Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Notes on the text
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I APPROACHES AND THEMES
- 1 Ivanov's Dionysiac ideal and Dante
- 2 Vladimir Solovyov and Dante
- 3 The Symbolist view of Dante as a poet of Sophia
- 4 Ivanov's ideal of mystical love
- PART II TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
1 - Ivanov's Dionysiac ideal and Dante
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Notes on the text
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I APPROACHES AND THEMES
- 1 Ivanov's Dionysiac ideal and Dante
- 2 Vladimir Solovyov and Dante
- 3 The Symbolist view of Dante as a poet of Sophia
- 4 Ivanov's ideal of mystical love
- PART II TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
IVANOV'S SPIRITUAL IDEAL
Formation: a Christian upbringing and classical education
The three traits which are usually considered characteristic of Ivanov – the fervent profession of the Christian faith, a high level of academic scholarship and a sense of poetic vocation – were all bequeathed to him at the outset of his life by his mother. In a brief autobiographical note written in 1917, Ivanov paid tribute to the decisive influence which his mother exerted on his life; she brought her son up in an atmosphere of mystical Russian Orthodox belief and piety, wished him to be highly educated and to become a poet. But Ivanov did not achieve a stable synthesis of these three elements without first going through a period of reaction during which he rebelled against his Christian upbringing, pursued a line of academic research unsuited to his nature, and regarded himself as a scholar rather than as a poet.
The start of this period of reaction occurred in February 1881 when Ivanov, as he subsequently recorded, made the sudden and painless discovery around the date of his fifteenth birthday that he was no longer a believing Christian but an atheist and revolutionary (55 11, 13). This phase of adolescent atheism lasted for five years; it covered the final three years of Ivanov's education at the First Moscow Gymnasium as well as his first two years at university, and was largely responsible for determining the course of his academic studies for some years to come.
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- Information
- The Poetic Imagination of Vyacheslav IvanovA Russian Symbolist's Perception of Dante, pp. 25 - 52Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989