and specific poetic chronicle - the occupation of Rome by the Nazis, air raids, the liberation of the city by the Allies is combined with the "eternal" themes of history and comprehension of truth.

On July 16, 1949, Vyacheslav Ivanov died: his grave is located in the Testaccio cemetery in Rome.

Despite the complex imagery of Ivanov's poems, as if making it difficult to translate them into music, his poetry aroused considerable interest among Russian composers, contemporaries of the poet and thinker. Alexander Grechaninov, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Mikhail Gnesin, Reingold Glier, Sergey Vasilenko, Artur Lurie, Adrian Shaposhnikov, Alexander Shenshin, Vissarion Shebalin and others wrote music on his texts (both original and poetic translations from ancient authors). In total, more than sixty works of chamber vocal music on the texts of Vyacheslav Ivanov reached us.