Vyacheslav Ivanov

Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov (; – 16 July 1949) was a Russian poet, playwright, and senior theorist of the Russian Symbolist movement. He was also a philosopher, translator, and literary critic. Early life Born in Moscow, Ivanov lost his father, a minor civil servant, when he was only five years old and was subsequently raised within the Russian Orthodox Church by his deeply religious mother. He graduated from the First Moscow Gymnasium with a gold medal and entered Moscow University where he studied history and philosophy under Sir Paul Vinogradoff. In 1886, he moved to Berlin University to study Classics, Roman law, and economics under Theodor Mommsen. During his stay in Imperial Germany, he absorbed the philosophy of German Romanticism, most notably as represented by Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Goethe. Ivanov's main passionate interest, however, was in researching the connection between the Greek religious cult of Dionysus and his worship during the Bacchanalia with the creation of the theatre of ancient Greece. In 1886 Ivanov married Darya Mikhailovna Dmitrievskaya, the sister of his close childhood friend Aleksei Dmitrievsky. From 1892 he studied archaeology in Rome, completing his doctoral dissertation there. In 1893 he met Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal, a well-to-do amateur singer, poet, and translator, who had recently separated from her husband. Through their shared descent from 17th-century Afro-Russian military officer and aristocrat Abram Petrovich Gannibal, Lidia was also a distant relation of Russian national poet Alexander Pushkin. Influenced by his recent discovery and enthusiasm for the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Ivanov and Zinovieva-Annibal surrendered to their mutual attraction, "during a tempestuous night at the Colosseum, which he described in verse as a ritualistic breaking of taboos and regeneration of ancient religious fervor."