The Russian Prospero: The Creative Universe of Viacheslav Ivanov

7. Ivanov’s Emigration

C  T C The Correspondence as Text Ivanov’s mature theoretical stance in the s entailed a certain humility before history. His emigration in , by contrast, revealed a quite different attitude. There were, of course, many personal reasons prompting him to emigrate. On a broader level, however, as a thinker Ivanov was escaping history and its conundrums.As for Shakespeare’s Prospero, exile was a condition of Ivanov’s continued sovereignty. He spent his waning years in splendid intellectual isolation from his compatriots, with intermittent visitations by Ariel, free to construct Russia as a fiction in The Tale of Svetomir-Tsarevich and numerous essays. The moment of Ivanov’s transition from hermeneutic engagement to the external standpoint of emigration is captured in A Correspondence from Two Corners.1 This small book consists of an exchange of twelve letters between Ivanov and his roommate, the eminent literary historian Mikhail Gershenzon , in June and July . In his letters to Gershenzon one sees traces of Ivanov’s hard-won hermeneutic standpoint as well as signs of impending detachment from history. The correspondence captures a moment of transition from participation in a vital intellectual community to lonely isolation, from a receptive cultural milieu to silence. When viewed in the context of events in both writers’ lives and of the work’s illustrious reception, the Correspondence itself turns out to be a highly complex event in Ivanov’s intellectual development and a compelling example of hermeneutic interaction between text and action. The Correspondence has usually been seen more as a timeless monument of humanistic thought than as a literary text. Vera Proskurina has demonstrated that this “universal document, beyond space and time,” is actually a “remarkable literary work, constructed according to the laws of the artistic  Ivanov’s Emigration  text and oriented toward literary play and theatrical conventionality”(: –). In particular, Ivanov holds to a rhetorical strategy of citation, never asserting anything without reference to some textual authority ().While he does make a few citations, Gershenzon clothes his argument mostly in metaphor, a more open rhetorical strategy that suggests“the inexpressibility in words” of spiritual essence (–). Ivanov finds freedom within tradition , while Gershenzon seeks its more immediate expression. Ivanov values the textuality of life, while Gershenzon aspires to the vitality of the text, its rootedness in real-life experience. The disputants argue about whether life or the text comes first. In the end Ivanov and Gershenzon are forced to admit that both abide in a fragile but vivifying interdependence. Due to the neglect of its literary qualities,the arguments of the Correspondence have often been reduced to a simple pro et contra: Ivanov defends culture as mediation between humanity and God, while Gershenzon (like Nikolai Berdiaev before him) seeks to circumvent culture in more direct expressions of the human spirit. From this viewpoint, the circumstances of the text’s composition seem a mere curiosity, despite the fact that the work’s topicality was the overriding issue for its earliest critics. Some, especially among the Bolsheviks, read the Correspondence as the swan song of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia, precisely the kind of intellectual showmanship that proletarian culture should abolish:“Ivanov’s faith in God and Gershenzon ’s faith in ‘spirit’ are religions of the same order since both excuse their high priests from the urgent duty of our day: the obligation to take an active part in the construction of a new life.”2 Others, mostly from the prerevolutionary intelligentsia, focused on the relevance of Ivanov’s and Gershenzon’s arguments about culture at such a pivotal moment for Russia, when the entire cultural legacy was at stake.While these early critical responses did not do much to illuminate the text, they pointed in a richer direction than the reductive approach that predominated after , when—largely at Ivanov’s prompting—the Correspondence became seen as a manifesto of Ivanov’s Christian humanism, a viewpoint that ignores Gershenzon’s contribution and the fact that neither Christianity nor humanism are explicit themes in the text. The concerns of the Correspondence are much more immediate, involving both the identity of nascent Soviet culture and whether the creative individual can best contribute by persevering at home or by fleeing abroad. The Correspondence as Event Ivanov’s contribution to the Correspondence can be interpreted either as his last word in Russia or as his first word in emigration. As the culmination of  Afterglow his writings in the s, Ivanov’s...