Ivanov, Viacheslav Ivanovich

Born Feb. 16 (28), 1866, in Moscow; died July 16, 1949, in Rome. Russian poet and playwright.

Ivanov published his Hellenistic Religion of a Suffering God in 1904; it dealt with the Hellenistic cult of Dionysus, which was the source of tragic theater. He became known as a poet in 1898. His first volume of lyric poetry, Pilot Stars (1903), was followed by the collection of stories Transparency (1904) and Tantalus (1905), a tragedy with “antique choruses.” After 1905 Ivanov became one of the theorists of the second generation of Russian symbolists. His views were shaped by a passion for Slavophilism, V. Solov’ev’s mystical-religious cult of beauty, and Nietzsche’s voluntaristic philosophy. His dignified, elegant poetry, saturated with archaisms, addressed itself to the ideals of the past (antiquity and the Middle Ages). Ivanov’s philosophical, aesthetic, and critical works expounded the idea that the poet’s highest mission is to uncover the “symbols” at the heart of religious myth.

The years from 1917 to 1924 were devoted to scholarly and cultural-educational activities. Ivanov defended his dissertation in philology (Dionysus and His Forerunners, 1921; published 1923). He emigrated to Italy in 1924. Ivanov translated Dante and Petrarch into Russian; he published his own works infrequently (Roman Sonnets, 1925; Man, 1939).