Between God and Ubermensch: Viacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov and His Vacillating Struggle with Nietzsche

At the end of the nineteenth century, a considerable part of the Russian intelligentsia became acquainted the works and of Friedrich Nietzsche, which for many of them was both a source of inspiration and a challenge further reflection. One of these young intellectuals was Viacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov (1866-1949), who was become a major poet and leading theoretician of the Russian symbolist movement. (1) In 1886, Ivanov left Moscow and went Berlin study classical philology and history. During his stay in the German capital, he took part in Theodore Mommsen's famous seminar on Roman history and most probably got in touch a number of writings, which had been arousing quite some excitement in selective intellectual circles from the early 1870s on. (2) In his Autobiographical Letter, written in 1917 at the request of the literary critic S.A. Vengerov, Ivanov relates how he left Berlin in 1891 and went Paris, packed with volumes of Nietzsche, about whom people started talking (SS, II: 19). Although he did not indicate exactly which books he took him and whether or not he had really read them, it is beyond all doubt that thought exerted a decisive impact on the young scholar's intellectual development--Nietzsche became increasingly and ever more powerfully the master of my thoughts (SS, II: 19)--and even influenced the course of his personal life. (3) Ivanov admits that he was particularly struck by first monograph, Die Geburt der Tragodie, which was first published in 1872, but came out a new foreword and a new subtitle in 1886. This book, focusing on the dynamics of artistic forces crystallized in the duplicity of the Apollinian and the Dionysian, prompted him shift the focus of his academic attention from Roman Hellenic history and spend a year in Athens study sources and remnants of Dionysian cults. (4) The specific intention of this move was, however, not pursue the philosopher's hypothesis on the relationship between religion and literature in Greek antiquity, but to overcome Nietzsche in the issues of religious consciousness (SS, II: 21). Although Ivanov's preoccupation Nietzsche was relatively short-lived, it was intense and gave rise the author's unceasing appreciation, in particular respect the figure of Dionysus. Nevertheless, his reading of texts cannot be characterized as a form of indiscriminate copying or unquestioned epigonism. On the contrary, Ivanov accepted aestheticized notion of the Dionysian--as derived from the ancient godhead, but completely disrobed of any religious connotation--with gratitude, yet only use it as a stimulus deepen his own religious insights. For him, Dionysus was not solely an artistic principle, but rather a genuine religious and metaphysical being. In order deal this contrast, Ivanov felt compelled study the roots of Dionysianism and its relation Christianity. He elaborated his viewpoints in two longer essays, Ellinskaia stradaiushchego Boga (The Hellenic Religion of the suffering God, 1904) and Religiia Dionisa: Ee proiskhozhdenie i vliianiia (The Religion of Dionysus: its Origin and Influence, 1905), and in the monograph Dionis i pradionisiistvo (1923). Intersecting Biographies It is important notice that for Ivanov, as Stammler points out, philosophy was fundamentally embedded in the developments of his biography: Nietzsche's entire life was a profound mystical experience in broad, occasionally sublime, outlines, ending tragically in an abrupt (300). During the time Ivanov lived in Berlin, the nomadic philosopher was at first no more than an obscure publicist, relatively unknown the general public. After his mental collapse in January 1889 and a short internment in mental hospitals in Basel and Jena, Nietzsche was cared for first by his mother in Naumburg, later--after his mother's death in 1897--by his sister in the famous Villa Silberblick in Weimar. …

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.