A night in the Colosseum turned a Russian classicist into a Symbolist firebrand
Vyacheslav Ivanov meant to be a respectable scholar and family man. Then, fired up by Nietzsche, he spent a stormy night in Rome's Colosseum with a married poet, left his wife, and became the high priest of Russian Symbolism. Decades later he ended his life as a Catholic professor in Rome, quoted by a pope.
Ivanov was born in Moscow in 1866 into the lower nobility. His father, a minor civil servant, died when he was five, and his devout mother raised him in the Orthodox faith. After a gold medal at school and history and philosophy at Moscow University, he went to Berlin in 1886 to study under Theodor Mommsen, soaking up Novalis, Hölderlin and Goethe. His real obsession was how the cult of Dionysus gave birth to Greek theatre.
That same year he married Darya Dmitrievskaya, his friend's sister, and later researched archaeology in Rome. In 1893 he met Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal, a singer, poet and translator distantly related to Pushkin. After their night in the Colosseum, which he recast in verse as a ritual breaking of taboos, his wife and daughter left him. Barred from an Orthodox wedding as the guilty parties in their divorces, the couple dressed in Dionysian costume and married in a Greek Orthodox church at Livorno in 1899. They kept an open marriage, yet he said that through each other they had found God.
Back in St. Petersburg, his weekly salon near the Tauride Palace became a hub of the Silver Age. He helped launch Anna Akhmatova and mentored Nikolai Berdyaev and Boris Pasternak. As a theatre theorist he wanted to dissolve the fourth wall and turn audiences into participants, an idea that influenced the director Vsevolod Meyerhold.
After revolution and civil war he emigrated to Italy in 1924 and joined the tiny Russian Greek Catholic Church in 1926, likening his conversion to St. Augustine's. A 1931 public debate in which he defended Christianity against Benedetto Croce made his name in the West. He taught in Rome until his death in 1949. Pope John Paul II often borrowed his image of Eastern and Western Christianity as the two lungs of the Church, and his work, long censored at home, revived after 1991.
Source: Vyacheslav Ivanov (poet)
