Russia's Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890–1940

4. The Third Rome in Exile: Refitting the Pieces in Viacheslav Ivanov’s “Roman Sonnets”

4 The Third Rome in Exile Refitting the Pieces in Viacheslav Ivanov’s “Roman Sonnets” Once again, a faithful pilgrim of your ancient arches, In my twilight hour with an evening “Ave Roma” I greet you as my own home, Refuge from wanderings, Eternal Rome. Viacheslav Ivanov, “Regina Viarum,” 1924 In a 1964 article, the Russian émigré writer and priest Kirill Fotiev wrote that following the appearance of Viacheslav Ivanov’s “Rimskie sonety” (Roman Sonnets), “no one can doubt any longer that we, the ‘barbarians,’ have been invited to the feast of the Western European spirit that Rome both was and continues to be.” Ivanov, Fotiev concluded , had shown the way to Rome’s culturally laden tables.1 Indeed, in Ivanov’s nine sonnets, written shortly after his 1924 emigration from newly Soviet Russia to Rome,2 the erudite Russian poet masterfully navigated an evocative path through the physical environs of his adopted city—its fountains, monuments, colors, and sounds—as well as its rich panoply of cultural associations, ranging from Greek and Roman mythology to Renaissance palaces and the sculptures of Bernini . Situating himself in the sonnets through repeated first-person references , Ivanov asserted the place of the Russian artist in the world of culture represented by the “first” Rome, calling to his company such compatriots as Nikolai Gogol’ and the painter Aleksandr Ivanov. 129 Moreover, through the act of writing himself into his Rome-based work, and through suggestions within the poems of his life’s journey, Ivanov claimed kinship with a series of central, epic literary personages— authors and characters—from the Western cultural tradition. These figures include Virgil and his Aeneas; Augustine, as both author and principal character in the Confessions; and Dante-the-author and Dantethe -character in the Divine Comedy. Moving from East to West in a disillusioned rejection of Russian political reality, Ivanov included in his sonnets a vision of St. Peter’s Dome, thus presaging his own conversion to Catholicism in 1926. At the same time, even as the sonnets reflect Ivanov’s turn from Russia to Rome, they also demonstrate his continuing faith in what he believed to be the ideal task of the twentieth-century Russian artist: the merging of East and West to join in the creation of a Kingdom of God characterized by the religious and cultural unity of humankind and the divine, of time and of space, through the active creativity of sacred memory. For Ivanov as for other Russian Symbolists writing about Rome, the envisaged heavenly dominion coexisted to some degree with earthly power, often associated by Ivanov with nationalism. Whereas previous writers, immersed in Russia’s turbulent revolutionary surroundings , had focused on the clash between these two forces, paying particular attention to the early Christian period, the émigré Ivanov, now immersed in the ongoing cultural history of the “Eternal City,” approached the junction of the sacred and the imperial-nationalistic somewhat differently. For him, the sacred and the imperial form part of a larger, Rome-based master narrative of death and resurrection in which earthly power, somewhat paradoxically, may be sanctioned by divinity and then reborn into holy universalism. This process is rooted in holy epiphany and myth, as the poet, drawing on the revelatory experiences of his creative predecessors, both prophesies and spurs a nation to fulfill its intended, unifying potential. As Virgil was said to have predicted and embodied in his “messianic” fourth eclogue the trans- figuration of worldly Rome into the overarching Christian kingdom sought by Augustine and lauded in its ideal form by Dante, Ivanov, too, claimed his role as Russian poet-prophet of a desired age of Christian unity. In the “Roman Sonnets,” Rome, pictured in its multitudinous guises and stages, represents this very state of creative unity, as worldly power is subsumed into the heavenly and both exist within the artistic work. Relinquishing immediate hope for Russia’s realization of his vision of the all-encompassing Third Rome status he had earlier sought 130 The Third Rome in Exile and turning instead to Rome itself, Ivanov nevertheless asserted a place for the Russian artist and his sacred goals in the complex Rome the sonnets reflect. Monuments and Spiritual Initiations The way downward is easy from Avernus. Black Dis’s door stands open night and day. But to retrace your steps to heaven’s air, There is the trouble, there is the toil. Virgil...