Contenu du sommaire : Un maître de sagesse au XX e siècle Vjačeslav Ivanov et son temps

Andrej SHISHKIN. The Platonic and Sufi symposion at the "Tower" in St. Petersburg : Ber- diaev and Viacheslav Ivanov. Viacheslav Ivanov's "Tower" in St. Petersburg was the organizing center of what Khodasevich called the "collective" culture of Russian symbolism. From 1905 on poets, philosophers and painters used to meet there. Participants of the meetings called them "symposia", Plato's symposion was their model. With the help of memoirs and personal correspondence of the time, the author reconstructs and analyses the events and the main themes discussed at the "Tower". He uses unpublished material from the archives of Viacheslav Ivanov, L. Zinov'eva-Annibal, N. Berdiaev, E. Anichkov, M. Kuzmin and P. Florenskii. The choice of subjects — Eros, love, death, new birth — , the idea of a dialogue enhanced by philosophical and religious reflection, and the way of approaching them were an answer to the needs of the epoch and the concern for being faithful to the symposial model. The author shows how the symposion in their themes and forms is reflected in the creative work of the participants, Viacheslav Ivanov himself, L. Zinov'eva-Annibal, N. Berdiaev and M. Voloshin.

Maria-Candida GHIDINI, The notion of inner form in Viacheslav lvanov's thought. The article aims at emphasizing the notion of inner form in lvanov's thought. This notion, rooted in the history of western philosophical thought, is adopted by Ivanov in accordance with the ontological-substantial, Platonic and Aristotelian interpretation. Not only is the notion of form tackled with, throughout lvanov's last articles, in relation to other arguments, but it becomes the main topic, in which a great many of his contradictions seem to be resolved.

Alexandre BOURMEYSTER, The Correspondence across a room : dialogue or representation ? The Correspondence across a room cannot he reduced to a confrontation between two theses : the defense of a thesaurus versus an appeal to a tabula rasa. The dialogue is dramatic because the interlocutors do not speak of the same subject. Nevertheless, their debate helps clarify the notions of civilization and culture and to reveal paradoxically their respective identities.

Konstantin SIGOV, Beyond the opposition Tabula rasa/Thesaurus. In connection with the Correspondence across a room. The opposition between Russia and the West, that had obsessed so many participants in the historical debate is completely transformed in the Correspondence across a room. After ihe First World War and the Revolution, Gerschenson and Ivanov discuss in a Bolshevik sanatorium the problematic of the transmission of the legacy of the past (Eastern as well as Western). The problems of the break down of traditions, of elements of constraint in political practices and scientific theories, the monumental past of culture and the decadent attitude in this respect in the present are being analyzed, on basis of the main question of possibilities of justifying history. Taking as a starting point precisely the questioning of the notion of truth (pravda) in history, it is proceeded to examine anew the objective of the debate of the Correspondence, defined in former interpretations as binary oppositions : Jew versus Hellene, nominalist versus realist, Rousseauist versus Platonist, tabula rasa versas thesaurus.

Angela DIOLETTA SICLARI, Individuality and ecumenism in the light of Kantian ethics. In the course of the primary stage of his formation, Ivanov comes close to Kant's ethical ideology and Fichte's and Schelling's idealism. But, all in all, he does not really share these ideas ; he rather makes use of them as symbols and as means to study personally, more thoroughly, the problem of connection between individual liberty and values. In "Krizis individualizina" (1905), Ivanov underlines two aspects of Kantian ethics : the indefinite multiplicity of unnecessary forms in which the moral intention can lie embodied and the universalism of the person, as objective of the moral action. He concludes therefrom that Kantian ethics equips the individual with a "royal dimension", in other words that it is the basis of ecumenism. However, from Kant's point of view, this "royal dimension" is not yet ecumenism : according to the latter, it is not only the dimension of rationality of will that is to be shared, but also the dimension of action and of concrete experience, in which the concrete rules to be followed reside. Ivanov — like all symbolists — views liberty as one of the two elements of polarity. From a certain point of view, the concrete world will always be negative inasmuch as it constitutes the limitation of the individual's liberty ; and it must be such so that the personality might reveal itself. This means that there are no other true objectives except the materialization of the person and that the person is realized only by opposition to the world, according to Fichte.

Michel GRABAR, Draft of an Ivanovian theory of culture in the Correspondence across a room. Sheltered, in 1920, in a "convalescent home for scientific and literary workers" in the outskirts of Moscow, Viacheslav Ivanov and Mikhail Gerschenson exchanged a dozen of letters from two comers of a room which they were forced to share. Such is the origin of the Correspondence. This splendid and arduous text deserves an attentive study because of the in- depth debate that it constitutes on the nature and the foundation of culture in which the radicalism of Enlightenment as exposed by Gerschenson clashes with Ivanov's humanist requirements of memory. This study is endeavoured here with complete respect for the logic of a highly intertextual text, in which one letter replies to another, and an explicit or implicit reference engages a dialogue with another reference.

Efim ETKIND, Viacheslav Ivanov and the questions of poetics in the 1920s. Viacheslav Ivanov was instrumental in creating a theory of poetry. This activity brings him close to his contemporaries, Briusov, Belyi and even Bal'mont. This paradoxical marriage between Symbolists' intuitivism and their scientific rationalism is explained by the discovery of various poetical worlds, due to Symbolists' attempts at being acquainted with new aesthetic phenomena, still indecipherable. In 1921-1922, Ivanov gave several lectures at Baku University, the texts of which had never been published. This study, based on the notes of one of Ivanov's students, analyses his conceptions of poetics (such as the nature of the language, the origine of sonorous images, the phonetic structure of poetry, etc.). The article concludes that Ivanov creates his theory through a constant polemics with the young Formalists. In spite of obvious divergencies, it can be stated that it is at the beginning of the twentieth century that modem poetics was created, thanks to the common efforts of Symbolists, Acmeists and supporters of the Russian formalist school.

Rolf FIEGUTH, The question of the category of the sublime in Viacheslav Ivanov s poetry. We interpret as a theory of the sublime Ivanov's view on the poet's inspiration which is surmounting individualism, first by the lonely poet's mystic ecstasies, and then by the inspired poet's return to the community (sobornost') with other human beings. The same idea is underlying Ivanov's poetical cycles : the single poem's individualism is dominated by its intertextuality (stylisation of the antique, the Old Russian, etc.) and by its subordination to the compositional principle of ordered texts : the single word's individualism is partly sacrificed to the particularities of Ivanovian metrics and syntax (for instance Hesperides). Ivanov's ideal of a communitarian sublime (sobornoe vozvyshennoe) should be read in the context of a history of the sublime in Russian literature.

Leonid HELLER, Viacheslav Ivanov s synthetism. From the 1880 's on, the evolution of modernism is punctuated with various synthetic schemes, such as a "great synthesis of science, art and religion", a synthesis of art and being, a "synthetic art", and finally "synthetic" devices in art. Viacheslav Ivanov occupies one of the foremost places among those who, in Russia, supplied these ideas with a real critical and philosophic consistency, and also among those who pioneered the road towards the "great synthesis". This article briefly examines Ivanov's « synthetism » as an element of his theoretical discourse, on the background of his time. It follows the progression of the notion of "synthesis" : science, mysticism and art, elements of the great synthesis, manifest themselves through particular tendencies and motives — energetism, esoterism, synthetism — and it stresses their influence on Ivanov's thought. It also endeavors to show the close connection of these motives in the cultural conscience of the Silver Age and of its successors, that is to say the point up to which they constitute themselves into the cultural paradigm of modernism.

Maria CYMBORSKA-LEBODA, Drama, music and theater : the symbolist conception of man. This article attempts to extract from the theoretical writings of symbolists (such as Viacheslav Ivanov and A. Belyi), their views on music, drama and theater. It traces the influence exercised directly by the traditions of ancient culture, familiar with the writers of this period, and the part of Nietzschean and Wagnerian aesthetics, as intermediary in the assimilation of antiquity (for instance, the eternal recurrence, the revival of the pristine elements in drama ; its chorus and its musical, Dionysiac element). The article examines symbolist views on the archaization of drama (partly similar to Bahtin's notion of genre) and the hierarchy of arts and genres, together with the typology of drama : Ivanov contrasts drama- performance with choral drama, of Dionysiac origin. Finally, the article presents Ivanov's philosophical views on man and culture.

Grazyna BOBILEWICZ-BRYŠ, The painting of the masters of Italian Renaissance in Viacheslav Ivanov's work. This article examines the influence of the painting of the masters of Italian Renaissance (Sandro Botticelli, Raphael Santi, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo) on Viacheslav Ivanov's work and conception of life. The author of Cor ardens adopts and re-interprets the aesthetic, philosophical and religious program of Italian painters. He refers to their iconographie devices and resorts to their stylistic and formal solutions (in the creation of figures, landscape, scenery, drawing, conception of perspective, etc.). The Renaissance masters, sources of poetical inspiration, as well as their work are for Ivanov symbols of the everlasting world of art, in which beauty is thus immune to the ravages of time.

Aleksandr ETKIND, Viacheslav Ivanov and psychoanalysis. Russian symbolism had certain characteristics in common with psychoanalysis and they influenced each other. This article examines the resemblances and the differences between the ideas of Viacheslav Ivanov and those of Freud and of Jung at the same period as well as certain biographical connections between them. In the historical domain, it is supposed that Sabine Spielrein and Emilii Metner were the influential personalities that established the link between psychoanalysis and symbolism in the Russian context. In the theoretical domain, it is supposed that the figures of (Edipus and Dionysos had provided the intellectual scheme polarizing the relationship between psychoanalysis and symbolism.

Aleksandr KUSHNER, The mythological themes in the lyric poetry of Viacheslav Ivanov and of I. Annenskii. In spite of the common characteristics of their philological interests, linked to antiquity, Ivanov and Annenskii varied greatly in their approach to myth of which they made use very differently in their lyric poetry. This is explained by the variety of their conceptions of poetical objectives. For Ivanov, the mythological theme was mainly a way to transfer poetical language into supraterrestrial spheres, a cosmic domain "inconceivable by the mind", in which this language adopted a metaphysical, orgiastic, dionysian meaning ; in his poetry, the names and the mythological themes, linked to each other, were transformed often enough into a unique, self-sufficient theme and, by comparison with it, the contemporary life appeared as prosaic and of little interest. For Annenskii, on the other hand, the myth deprived of "dimness" presented unexpectedly a present-day aspect in his poetry and played therein only the part of striking and original metaphors. Annenskii created in his verses a new, everyday myth, originating in the painful conjunction of the soul with the surrounding world. He viewed contemporary life as terrible, as well as beautiful and mysterious, and the "sublime" and the "inconceivable" were not "superpositions" originating from above — as in the case of Ivanov — but from life itself.

Pamela DAVIDSON, The legacy of difficulty in the Russian poetic tradition : contemporary critical responses to Ivanov s Cor Ardens. In reviewing the responses of Ivanov's fellow-poets to his collection of verse Cor Ardens (1911-1912), the paper focuses on one particular issue : the difficulty of Ivanov 's poetry and the legacy of this aspect of his poetics. The paper falls into three parts. The first provides an introduction to the concept of difficulty in poetry, considered in relation to the development of the Russian poetic tradition and to Ivanov's place within this tradition. The central and most extensive part analyses the responses to the difficulty of Ivanov's poetry reflected in the reviews of Cor Ardens written by Valerii Briusov, Mikhail Kuzmin, Georgii Chulkov, and three younger poets of the next generation, Nikolai Gumilev, Sergei Gorodetskii and Vladislav Khodasevich. The final part considers Ivanov's innovatory role and legacy as a "difficult" poet, and concludes that it had a two-fold impact — both directly, on the level of fonnal difficulty, as Briusov and Kuzmin underline, but also indirectly, as a stimulus to reaction and self-definition, as is particularly clear from Gumilev 's response to Ivanov's ideological complexity.

Aminadav DYKMAN, Lithica Ivanoviana. Some remarks about the cycle Prozrachnost'. This article presents the literary tradition that serves as a background to Viacheslav Ivanov 's poetical cycle Prozrachnost' (The kingdom of transparency). The author endeavours to demonstrate the deliberate synthetism of this cycle, evoking texts of Greek and Latin lapidaries, the famous medieval Marbode 's lapidary, as well as several poetic texts belonging to the baroque period or the symbolist poets. This article supports the thesis according to which a global appreciation of Ivanov's text can be obtained only after confrontation of its various literary sources.

Aleksandr ARKHANGEL'SKII, Viacheslav Ivanov s Mladenchestvo and the philosophy of infancy in Boris Pasternak s work. This article endeavored to link Ivanov's mythopoetical image of infancy, — viewed not as a pastoral, serene period, but instead, as a stage of tragic consciousness, close to paradise and hell — , to Pasternak's philosophy of childhood, lived as an experience of successive losses and understanding of the mystery of death. Because of the spiritual supports provided by the notion of succession, of fatherhood, a "pledge of immortality" is thus bestowed on the shaping personality. For Ivanov and Pasternak, art that penetrates early in the child's universe and brings the harmony of another — tragic — order, becomes a link in the chain : infancy — > fatherhood -> death -> eternity.

Donata G ELI Л MUREDDU, Memory of the past, classical motifs and palinody in the Roman diary of the year 1944. In Dnevnik 1944 goda Viacheslav Ivanov reached the final stage of his spiritual quest, the coherent point of arrival of the linear itinerary of his poetics. Christian anamnesis, which lies throughout the Diary, testifies continuity of inspiration : memory of the past is purified and lives in the present. Anamnesis concerns human memory of either great or small events : everything flows into, and finds salvation in the all-encompassing Eternal Memory. The death-rebirth dialectic, linked with the relationship between individual memory and Vechnaia Pamiať, reclaims another recurrent aspect of Ivanov 's memory-oriented poetics : the passage from individual to choral memory, flowing into the current of Mnemosyne.

Roman DOUBROVKINE, The German version of the threnody "Chelovek". An attempt of interpretation. The aim of the article is to interpret the German version of the first part of Viacheslav Ivanov 's poem "Der Mensch", the manuscript of which is preserved at the Geneva archive "Fondation Bodmer". Stylistically, this translation, made at the beginning of the 1930's and planned to be published in a Swiss magazine Corona, differs greatly from the Russian original. "Chelovek" was written before the Revolution, but was printed only in 1939 in Paris. For reasons unknown the German translation was never published. Comparing the German translation with the commentaries made by Viacheslav Ivanov to the Paris edition, the author of this article comes to the conclusion that the German text should be regarded as a new and more mature rendering of this most elaborate work. Ivanov 's letters, discovered recently, have confirmed this hypothesis. If "Der Mensch" can be considered a translation, then the right to translate in this way belongs solely to the author.

Dimitri SEGAL, Vmcheslav Ivanov and the Shor family. During the 1920-I930's Viacheslav Ivanov had intensive contacts with the young emigre philosopher Evsei (Yehoshua) Shor in Tel-Aviv. These contacts were mostly devoted to E. Shor's activities as Ivanov 'я translator into German. A selection of letters written by Ivanov and Shor is published, mostly around Shor's attempt to reconstruct Ivanov 's Weltanschauung.

Michael WACHTEL, Viacheslav Ivanov, a student at Berlin University. Viacheslav Ivanov's studies in Berlin and Rome have become the stuff of legend rather than of scholarly investigation. The present paper, based on archival documents from Berlin and Moscow, seeks to correct numerous misconceptions about these formative years. In an introductory essay, the author charts the course of Ivanov's studies (in particular, the tortuous path of his dissertation progress) and examines his relationship to his mentors, Professors Otto Hirschfeld and Theodor Mommsen. The essay is followed by annotated publications of relevant material ; first, a list of Ivanov's course during the years in Berlin (as compiled by Ivanov himself in 1895) and second, Ivanov's correspondence with Hirschfeld.

Vera PROSKURINA, Viacheslav Ivanov and Mikhail Gerschenson on the way to the Correspondence across a room. The present article traces the history of personal and "professional" relations of Viacheslav Ivanov with the historian of the Russian intellectual movement, writer and thinker, Mikhail Gerschenson. Based on the unpublished materials of their correspondence and the manuscript review "Bul'var i pereulok" (1915), the prelude to the Correspondence across a room looms up, the roots of which go back to the mid-1910's, a time of joint translation work and of friendly discussions among Ivanov's Muscovite interlocutors. Gerschenson 's article, "Teoriia slovesnosti", annexed herewith, is extracted from the humoristic review "Bul'var i pereulok". Filled with domestic esoterism, it gives a skilful representation of "Ivanov's universe". Interspersed with Gerschenson 's ironical accents, it foreshadows their future polemics and throws a light on its origin.

Michel GRABAR, Viacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Solov'ev. As a philosopher and a poet, Vladimir Solov'ev exercised a determining influence on the making of the "new religious conscience" in the Silver Age. Viacheslav Ivanov, acting here as a historian of Russian culture, analyses, in a text dated from 1911, the part thus played by Solov'ev in this domain. According to Ivanov, the Russian philosopher shaped the new religious feeling, as yet amorphous, that Dostoevskii and Tolstoi portrayed in their novels. He endowed Russian faith — exclusive and national — with a degree of universality unknown prior to his intervention. With the divino-humanity superseding the overman, he managed to find a way out of decaying individualism. Beyond the significant part played by Solov'ev in the intellectual history of the Silver Age, an intimate bond has been established between his work and Ivanov's poetical and spiritual path : a light projected on this tenuous connection will help understand the profound consistency of the latter 's work.

Konstantin LAPPO-DANILEVSKII, Viacheslav Ivanov and Aleksei Kruchenykh in a debate on Nietzsche and Dostoevskii. This article relates, on basis of hitherto unpublished documents, a little-known episode in the cultural life of Baku after the Revolution : a debate that took place at a session of the chair of foreign literatures of the Baku University, on May 9, 1921. Viacheslav Ivanov 's argumentation presents a particular interest because it contains an analysis of the main concepts of Dostoevskii's philosophy. Enclosed herewith are published several archival documents among which an impromptu in verse of A. Kruchenykh addressed to Viacheslav Ivanov.