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Dante in Russian Symbolist Discourse

JOHN M. KOPPER

[Dante] became in turn a heretic, a revolutionary, and the fer- vent defender of a unified Italy - in each instance according to the requirements of the time.

- Aleksandr Veselovsky1

On all the earth our only model. - Valéry Briusov2

Russia marked the six-hundredth anniversary of Dante's death in extraordinary fashion. Only four years removed from revolution and still in the

grip of famine and a cataclysmic civil war, it celebrated 1921 with a flood of testimonials, literary evenings, poems, essays, lectures, and popular monographs destined for readers ranging from the intelligentsia to school children.3 One must look at the fortunes of Dante's reception in Russia

during the preceding decades to explain this unusual tribute. The years 1890-1921 saw a dramatic reconfiguration of the Russian understanding of Dante. Interpretations that had hitherto been the idiosyncratic fruit of individual writers were rapidly drawn together into one discourse, and the Florentine poet became a critical fulcrum on which the nation's intelligentsia balanced its arguments about culture. As early as the 1890s the Russian artistic community had articulated a new ground for interpreting Dante and tentatively begun to elaborate formal procedures for reading

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES, Vol. 31, No. 1, 1994.

Copyright © 1994. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.



26 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

Dante into their debates about the conflict between religion and modernity. The first two decades of this century witnessed the result of their labors. The Symbolist movement would make Dante's work its most con- sistent and widely used non-Russian subtext. Thus Dante's importance to early twentieth-century Russian letters goes well beyond the mere fre- quency of his appearances in texts of the time. The manner of his reception says a great deal about the preconditions for constructing Russian cultural icons in general and at the same time speaks to the distinctiveness of Russian Symbolism within a pan-European context.

After establishing the parameters for discussion of the Symbolist Dante and positioning its investigation within the context of existing scholarship, this essay will trace Dante's evolution as a Symbolist cultural hero. At first glance, if one follows strict chronology, the story of Dante's reception by the Symbolists appears bewilderingly complex. A year-by- year review of publications serves to reinforce the sense that there is no pattern or logic to the growth of a Symbolist Dante. But in fact quite the contrary is true. During the years 1890-1921 two distinct approaches to Dante were developed by the Symbolists and then telescoped. The first approach is exemplified by Valéry Briusov's poems of the years 1898- 1907, the second by Andrei Bely's and Ellis's work during the period 1900-1915. The foundations for Bely's reading of Dante were laid earlier, however, and his interpretation would persist as a "non-productive" arti- fact in Russian letters into the early 1920s. Chronicling this second approach to Dante will thus entail backtracking to examine an important essay from the 1890s and then carrying the argument forward to some of Bely's writings in the 1920s. Finally, before the Belyian model passed into the realm of the commonplace, it was taken up by two of the greatest poets of the Symbolist movement and combined with Briusov's construct. The synthesis accomplished by Viacheslav Ivanov and Aleksandr Blok represented the final flowering of the Symbolist cult of Dante and produced an image of the poet unlike anything in European literature.4 In order to provide a prehistory to this striking moment of culmination, the essay moves back in time again. In sum, it examines not one but three Dante and studies the evolution of each construct in its entirety before turning to the next. The essay concludes with a brief contrast between the Russian Symbolist Dante and the Dante of English Symbolist poets in the early 1920s.



DANTE AND RUSSIAN SYMBOLISM 27

The enthusiasm for Dante in Russia after 1900 was unprecedented. Although several nineteenth-century writers had exhibited a lively interest in Dante, their contributions to the formation of a Russian Dante had found no collective echo in the literary discourse of their time. Pushkin was well acquainted with The Divine Comedy, and his characteristically complex blend of irreverence and respect had led him to inaugurate use of the terzina in Russian poetry ("At life's start I remember school" [UV nachale zhizni shkolu pomniu ia"]) and to write the first Russian parodies of Dante ("Then we moved on . . ." ["I dale my poshli . . ."] and "Then I saw a black swarm of demons" ["Togda ia demonov uvidel chernyi roi"]).5 Gogol's deep sympathy with the ethical impulse of the Commedia inspired the guiding metaphor of Dead Souls, and the moral architecture of Dante

provided him, as it later would Dostoevsky, with the blueprint for a sin-to- salvation trilogy. Herzen in his turn would make Dante's exile a metaphor for his own and convert fourteenth-century Italy into a mirror of Nikolaevan Russia.6 But outside those literary references inspired by a

reading of The Divine Comedy, Pushkin, Gogol, and Herzen leave no artifacts to comprise a Dante history. Nor did the labors of Russia's greatest student of Italy, Aleksandr Veselovsky, immediately bring Dante's work into greater circulation.7 Veselovsky's work was better known in

Italy than in Russia, where he did not receive general notice until the reissue of his works by the Academy of Sciences in 1908. While Dante was widely known in Russia before the twentieth century, there was no

publicized, publicly-shared Dante before then. The passion for Dante that developed after 1900 was fueled by a general

interest in the Italian Renaissance. During the early years of the century the demand for information about Italy was both met and inspired by translations of works dealing with the Renaissance, Dante, and early modern Italy.8 It is no coincidence that these studies appeared during the decade of Russian Symbolism's programmatic codification and the subse-

quent years - the period of its eclipse in literary politics - when Symbol- ism bore its most enduring artistic fruit. Dante was a discovery of the

Symbolists. Periodicals like Vesy [The Scales] and Zolotoe runo [The Golden Fleece] are filled with fragmentary translations from Dante as well as verses and essays which invoke Dante's poems and Dante's Italy.9 Not simply read, cited, translated, and written about, Dante became an episode in the evolution of a religious philosophy and the focus of a new aesthetic. In




the hands of the movement's vanguard, Dante would even for a time be transformed into "Danteana," showing that the poet had become important enough to be popularized in journalistic miscellanies.

To grapple with Dante's largely discontinuous role in Russian thought, Soviet scholarship of the last thirty years has produced thorough chronologies: histories of translations, catalogues of citations, and invento- ries of imitations and parodies. 10 More recently, both Soviet and Anglo- American Slavists have studied the impact of Dante on certain writers, particularly Pushkin, Gogol, Blok, and Ivanov.11 But the chronologies of Dante reception and the monographs that investigate personal influence

point to the need for a study that describes the evolution of an aesthetic of Dante within the span of one generation. In the case of the Symbol- ists, Dante had such a history.

It was the era's most articulate and enthusiastic spokesman for the texts of foreign literatures, Valéry Briusov, who first among the Symbolist poets gave a nuanced reading of Dante. Two poems in Tertia Vigilia, both written in terzinas, are devoted to the poet: "Dante," written in 1898, and "Dante v Venetsii," dating from 1900. To be sure, certain images in these poems are nineteenth-century borrowings: Dante's "severe, scorched coun- tenance" ("surovyi, opalennyi lik") and his "gloomy face" ("ugriumyi oblik"). But other features of the portrait are unique to Briusov: "ageless, neither a boy nor an old man" ("Bez vozrasta, ne mal'chik, ne starik") or "like a girl" ("na devushku pokhozhii").12 And in "Dante" Briusov formu- lates what would become a persistent thesis: that Dante endures in the imagination because of his unshakeable and transcendent moral authority. This theme is taken up in "Dante v Venetsii," which ascribes Dante's immutability to his remove from petty human venality: "indifferent to our

pitiable needs" ("I zhalkim nashim nuzhdam ne prichastnyi").n An object of awe to the poet, Briusov's Dante has the moral qualifications of nastavnichestvo ("mentorship" or "preceptorship") and the depraved Vene- tians of "Dante v Venetsii" fall silent in recognition of this truth. He is a statue of dogmatic conviction, but the particulars of his ethics remain in the shadow and are not promoted as doctrine.

The manner in which these two poems confer on Dante the status of a moral icon is significant. In "Dante v Venetsii" Briusov performs a semantic operation that will become characteristic of the Symbolists' poetics of Dante: he disassembles existing Dante constructs and freely uses their

component parts to create a fresh image of the poet. Grafting a key




element of Dante's nineteenth-century portrait, his timelessness, onto the topic of "Dante v Venetsii," the nature of evil, Briusov produces a new term, the immutability of sin. By similarly extending the idea of timelessness to images in The Divine Comedy, Briusov apportions to contemporary Venice all the features of Hell: canals, bestial humans, and teaming masses of sinners. Taken together with the opening of the poem, which invokes the first scene of The Divine Comedy ("Through the streets of Venice, at the uncertain hour of evening, I wandered among the crowd" ["Po ulitsam Venetsii, v vechernii^Nevernyi chas, bluzhdal ia mezh

tolpy"]),14 the imagery transforms the poet's progress through Venice into a reflection of Dante's journey through the underworld. Briusov's "Dante" is an exceptionally pliable metaphor. Traits such as unchangeability or the topography of Hell may be separated out and reattached to other semantic units of the text. This freely shifting Dante was exploited to perfection by Ivanov and Blok.

Briusov's poems suggest but fail to consummate a merger between the modern poet and Dante that would go beyond the reapplication of a body of metaphors. In the concluding line of "Dante," "Truly you long dwelt in hell!" ("Voistinu ty dolgo zhil - v adu!"), Briusov's sympathy with the Florentine poet is pricked by the modern awareness that con-

temporary life is still infernal. In a later poem, "Poetu" (1907), Briusov

conjures his peer to let his face be scorched by the fires of hell: "the subterranean flame must singe your cheeks like Dante's" ("Kak Dantu, podzemnoe plamia\Dolzhno tebe shcheki obzhech' "). All the ingredi- ents for a conflation of the contemporary writer with Dante are present in Briusov's poem, but the identification remains inchoate. The Dante he paints is unencumbered by the particularities of space and time: fourteenth-century Italy is a portable stage-set, an attribute of the poet which signifies his presence in the poem. This circular referentiality makes Dante a self-contained locus of meaning, detachable from history and therefore immune to substantial modification brought about by reas- sessment of that history. Dante figures the immortality of genius and towers over his environment.

Fed by the erudite enthusiasms of Briusov, a cult of Dante developed in the decade after 1898, bringing Dante's texts to a wide readership and

provoking a new interest in early modern Italian culture. But the Russian

responsible for structuring the cult around specific cultural determinants was Dmitry Merezhkovsky. This is an irony, since Merezhkovsky made no




effort to give Dante a historical identity. Other than some translations of cantos from Inferno completed in 1885 and a short piece written fifty years later in emigration Merezhkovsky rarely referred to Dante in print.15 Yet the post mortem he performed on late nineteenth-century Russian spiritual life would determine much of the subsequent Symbolist representation of Dante. Merezhkovsky's 1892 essay "On the Reasons for the Decline of Russian Literature and New Currents of Contemporary Literature" ("O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniiakh sovremennoi russkoi literatury") defined the perimeter within which most Russian Symbolists would construct their models of Dante. The years dividing this essay from the 1914 essays by Ellis in Trudy i dni [Works and Days] mark a considerable space in literary history but virtually no interval in argument. It is necessary, then, to return to the 1890s in order to understand how Russian Symbolism developed an alternative to Briusov's Dante.

In "On the Reasons" Merezhkovsky enumerates the great artistic ages of European civilization - Periclean Athens, Augustan Rome, Renais- sance Florence, and eighteenth-century Weimar - periods whose splendor derives from the reflection of all cultural artifacts in a unified aesthetic. "I recognize the mighty chisel of Donatello in Alighieri's minted terzinas, with their metallic ring. On everything is the stamp of the brooding, free, and untamable spirit of the Florentine."16 The force which stamps an artistic age at its acme is universal and popular, the "genius of the people,"17 but modernity destroys this powerful reservoir of energy by parti- tioning it. In a calculated and selective reading of nineteenth-century European literature, Merezhkovsky disambiguates not one but two spirits, a triumphant, godless utilitarianism, culminating in the criticism of Pisarev and Chernyshevsky and the French roman expérimental and an idealism endangered by the materialists and nearly extinguished by the 1890s. In the fissure between materialism and idealism the unity of the

popular voice has been destroyed. Spurning the utilitarians and social "scientists" of Auguste Comte's water, Merezhkovsky promotes idealism as the essential expressive mode of Russia, and besides retroactively enroll- ing the canonically great Russian writers of his century in its camp, asserts the need for a religious revival that will build on their persistent but

imperiled efforts. His goal is the "conscious embodiment in literature of a free and godly idealism."18

Merezhkovsky's conviction that the "genius of the people" is specifi-




cally religious would help to restore to turn-of-the-century Russia the discredited discourse of Slavophilism and serve as the opening gambit in refurbishing the image of Christianity among the intelligentsia. During the next fifteen years Merezhkovsky shifted his attention from his au- topsy of contemporary literature to a detailed analysis of the victory of materialism, the triumph of "Marx-Moloch," and the counter-revolution against materialism which he envisioned could be mounted by a revived religiosity. "In place of the Bible is the account book," he would write in "The Coming Ham" ("Griadushchii Kham"): "Only the coming of Chris- tianity possesses the power to vanquish philistinism and the coming vulgarity" ["meshchanstvo i khamstvo griadushchee"].19 In an explicit reference to the Slavophile lexicon of Aleksei Khomiakov, Merezh- kovsky concludes with an appeal to a cultural unity centered in religion: "What is needed is a universal idea which would unite the intelligentsia, the church, and the people. . . . Neither a religion without community ["obshchestvennost' "], nor a community without religion, but only a religious community will save Russia."20 The réintégration of culture and religion would banish from Russia what Merezhkovsky, in a bow toward Dante's three-headed Lucifer, calls the "three faces of Ham": the suprem- acy of positivism, the capitulation of Orthodoxy, and the rootlessness of the lower classes ("bosiachestvo").

Merezhkovsky's Isaiah-like diagnosis of Russia's malaise did not require the remedy of a Messiah, but it gave direction to the intelligentsia's efforts to reformulate the terms upon which Russian culture was founded, and by defining the theoretical space that a revived national spirit would occupy, it implicitly encouraged the search for heroes that might people that space. The generation of Symbolists that gained an audience around 1901 used his program to promote exemplary cultural figures, "saints" whose historical image offered inspiration to Russia.

As a luminary of poetry's past, Dante was caught up in the immense net of cultural internationalism cast by Russian Symbolism. He was made part of the inner pantheon of great poets in the First Circle of Hell who, with the latterday additions of Shakespeare and Goethe, represented a Euro-

pean past that Russians felt obliged to know. At the beginning, then, Dante was appropriated as a word, with no more semantic content than "Homer." In a characteristically peremptory honor roll of the turn-of-the- century's cult authors Andrei Bely would refer to Dante: "There was no




possibility of us, the youth of that era, resolving [questions about the Eternal Feminine and Sophia]. We still had not properly mastered such titans as Dante, Plato, Goethe, and Kant."21

In many cases the Dante who emerges from these catalogues of immor- tals into the light of specificity is never divested of the associations in which the nineteenth century dressed him. Emily Medtner criticized the 1905 premiere of Rakhmaninov's opera Francheska da Rimini in the following words: "True, the terrors of Chaikovsky are closer to Dostoevsky than to Dante, but for all this they are genuine terrors, not the conventionally sinister effects used by Rakhmaninov. "22 Reviewing for Apollon Mikhail Fokin's ballet version of Chaikovsky's Francheska da Rimini, Eduard Stark would condemn the choreographer's failure to convey the "severe medieval atmosphere which imbues Dante's poem."23 Bard of the underworld and a puritan singer of "terror," the popular Dante of the early 1900s was often the vivid creation of a neo-Romantic sensibility. He was the Dante familiar to English and French readers from Gustave Doré's illustrations, a

brooding character drawn in the taste of Lermontov.

Merezhkovsky's cultural critique, however, continued to define acquisi- tion standards for Russia's museum of heroes, and as the age began scruti-

nizing its idols, certain figures (Schopenhauer and Hamsun among them) receded in importance. Others, like Goethe, embodied the "genius of the

people" but could not meet Merezhkovsky's stringent stipulation that the modern age, in order to combat the soulless materialism underlying positivism in science and naturalism in the arts, must adopt a cohesive reli-

gious structure. Dante, on the other hand, showed remarkable resilience. He became a crucial support for the theoretical edifice built by the Sym- bolists and in the process eventually received the historical identity which Briusov and others had withheld from him.

The difference between the Dante of Briusov and the "religious" Dante of Symbolist polemics can be seen in Bely's work. If Briusov's Dante was a catholic image, implicitly available to all moralists of contemporaneity, Bely's was virtually the opposite: a territory to be seized and defended. In a mordant 1905 review of Giovanni Scartazzini's monograph on Dante, Bely would mock the specialist who failed to address the importance of Dante to Symbolist "believers": "The venerable Dante scholar could

scarcely grasp Dante with the energy with which the Symbolist schools of

poets, artists, and thinkers now strive to understand him." Likewise, "The

Symbolist struggle sweeping Europe carries us toward an eternal sea, to-




ward universal religious symbols. Remaining withall an artist, Dante developed for us this system of religious symbols."24 Bely's Dante was a battle standard raised in partisan war.25 The sectarian possessiveness of the Scartazzini review would survive the Symbolist movement to blossom in a late flower, Mandelshtam's Conversation about Dante, a text which places Mandelshtam and Dante on the side of the blessed and on the other the profani, "those who haven't read Dante."26 This division of souls is not learned from Dante, though it might have been: the Russian intelligentsia's drive to factionalize, perhaps its most typical feature from 1835 onward, gave it an important affinity with Dante, whose poetic work, in both its religious and political dimensions, is founded on the idea of selection.

An equally blunt but more revealing reading of Dante is shown in

Bely's unpublished "The Basis of my Worldview" ("Osnovy moego mirovozzreniia"), dated 12 October 1922. Writing about the "problem of culture," Bely notes:

There were many poets and mystics before Dante, but Dante stands for us as the forerunner of the Renaissance, not Ruysbroeck or Brunetto Latini.27 Why? Because Dante is characterized by a

diversity of aspirations, because he is not just a mystic or a poet or a politician, but all three, wrapped up in one whole. This "whole" is culture. Dante is the creator of culture.28

Bely appropriates Dante because of his resistance to narrow appropriation and because he embodies all aspects of culture in crisis. The rhetoric of "whole" ("tseloe") reminds one of Khomiakov's Slavophile diction. A

self-appointed philosopher and historian of culture (for a zealous

anthroposophist they were the same), Bely would devote the 1920s to

writing a series of works - the "Moscow" novels, his memoirs, and essay/ summaries like "Osnovy" - dedicated to one guiding theme, the creative

energy released by the cyclical crises of history. For Bely, Dante lived

during the critical passage from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and

Bely urges his own generation, living through another moment of crisis, to take as its sacred texts not only Dante but the works of all artists whose lives spanned the thresholds of history.29 In Bely's eyes Dante's candidacy for nastavnichestvo derives from his historic union of roles, a fate conditioned not only by his genius but by the time.




While Bely 's image of Dante is charged with a meaning born in late medieval culture, the historical moment represented by fourteenth-century Italy is withdrawn from context. Dante is not the poet of Guelf Florence so much as he is the artist-citizen of a world in profound upheaval, subject to religious schisms, dizzying political realignments, and the ongoing destruc- tion of the myth of a Christian imperium. The Belyian Dante draws semantic weight from the particular historical conditions of pre-Renaissance Italy but also bears in himself the Idea of history - or more precisely, the Idea of the historical process.

Thus a new Dante emerged, clearly articulated and polemically in-

spired in the "historical" Dante created by Bely and Ellis and inserted into Merezhkovsky's Slavophile critique of national life. But Briusov's construct of a saintly, timeless guide, though suffering temporary eclipse, was not permanently displaced by this Merezhkovsky-Bely-Ellis model. In the hands of Viacheslav Ivanov and Aleksandr Blok, Briusov's Dante would have a new life, finally combining with the Belyian Dante to produce a wedding between the intensely personalized relationship of poet and precursor that Briusov created and the Belyian figure of the Florentine writer as cynosure of religious Symbolist poetry. The connection between Dante and both Ivanov and Blok has been described in great detail. My task here is to locate that scholarship within a history of the Symbolist Dante and to show that in Ivanov and Blok the professional kinship which stamped Briusov's relationship to Dante united with the theoretical concord that

Bely established between Dante and Symbolism. Ivanov perceived a historical relation between himself and Dante while Blok cultivated a close- ness based on temperament. These affinities were remarked by the poets themselves and by their contemporaries.

In order to understand the transformation which Dante underwent at the hands of Ivanov and Blok, one must first look at Ivanov's early poems on Dante, written shortly after the turn of the century. Of all the Symbol- ists Ivanov best knew Dante's work. Even the most casual comparison of the translations he and Ellis printed over the years in Vesy, Zolotoe runo, and Trudy i dni reveals his mastery of Dante's idiom, a fluency unique among Russian writers of the time. Armed with a knowledge of Italian civilization that probably surpassed that of any Russian in his generation, Ivanov was superbly equipped to read Dante as a manifestation of medieval sensibility and at the same time to separate his construct of the poet from the uses to which Dante was put by contemporary readers. For




Ivanov, Dante was not a sword to be raised in polemical discussion but a mind with which to converse. The special marriage of intellection and art that distinguishes Dante's poetry strongly attracted Ivanov, who through- out his career, but particularly before emigration, attempted to produce a similar body of work.

True, the historical Dante of Ivanov often remains a commonplace. In a drily humorous sonnet of 1904, dedicated to the philosopher Vladimir Ivanovsky, Ivanov teases, "Your mentor is not Hume but 'severe Dante!' "

(uUzhe nastavnik tvoi - ne Ium - a 'surovyi Dant!' ").î0 In general, however, Ivanov uses the texts of La vita nuova and The Divine Comedy with a degree of nuanced originality which distinguishes his work from that of his contemporaries. Dante's work provides an endless well of allusion for Ivanov's verse, both as direct citations - especially in titles and epigraphs - and in periphrastic interpretations of scenes. The number of titles taken from Dante is formidable (e.g., "Mi fur le serpi amiche," "Paolo i Francheska," "Gli Spiriti del viso," and "La Selva oscura"). Indeed in the period 1903-1911, the years in which he published his first four collections of verse, the chief intertext of Ivanov's

poetry is unquestionably Dante. The titles of two of these collections, Pilot Stars (1903) and Cor ardens (1911), are drawn from La vita nuova and The Divine Comedy respectively.

Ivanov's application of Dante, however, goes far beyond citation. He

frequently uses an image from Dante to launch a "paratextual" train of

thought that revises or distorts Dante's meaning. Ivanov's predecessor in such "fictional glosses to fiction" is Konstantin Balmont. Balmont's 1895

poem "Dante" invents a conversation between Dante and his shade and interlards the text with paraphrases of many of Dante's most noted im-

ages. For example, Balmont quotes Cacciaguida's prophecy about Dante's coming exile: "And you will understand how bitter is the taste of another's bread, how hard the stairs of others' houses" ("I ty poimesh', kak

gorek khleb chuzhoi,\Kak tiazhely chuzhikh domov stupeni"). 31 Balmont's

adaptation of Dante obviously lacks complexity, and the citation serves more to register the Russian writer's polyglot erudition than to establish a

precise and coherent bridge between two poetic voices. But the device itself is remarkably serviceable, and Ivanov would exploit it with tireless

subtlety in the next decade. In "Mi fur le serpi amiche" he resorts to a scene from the eighth circle of Hell to describe his relationship with Briusov. u In "La Selva oscura" Ivanov finds the opening scene of The




Divine Comedy in need of a gloss and expands Dante's lines in order to contrast the earthly and heavenly.33 In "Dukh," whose epigraph is itself taken from the exordium of Paradiso 33, Ivanov paraphrases Dante's vision of God.34 At times, it would seem, Ivanov wishes to prove that Dante has provided modernity with all its metaphors. The "other world" with which the Symbolist Ivanov establishes a system of correspondences appears to be not the transcendentally-conceived plane of problematic access envisioned by Schopenhauer and Mallarmé but a written world, the text of the The Divine Comedy itself.

Ivanov, however, sought in Dante not merely a stock of poetic images but a conjunction with his own spiritual outlook.35 As Pamela Davidson has asserted, he saw "the Middle Ages as a period in history which exem-

plified the spiritual and poetic ideals to which he aspired."36 Davidson has

exhaustively studied Ivanov's emendation of Dante, particularly his efforts to create a Christian figure in harmony with both Vladimir Solo- viev's cult of Sophia and Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, a text that exalts the virtues of Dionysian release and the loss of individuality. 37 Leaping the centuries, Ivanov's achronological genealogies also discover a reassuringly close relationship between Dante and the immediate forebears of Russian Symbolism. For Ivanov Dante chiefly offers a model of the "art of the cell" ("keleinoe iskusstvo"), which alone among modern art forms opens a way back to the great art of pre-Renaissance societies, when uniformity of life and integration of vision permitted a correspondingly unified and universal art. "Art of the cell" is an "art of the metaphysical will. Contempla- tion ... is directed ... at the inner and the universal."38 Such an art

properly expresses a Symbolist poetic, for in transitional ages (by definition, contemporaneity) its inner world coincides, by virtue of internal

necessity, with a symbol which is popular and universal ("vsenarodnym i

vselenskim").39 Ivanov can conclude that Dante is not merely a symbolist but a Symbolist.

The 1913 essay "On the Limits of Art" ("O granitsakh iskusstva") shows the degree to which Ivanov's thinking has become centered on Dante. The article is designed to provide a typological map of the forms of art, though not based, as were the nineteenth-century models of Hegel and Schopen- hauer, upon either a journey toward self-consciousness or an evolution toward ever less-tangible media. Ivanov's schema is structured around modes, such as symbolism and naturalism, which are differentiated from




one another by their "distance" from the transcendental world. Dante not only occupies a privileged place on this chart but provides the dominant metaphor for argument. Appealing to the chief spatial figure of The Divine Comedy, Ivanov defines art as a repeated ascent to and descent from higher reality. He faithfully echoes the rhetorical ambiguity of "descent" in Dante, understanding by the word both a journey into mundane experience and the fall from the transcendental vision which is a pre-condition for any description of that vision: "Art is always a descent."40 Ivanov thus uses Dante to refute the idea that empirical interpretation and symbolic transformation are in conflict, an idea he would express elsewhere.41 The art which

penetrates to "highest realities" is symbolist, and its prototype is Dante. The stages by which one approaches these realities represent a variety of modes of artistic expression - "subjectivism" and "realism," for example -

which like the sphere of the Moon in Dante's schema figure the partial vision of their inhabitants. If the vertical metaphor of The Divine Comedy symbolizes for Ivanov the passage of artists out of and back into themselves in their transcription of spiritual events, the plan of Paradiso itself becomes the model for artistic, and specifically literary, operations. This reincoding of The Divine Comedy as an ars poetica allows Ivanov to see Dante as the

significant theorist of Symbolist poetry, and with his conversion of Dante's work into a metaphor for aesthetic processes he goes far beyond any earlier Russian writer in his appropriation of the poet.

The family tree of Symbolists which Ivanov established had the in- tended effect of placing the genealogist on the branch. Ivanov's contemporaries strongly associated him with Dante and saw him to be as much Dante's pupil as Dante was Vergil's. Recognizing Ivanov's debt to Dante in a review of Cor ardens, Georgy Chulkov wrote, "In the country of love the poet's inspired guide was Dante. Before him Viacheslav Ivanov bowed

humbly and selflessly."42 Chulkov makes Dante Ivanov's mentor. Like Davidson, he sees in Ivanov the continuer of a line of philosophical poetry. Numerous other acquaintances of Ivanov's associated him with Dante, again not to equate the two but to place them in one tradition.

Sergei Bulgakov put them in a Platonic line:

Dante's name has frequently been mentioned recently in connection with V. Ivanov, Dante that superbly magnificent poet and thinker, sometimes complex and difficult, hard to understand with-




out commentaries. . . . Overshadowing us, in the remoteness of

time, towers the figure of Plato - mystic, poet, the creator of

myths, and philosopher.45

And Fedor Stepun, invoking the Symbolist theory of a national art, wrote:

The popular art of Viacheslav Ivanov is the art of Dante, Dostoev-

sky, Goethe, and Kleist, the high art of interpreting and even

creating the people's soul. It has nothing in common with psycho- social depictions of popular life or with the demand that art be accessible to popular understanding.44

If European Symbolism had enrolled Wagner as a modern mythologist, then Russia would retrospectively enter one of its own, Viacheslav

Ivanov, on the same list. The rechristening of Dante as a contemporary Symbolist led directly to

the Dante cult that emerges in Trudy i dni (1912-1916), the last major Symbolist journal. To a large extent the "Danteana" section of the con-

cluding issues of Trudy i dni portrays a Dante constrained by the Romantic

commonplaces which persisted through the Symbolist period. Yet the very redundancy of these images would contribute to the movement's sense of a shared language. This "agreed-upon" Dante would represent for Symbol- ism a tie with European Romanticism, its immediate precursor in attempt- ing to reforge the link with transcendent experience that had been rup- tured by modernity.

The Dante of Trudy i dni, however, also breaks with the Romantic model. In doing so it shows one extreme reached by the Dante cult in Russia when that cult sought a wider audience. In the hands of Ellis, Dante becomes the paragon of a poet who believes in his subject. N.

Solovetsky makes him an occultist, and J. Van der Meulen produces an

awed, emotional periphrasis not of The Divine Comedy but of the experience of reading it.45 At this point Dante joins the ranks of an apparent oxymoron, Symbolist "popular culture." Ellis's uDante-the-believer" presupposes an audience defined by its own self-satisfied sectarianism, while the "occultist Dante," adapted to the intelligentsia's latest enthusiasm for

mysticism, offers a letter of introduction to a poet that nineteenth-

century Russia had held to be as remote as he was important. Through the




offices of Van der Meulen, Dante's text presents in simplified form a plot reconstructed as a sequence of emotions. In all of these Trudy i dni essays one has difficulty distinguishing the direction of the writing, that is, whether Symbolism is being handed the credentials necessary to enter the circle of European religious poetry or whether Dante's credentials are being tested by Russian Symbolism. Thus, for example, the need to widen Dante's appeal that one senses in Van der Meulen and Solovetsky is contradicted by the aggressive exclusivity of Ellis's readings. These anti- thetical currents reflect Russian Symbolism in its post- 19 11 crisis over

readership and embody a growing conflict between what could be called catholicity and Catholicism in the increasingly centrifugal movement.

The history of Aleksandr Blok and Dante shows another extreme to the Dante cult and provides a logical endpoint to the system of associations initiated by Briusov, who identified Dante as an ageless fellow poet, and Bely and Ivanov, who enrolled him in the factional projects of their own

generation. A reverent student of Briusov and far more circumspect in his

approach to religion than Ivanov and Bely, Blok initially saw in Dante the

exemplary artist-moralist, deeply out of sympathy with contemporary life. Blok became enamored with this Dante at the turn of the century, and his

trip to Italy in 1908-1909 further charged the relationship. It is no accident that he would address his new understanding of Dante to Briusov, for Blok's construct of Dante at this time is largely reminiscent of Briusov's. On 2 October 1909, Blok wrote him, "It is entirely understand- able why Dante found asylum in Ravenna. This is a city for rest and quiet death."46 Like Ivanov, Blok often confines himself to a historical Dante that obeys the formulas of the time, as the 1909 poem "Ravenna" shows: "Dante's shade with its aquiline profile sings to me of a 'New Life' "

("Ten' Dan ta s profilem orlinym\O Novoi Zhizni mne poet").47 The previous year Blok would write of the inner voice that guided "the medieval Dante, brooding lover of the heavenly Beatrice."48 But Blok saw in Dante far more than an enchanting model of medieval sensibility. In the 1909 essay "The Lightning of Art" ("Molniia iskusstva") Blok wrote, "It is good if you carry in your soul your own Vergil, who can say, 4Do not be afraid, at the end of the path you will see Her Who sent you.' "49 And in the 1918 sketch of the foreword to an unpublished edition of "Stikhi o prekrasnoi dame" he added, "I felt myself astray in the wood of my own past until it occurred to me to use the device which Dante chose when he was writing the Vita nuova. "50




These quotations make clear that during his Italian journey Blok in fact internalized not Vergil but Dante. An extraordinary number of contemporaries would later associate Blok the person with their image of Dante. In her poetic cycle "Vospominaniia ob Aleksandre Bloke," Nadezhda Pav- lovich would reminisce about an evening spent with Blok in January 1921:

All night over Peter's city Flew the drawn-out sound of the blizzard . . . See the pure, severe profile Around the cowl!

Resembling Dante, stern, dark, Amidst the holiday fires He would answer an indiscreet look With his deathly smile.

Vsiu noch' nad gorodom Petrovym Letel protiazhnyi v'iuzhnyi zvuk . . . Vot profiF chistyi i surovyi, Vot kapiushona vokrug!

Pokhozh na Dan ta, strogii, temnyi, Sred' ètikh prazdnichnykh ognei, On otvechal na vzgliad neskromnyi Ulybkoi mertvennoi svoei.51

In his memoirs of Blok, Sergei Gorodetsky also likened the poet to Dante: "He descended into the abyss with the gentlest eyes and the pure heart of a child, dispassionately traversed its most sinister recesses and carried back his difficult, Dante-like experience into the blinding light of

contemporaneity."52 And in 1922, the year after Blok died - a date which coincided with the six hundredth anniversary of Dante's death - Nikolai

Minsky devoted a monograph to Dante and Blok in which they appear as " Moments' in the enormous, eternal problem of personality. . . . The will of the individual personality must eternally reckon with and struggle against the will of the collective and society, the state, and the people." Minsky then applies Dantean imagery to Blok:




In the middle of life's journey, at thirty-five years of age, Blok, like Dante, awoke in "a dark wood," at the entrance of Hell, not an imaginary hell but a real one, the hell of the Russian Revolution. And what is so striking is the fact that Blok enters hell with the same feeling as Dante, with the consciousness of the necessity and the justice of the revenge being carried out.5î

The Dantification of Blok, inaugurated by Blok himself and continued by Pavlovich, Gorodetsky, and Minsky, has been completed by the critics, as a look at the writings of Khlodovsky, Pirog, and Etkind will show.54

It was not entirely new for Russian letters to transform a writer into Dante. In 1907, in his commentary to a selection of letters by Vladimir Soloviev in Zolotoe runo, Vasily Rozanov initially adopted for Soloviev the

leitmotif "student of Dante," promoted him to Dante's position ("[Solo- viev] looked on literature 'from the height of Dante and the Italians' and

respected almost nothing in contemporary life"), and finally applied to him Pushkin's line "Severe Dante did not disdain the sonnet" ("Surovyi Dant ne preziral soneta").55 In 1913, Briusov would call Emile Verhaeren the "Dante of contemporaneity."56 What made the Dantification of Blok

special was its creation of a fresh mythology. While the parallel drawn by Briusov would remain a restricted analogy, the wholesale remaking of Blok exercised the minds of an entire generation of Symbolists, desper- ately concerned that the historical significance of their movement might perish with his death. Blok became the magnet of their efforts, the site of an enterprise in biographical myth-making that proceeded with unparal- leled intensity after 1921. Bely's memoirs of Blok would most fully realize this effort to textualize Blok's life. His reminiscences epitomize a literary process which the Russians call "zhiznetvorchestvo" ("biopoesis"). Over the years many other writers besides Dante would be projected into the

mythological portrait of Blok. Aleksandr Pushkin was unquestionably the most significant of them.57 In every case, however, the act of superposi- tion had the same goal: the construction of an artistic divinity that would link Russians with an earlier time and prove impervious to the incoher- ence which afflicted a culture in the throes of revolutionary change. The transformation of Blok into Dante was reinforced by his apotheosis as the "new Pushkin," the undying poet-prophet of Russia, but more importantly the Dantification of Blok gave him a place in universal literary history.




Symbolism, in the aesthetic of Blok's literary allies, was universal. Through this equation Blok could remain a Russian national poet while at the same time becoming, like Dante and through Dante, the prototype of all national poets. Dante thus offered the Symbolists a way of reconciling their vital connection to Slavophile ideology with the internationalism required by their aesthetic theory. In representing Blok as Dante, the Symbolists effectively embalmed Blok within a self-serving interpretation. It is a condign fate for a poet whose verse invoked the emotions readers attached to the mythologized images of other poets and other eras. Blok himself offered Russians the way to mythologize him and so became a

trope of his own making. From the many surfaces that Dante exhibited in Russia from 1900 to

1922, two largely distinct images emerge. One is the "monumental." Although this Dante is eternally relevant to modernity, his force is rooted in history. A precise (if variously understood) configuration of religious and political events conditioned his achievement, and it is in large part this historical moment that Dante offers to the contemporary audience. Because different aspects of this moment appeal variously, terms of access to him may be stipulated differently. Ellis requires Catholicism as a condition of entry, Bely acceptance of his theory of culture in crisis, Briusov consensus that the modern world is tainted by pettiness and vice. Ivanov's idea of an "art of the cell" at once belongs to the monumentalizing tradition of Ellis, Bely, and Briusov and comes closest to articulating its

operations. It presupposes a Dante who could simultaneously represent the great tradition of art and offer a way back to its production. His was a Christ-like poet who grants each succeeding generation unique access to his greatness while presenting a hermeneutic for his ongoing reinterpreta- tion. This is the Dante of nastavnichestvo, one who presents a model for

contemporaneity or, in the case of Ivanov, a tradition within which to work. Ivanov's Dante remains important because he offers a way of struc-

turing transcendental experience and exemplifies the integration of fragmentary perception into a unified vision. While Dante, unlike twentieth-

century Europe, may have believed in the wholeness of knowledge, his faith is matched by a modern curiosity about the cognitive and creative means by which that knowledge could be organized.

For some, like Solovetsky and Fedor Stepun in his evaluation of Ivanov's career, Dante's monumentality lay in his having given expression to a culture at its moment of ascendancy. Such periods of culmination, in




the Symbolists' sometimes neo-Romantic sensibility, were marked by a unity of outlook and a totality of vision to which the resources of a great artist were entirely adequate. Hence Dante the national poet, who sang both of and to medieval Italy. This image of Dante as artist-hero, the perfect vehicle of ethnos - or, in Stepun's phrase, "the people's soul" -

was fashioned into a weapon against positivism, socialism, and the other "faces of Ham."

The ideal of a heroic artist also made possible Dante's second hypostasis on Russian soil as the "demonic." The precondition for the assemblage of a "demonic Dante" was his necessary identification with the language of nationalism in Russia, which in 1900 remained Slavophile. Dante had to be absorbed by Bely into the rhetoric of Merezhkovsky before he could reemerge with a specific link to Russia. In Dante Russians discovered a writer able to address the challenge mounted by materialist philosophy and secular culture against their Orthodox heritage. By offering a world

large enough to assimilate and reconcile the conflicting claims of empiri- cism and religion, Dante solves for the Russian intelligentsia the central issue of its day. Reason and spirit in the twentieth century can trace their

way back to Dante, as if they had been lost for centuries in the dark wood of error. Once Dante's voice could be used by a contemporary Russian, it could possess the user. The subsequent and progressive identifications of Russian writers with Dante present an interesting pathology of the demonic. Although some of its symptomatic expressions show no overt debt to Slavophilism (the paraphrases of Ellis and Ivanov and the sympathy which Dante elicits from Briusov), Blok's transformation into Dante is

governed by an explicitly historical awareness. Certain features of the Symbolist cult of Dante in Russia were generic

images in European literature, inherited from the previous century: Dante the eternal poet and Dante the Romantics' "poet of Florence." Ellis's idea of a hieratically-conceived cult of the past was also a borrowing. Joséphin ("Sâr") Péladan's Salons de la Rose-Croix staged in Paris between 1892 and 1898 offered a model for reupholstering a tradition of religious poetry and gave Ellis a style, oscillating between the programmatic and the exalted, for representing that tradition.58 The Anthroposophists' cult of Goethe at Rudolph Steiner's Utopian community in Dornach, Switzerland (where Bely lived from 1914 to 1916) also studiously manipulated occult versions of traditional religion.

But in the year of Minsky's essay, a work which sought to modernize




Dante, there appeared a poem with opposite intent. T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" parodies The Divine Comedy by acknowledging the failure of

contemporary art to re-form the civilized totality that Dante depicted. Eliot believed that the cement had been lost. His two major Dante essays from the 1920s address issues in Dante's poetics - the tensions between emotion and allegorical structure and between poet and autobiographical persona - which can largely be disengaged from the issue of a cultural-

religious totality debated by the Russians.59 Five years before "The Waste Land," William Butler Yeats would write

in "Per Arnica Silentia Lunae" that Dante was "the chief imagination of Christendom," an epithet that Ellis would have accepted. But Yeats's concern in this libellus is Dante's reconciliation of personal history with the edifice of allegory.60 In "William Blake and His Illustrations to the Divine Comedy" (1924), Yeats is impressed by but not tempted to imitate Dante's glorification of the law and finds Dante so distant in sensibility that the aptest illustration of his work would emphasize the "magical light" glimmering "upon a world different from the Dantesque world of our own intelligence."61 By equating modernity with the "Dantesque" or un-Dantean, Yeats rejects efforts to make Dante's Comedy contemporary and approachable, but his implicit counterreading, the "Dantean" Com-

edy, also deprives the poet of all religious definition except his own tran- scendence. Both Eliot and Yeats identify in Dante a poet equipped to solve certain compositional dilemmas, and while many of these problems depend on the historical and religious vision Dante embraced, the solu- tions themselves are secular. While offering in some cases model answers to the historical questions posed by Eliot and Yeats, Dante resists his own modernization.

A chief goal of the Russian Symbolists, in contrast, was to restore a coherence to the nation's artistic life through an explicitly religious poetry. Dante anchored the rendition of ecstatic experience to a rigorous religious metaphysic. This image of Dante appealed to Ivanov, and its

popularity typifies an age that embraced a number of hierarchical religious systems, including Catholicism (Ivanov, Sergei Soloviev, Ellis) and various theosophical movements (Kandinsky, Scriabin, Bely). In the extreme case of Ellis, Dante not only presented modernity the example of a poet who believed what he wrote but offered the belief system itself.62

A particular understanding of Dante thus marked his reception on Russian soil. The Symbolists saw in his work the conjunction of religiosity




and a symbolist aesthetic and the means thereby for Russia to effect its escape from the materialism of Europe. More importantly they used Dante to define non-Russian beliefs as non-Christian. The intensity of this effort and the high stakes for which the movement played explains the sectarian intransigence which the Symbolists often transferred onto Russian writing about Dante (Ellis and to a lesser extent Bely are prime instances). It

explains too why Russian Symbolism repeatedly emphasized Dante's po- tential for coexistence with the soul of modernity. Through Dante the Symbolists created a line of succession that legitimized contemporary literature. The updating of Dante led to a progressive series of identifications with him that finally surpassed anything in contemporary European letters: the transposition of the Symbolist interest in tutelary figures onto the image of Dante, who is qualified to serve as the eternal mentor; the evolution of Ivanov's poetic persona, which the poet himself as well as those about him associates with a Dantean tradition; and the union of two

poets, one medieval and one contemporary, when Blok becomes Dante.

Dartmouth College

NOTES

1. A. N. Veselovskii, "Dante i simvolicheskaia poèziia katolichestva," (1866), Italiia i voTjozhdenie (1859-1870), Sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg: Akademiia Nauk, 1908) 1: 46-47. I would like to thank Boris Averin, Barry Scherr, Richard Sheldon, and James West for their many useful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. In helping me to locate materials on Dante, Patricia Carter and Marianne Hraibi of the Dartmouth College Interli- brary Loan Office effectively extended my reach to the Lenin Library. Nancy Millichap of Humanities Computing helped with the technical production of this essay, and during 1989 Richard Lein ably assisted my research. A grant in 1988 from the International Research and Exchanges Board and the gracious cooperation of the staff of the Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva in Moscow made possible the research on Bely and Dante.

2. Valerii Briusov, "Dante," Stikhotvoreniia, poèmy: 1892-1909, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh (Moscow: Khud. Lit., 1973) 1: 155. Hereafter SS.

3. Among the popular "handbooks" on Dante, see especially 1. Glivenko, 1321-1921: Dante Aligeri, k 600-letiiu so dnia smerti (Moscow: n.p., 1922); Boris Zaitsev's Dante i ego poèma (Moscow: Vega, 1922); and B. V. Asaf'ev's "Dante i muzyka," published in a brochure issued by the Petrograd Philharmonic. In 1921 in Petrograd F. F. Zelinskii ad' dressed the "Friends of Italy" group on the ethical character of Dante's work and a concert devoted to Dante was performed at the Philharmonic. For details of the Dante Jubilee, see




I. N. Golenishchev-Kutuzov, "Dante v sovetskoi kul'tury," Izvestiia AN SSSR, Seriia literature i iazyka 24.2 (March- April 1965): 129-34; I. N. Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Tvorchestvo Dante i mirovaia kultura (Moscow: Nauka, 1971) 487-93; and N. G. Elina, "Dante v russkoi literature, kritike i perevodakh," Vestnik istorii mirovoi kultury (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1959) 118.

4. The waning of the Symholist Dante hy no means spelled an end to his reception on Russian soil. In 1933 Osip Mandelshtam wrote his intensely personal Conversation about Dante, a work which uses meditations on the Italian poet as the conceit for composing an "ars poetica." The two decades after 1921 also saw the turn to an earnest and fertile scholarship, productive of the first important Russian Dantologists since the nineteenth century: Dzhivelegov, Pinsky, Alpatov, and Lozinsky.

5. A. S. Pushkin, Stikhotvoreniia 1825-36 gg, Sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh. (Moscow: Khud. Lit., 1974) 1: 252-53, 278-79. See also "Surovyi Dant ne preziral soneta" 219.

6. In his letter to Michelet, Herzen writes, "This Russia hegins with the emperor and goes from gendarme to gendarme, from bureaucreat to bureaucrat, to the last policeman in the remotest corner of the empire. Each step on this ladder attains, like Dante's bolgi (sic; Herzen refers to the bulge, or ditches of Hell], a new evil power, a new degree of depravity and cruelty" (translation mine). Aleksandr Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh (Mos- cow: Akademiia Nauk, 1956) 7: 329. In the 1843 essay "Buddhism in Science," Herzen voices admiration for the decision of Dante not to remain with the blessed in Paradise and makes him a model bearer of the "philosophy of action." Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh, (Moscow: Khud. Lit., 1954) 3: 69. Like many nineteenth-century readers of Dante, Herzen was not overstrict about distinguishing the poet from the fictional narrator.

7. In addition to the essay cited above, see particularly Veselovsky's "Dante Aligieri [sic], ego zhizn' i proizvedeniia" (1859), "Dante i mytarstva Ital'ianskogo edinstva" (1865), and "Villa Al'berti: Novye materialy dlia kharakteristiki literaturnogo i obshchestvennogo pereloma v ital'ianskoi zhizni XIV-XV stoletiia" (1870) 360-61, all reprinted in Italiia i vozrozhdenie.

8. Zygmunt Krasinski's The Un-divine Comedy, a Dantean vision of Polish politics that G. K. Chesterton likened to Maeterlinck and "the allegorical eccentricities o( the Russian drama," was printed by Skorpion in a Russian edition in 1902 and reissued in 1906. Jacob Burckhardt's Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien appeared in St. Petersburg between 1904 and 1906. Sergei Rakhmaninov produced Paolo i Francheska in 1905 to widespread acclaim. The same year Giovanni Scartazzini's handbook on Dante was published and discussed in the periodical press, while Konstantin Balmont's edition of the complete works of Shelley came out in 1907, introducing Russian readers to A Defense of Poetry and a host of poems containing references to Dante. The following year three translations of D'Annunzio's play Francesca da Rimini appeared, including one by Valéry Briusov and Viacheslav Ivanov. In 1911 Karl Federn's 1868 monograph appeared as Dante i ego vremia, translated by V. M. Spasskaia and introduced by the philologist Matvei Rozanov. Walter Pater's The Renais- sance: Studies in Art and Poetry was published in Zaimovsky's translation in 1912. Three years later the work of Francesco Flamini was translated as Bozhestvennaia komediia Dante: Posobie dlia ee izucheniia, again introduced by Rozanov. A look at Valentina Danchenko's bibliography shows that the average yearly number of Russian publications on Dante during the period 1900-1922 was not matched again for nearly forty years. V. Danchenko, Dante Aligeri: Bibliograficheskii ukazatel russkikh perevodov i kriticheskoi literatury na russkom iazyke, 1762-1972 (Moscow: Kniga, 1973).

9. See, for example, Sergei Soloviev's "Tertsiny" in Vesy 8 (1909): 7-13; and Boris Zaitsev's "Italiia- Siena" in Zolotoe runo 3/4 (1908): 67-69.




10. Besides the articles of Golenishchev-Kutuzov and Elina cited above, see Igor Belza, "Francesco Frola, Dante e la Russia," La Parola del popolo 58.76 (December 1965-January 1966): 115-17; Belza's "Dante i slaviane," Dante i slaviane, ed. Igor' Belza (Moscow: Nauka, 1965) 7-48; and a resume of the contents of the Dantovskie chteniia series by Eaghor G. Kostetzky in Deutsches Dante Jahrbuch 58 (1983): 191-209. An excellent though now outdated bibliography of Dante in Russia is Valentina Danchenko's Dante Aligeri, cited above. It has been supplemented by E. I. Makedonskaia, "Dante v otechestvennoi literature, 1972-1978 gg.: Bibliograricheskii ukazatel'," Dantovskie chteniia 1987, ed. Igor' Belza (Moscow: Nauka, 1989) 222-72.

11. See for example M. N. Rozanov, "Pushkin i Dante," Pushkin i ego sovremenniki 37 (1928) 11-41; D. D. Blagoi, "Dante v soznanii i v tvorchestve Pushkina," Istoriko* filologicheskie issledovaniia (Moscow: Nauka, 1967) 237-46; Marianne Shapiro, "Gogol and Dante," Modern Language Studies 17.2 (Spring 1987): 37-54; R. I. Khlodovskii, " Tesn' Ada' (Zametki k terne 'Blok i Dante')," Nauchnye doklady vysshei shkoly "Filologicheskie nauki" 4 (1965): 58-65; Khlodovskii, "Blok i Dante (K problème literaturnykh sviazei)," Dante i vsemirnaia literatura, ed. N. I. Balashov et al. (Moscow: Nauka, 1967) 176-247; Lucy E. Vogel, Aleksandr Blok: The Journey to Italy (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1973); Peter McCarey and Mariarosaria Cardines, "The Harrowing of Hell and Resurrection: Dante's Inferno and Blok's Dvenadtsat," Slavonic and East European Review 63.3 (July 1985): 337- 48; Pamela Davidson, "Vyacheslav Ivanov and Dante," Vyacheslav Ivanov: Poet, Critic and Philosopher, ed. Robert L. Jackson and Lowry Nelson, Jr. (New Haven: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1986) 147-61; and Pamela Davidson, The Poetic Imagina- tion of Vyacheslav Ivanov: A Russian Symbolist's Perception of Dante (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989). Aleksei Veselovsky published a number of studies of Dante's influence, including "Gertsen-pisatel'," which discusses Herzen's knowledge of Dante {Vestnik Evropy, [1908) 3: 303-4, 316), and an essay linking Dante to Gogol, "Mertvye dushi: Glava iz étiuda o

Gogole," Vestnik Evropy 3 (1861): 61-102. Aram Asoian studies the influence of Dante in Russia from the late eighteenth century through Ivanov and Blok in his monograph Dante i russkaia literatura (Sverdlovsk: Izd. Ural'skogo universiteta, 1989).

12. Briusov, "Dante v Venetsii," SS 1: 156, "Dante," SS 1: 155. 13. Briusov, SS 1: 156. 14. Briusov, "Poetu," SS 1:447. 15. See Merezhkovsky's Dante (Brussels: Petropolis, 1939), and his filmscript on Dante,

written in 1937 and printed in Dante, Boris Godunov, ed. Ternira Pachmuss (New York: Gnosis, 1990).

16. Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, "O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniiakh sovremennoi russkoi literatury," Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, 24 vols. (Moscow: Sytin, 1914) 18: 179.

17. Merezhkovskii, "O prichinakh" 180. 18. Merezhkovskii, "O prichinakh" 275. 19. Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, "Griadushchii Kham," Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii 14: 23, 21. 20. Merezhkovskii, "Griadushchii Kham" 14: 38. This is not to say that Khomiakov's

language was original; the terminology is Schelling's, as Khomiakov himself recognized. See Aleksei Khomiakov, "Opyt katikhizicheskogo izlozheniia ucheniia o tserkvi" ("Tserkov' odna"), apparently written in the late 1840s, published posthumously in Pravoslavnoe obozrenie in 1864 under the title "O tserkvi," reprinted Sochineniia bogoslovskie (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1900) 2: 1-26 in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii.

21. A. Belyi, "Vospominaniia ob Aleksandre Bloke," Zapiski mechtatelei 6-7 (1922): 22. 22. Emilii Medtner,

" 'Skupoi rytsar' i 'Francheska da-Rimini' [sic]," Zolotoe runo 1

(1906): 123. The review appears under the pseudonym "VoFfing."




23. Eduard Stark, "Novye balety M. Fokina," Apollim 10 (1915): 66. 24. Andrei Belyi, "Skartatstsini," Vesy 1 1 (1905): 75. 25. Despite Bely's claim that the Symbolists tried with particular energy to understand

Dante, the evidence in his own case confutes this. In "O mirosozertsanii Dante," a subsec- tion of his unpublished "Bibliografiia filosofii" drafted in the 1920s, Bely would list seven works useful to a study of Dante. All are from the nineteenth century, and for the most part are surveys addressed to the non-specialist. They include "Dante i srednevekovaia poèziia," a mis-citation of Veselovsky's "Dante i simvolicheskaia poèziia katolichestva"; a translation of Michelangelo Pinto's lectures on Dante, delivered at Moscow University in the 1860s; and most tellingly the entry "Scartazzini. DA. 1869," a reference which is starred. Scartazzini's book appeared in Russian only in 1905 and Bely could not have managed the Italian text. One wonders at this citation of an edition he could not have read and is led to question how familiar Bely was with the remaining Dante books on his list. More suspicious still is the asterisk, which Bely uses in the "Bibliograflia filosofii" to denote works of great importance. Either his memory of the Scartazzini book betrayed him, or his disparaging review of Scartazzini in 1905 had little to do with Scartazzini and much to do with the image of Dante that the Symbolists were erecting. Following is an exact transcription of Bely's list: "H. Delff, DA. Leipzig. 1869; Vegele, Dante Aligeri. 1881; 'Scartazzini. DA. 1869; V. Lesevich. Dante. SP 1886; A.N. Veselovskii. D i srednevekovaia poèziia (Vestnik Evropy 1886 t. 4); Pinto. Dante. SP. 1866; and Simonds. Dante, ego vremia. SP. 1893." See Bely's "Bibliografiia filosofii," TsGALI f. 53 (Bely fond), op. 1, ed. khr. 80 (1), 1.52 recto.

26. If the exclusiveness of Mandelshtam's reading reminds one of Bely and Ellis, its aesthetic is Acmeist and undoubtedly inspired by Anna Akhmatova's love of Dante. The "Acmeist Dante" is foreshadowed in a comment by Lev Bakst, who turned to Dante in order to extoll the virtues of precision in art. "Dante's example for us is absolutely sacred. It is impossible to measure off, construct, and fortify Dante's Hell with greater, let me say, mathematical precision, and therewith force one to believe in the possibility of its exis- tence. All the distances in the circles and spirals of Hell can be reconstructed on a scaled- down model, and one can follow Dante and Vergil, as it were, from pin to pin, stuck on maps of military actions. Descending ever lower and lower, Dante describes with an inexorable, purely Florentine exactness, like an attentive geologist, the gradual changes in soil, from water and dirt to sand, iron, granite, and boiling mineral springs. . . . Thus everywhere that he can Dante tries above all to give his fiction a real and logical structure." Lev Bakst, "Puti klassitsizma v iskusstve," Apollon 3 (December 1909): 53. Translation mine.

27. Jan van Ruysbroeck (1293-1381) was a Flemish mystic, author of Die Chierheit der gheesteliker Brulocht (1350, translated as The Spiritual Espousals). Brunetto Latini (c. 1220- 1294), known today primarily for his appearance in Inferno 15, was the author of Li livres dou Trésor and the Tesoretto, both of which influenced the writing of The Divine Comedy.

28. Andrei Belyi, "Osnovy moego mirovozzreniia," TsGALI f. 53 (Bely fond), op. 1, ed. khr. 69, 1. 33.

29. "Pervoe svidanie," Bely's 1921 poem dedicated to "turning points," is richly allusive of Dante, both obliquely (the imitation of La vita nuova, also an autobiography about encounters) and directly (Bely describes his infatuation with Margarita Morozova: "And I, like a worthless Ghibelline at the feet of the Guelfs, am wordless and without purpose, her entertaining paladin" ["I ia, kak giblyi GibellinXU Gvel'fov nog, - bez slov, bez tseli: \Ee poteshnyi paladin ... "]. Andrei Belyi, "Pervoe svidanie," Poèziia, proza Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khud. Lit., 1990) 1: 257. Bely didn't mind or remember that Dante was a Guelf. Another fictional autobiography of "crises," Kotik Letaev (1916),




borrows from Dante its imagery of ascent and descent, its concern with the recollection and assessment of a spiritual journey, and its use of a mentor. In chapter six it also parodies the imagery of the Earthly Paradise. Bely began the novel during the autumn of the year he turned thirty-five and deliberately invites parallels between his own spiritual case history and Dante's. Given Bely's broad erudition, however, it is difficult to name the many subtexts of Kotik Letaev with complete assurance. Nietzsche, Steiner, Dante, Soloviev, and the Goethe of "The Mystery of Faust" (being rehearsed at Dornach concurrently with Bely's writing of the novel in late 1915) enter Kotik Letaev as overlapping and often mutually reinforcing influences. The body of ideas and images uniting all of these - a fact that seems to have escaped Bely - is Neo-Platonism.

30. V. Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols., ed. D. V. Ivanov andO. Deschartes (Brussels: Foyer oriental chrétien, 1971) 1: 789.

31. K. Bal'mont, "Dante," hbrannoe: Stikhotvoreniia, perevody, stat'i (Moscow: Khud. Lit., 1983) 52-53. Cf. Paradiso 17: 58-60.

32. V. Ivanov, "Mi fur le serpi amiche," SS 2: 290-91. 33. V. Ivanov, "La Selva oscura," SS 1: 521-22. 34. V. Ivanov, "Dukh," SS 1: 518-19. 35. Davidson, "Vyacheslav Ivanov and Dante" 149-50. 36. Davidson, "Vyacheslav Ivanov and Dante" 155. 37. "The fact that Ivanov was approaching Dante from the standpoint of an ideal

formed of Dionysiac and Solovyovian elements meant that a certain amount of distortion of Dante's text inevitably took place. He tended to take up Dantesque images and infuse them with Dionysiac and Solovyovian content; sometimes this meant divesting them of features which were incompatible with the teaching of Dionysus or Solovyov, or adapting them in order to integrate them into a new context." Davidson, The Poetic Imagination of Vyacheslav Ivanov 123-24. Furthermore, Davidson argues, Ivanov's view of the productive nature of sin in spiritual development leads to Ivanov's promotion of Dante as a model of the saved sinner. This entails focusing on The Divine Comedy as a story of progression through sin rather than past sin and "a deliberate confusion of Dante, the spectator of sin, with Dante, the sinner." Davidson, The Poetic Imagination 130.

38. Ivanov, "Kop'e Afiny," Po zvezdam (St. Petersburg: Ory, 1909) 47. 39. Ivanov, "Kop'e Afiny" 5 1 . 40. Ivanov, "O granitsakh iskusstva," Trudy i dni 7 (1914); rpt. SS 2: 640. 41. Ivanov, "Dve stikhii v sovremennom simvolizme" (1908), rpt. SS 2: 543. 42. G. Chulkov, "Poèt'kormshchik," Apollon 10 (1911): 63. 43. Sergei Bulgakov, Tikhiedumy: hstatei 1911-15 gg. (1918; rpt. Paris: YMCA, 1976)

138. 44. Fedor Stepun, Vstrechi (Munich: Tovarishchestvo zarubezhnykh knizhnykh pisatelei,

1962) 152. 45. Ellis, "Uchitel' very," Trudi i dni (1914): 63-78; N. Solovetskii, "Bozhestvennaia

komediia," Trudi i dm ; 8 ( 1916): 23-45; J. Van der Meulen, "O planetnykh sferakh Dantova 'Raia' v svete astrosofii," Trudi i dni 8 (1916): 9-22. See also Ellis's "Venets Dante," Svobodnaia sovest' : LiteraturnO'filosofskii sbornik, 2 vols., (Moscow: Sytin, 1906) 1: 110-38. Four years after Svobodnaia sovest' Ellis published a series of reflections on Dante in his book Russkie simvolisty. The Dante of Russkie simvolisty is the object of approving comparisons, a validating term invoked to legitimize the work of Ellis's own camp, Russian Symbolism. When Ellis declares that the nature of all mystic visions is the same, Dante is listed with other seers, and Swedenborg's vision is said to flow as naturally and inevitably as Dante's. Likewise, Ellis argues that the cult of the Eternal Feminine is the same that is found in the




sonnets of Dante and Petrarch. Ellis, Russkie simvolisty (1910; rpt. Letchworth: Bradda, 1972) 234, 238, 264.

46. Aleksandr Blok, Sobranie sochinenii v vos mi tomakh (Moscow: Khud. Lit., 1960) 8: 294.

47. Blok, SS 3: 99. 48. Blok, SS 5: 316. 49. Blok, SS 5: 390. 50. Blok, SS 1:561. 51. Nadezhda Pavlovich, Dumy i vospominaniia (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1966) 35-

36. 52. Sergei Gorodetskii, "Vospominaniia ob Aleksandre Bloke," Pechat' i revoliutsiia 1

(1922): 75, quoted in Khlodovskii, M 4Pesn' Ada'," 64-65. 53. N. M. Minskii, Ot Dante k Bloku (Berlin: Mysl', 1922) 5, 52. 54. R. I. Khlodovskii, "Blok i Dante," 141, 148, 221; Khlodovskii, " 'Pesn' Ada'," 63;

Efim Ètkind, "Ten' Danta," Voprosy literatury 11 (1970): 30; Gerald Pirog, Aleksandr Blok's 'ltaljanskie stixi: Confrontation and Disillusionment (Columbus: Slavica, 1983) 51.

55. V Rozanov, "Iz starykh pisem: pis'ma Vlad. Serg. Solov'eva (okonchanie)," Zolotoe runo 3 (1907): 54, 57. Writing four years later in Apollon, J. von Guenther would associate Stefan George's life with Dante's. J. von Guenther, "Stefan George," Apollon 3 (1911): 63.

56. Valerii Briusov, "Dante sovremennosti," 1913, rpt. in Stat'i i retsenzii 1893-1924 Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, (Moscow: Khud. Lit., 1975) 6: 409-16.

57. Irina Paperno, "Pushkin v zhizni cheloveka Serebrianogo veka," Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age, ed. B. Gasparov, R. P. Hughes, and I. Paperno (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992) 19-51. Much recent literary scholarship - typified by the volume referred to here - has concentrated on the originals lying behind acts of cultural transference: Pushkin's life as reread by Silver Age Russian writers, for example. It is now important to elucidate the process through which certain figures became the targets of these "borrowed lives." From this perspective Aleksandr Blok is certainly the most pliant "receptor" in the whole Russian literary tradition, a figure onto whom an extraordinary number of other artists have been projected. As this essay tries to show, the literary reformatting of past writers' lives is carried out with unusual intensity by Symbolism, but the impulse to engage in "zhiznetvorchesto" is also governed by specifically Russian features, particularly the requirement that the Russian writer be a cultural historian. Gibbon could be considered the English Tacitus and Charles Dickens could aspire to write like Macaulay or Carlyle, but English letters has not required that there be a new Dickens. Because later generations do not assign them a privileged place in interpreting their times, Western European and American writers do not maintain such a charged relationship with their nation's past as do Russian writers. The doubling of Walt Whitman in William Carlos Williams is an important exception. In American culture the figure whose biography has served as the greatest focal point of mythmaking is not a writer but a politician, Abraham Lincoln.

58. Gabriel Albinet's poster for the third Salon, held in Paris in 1894, depicted "Hugh of the Pagans, in the Mask of Dante." Robert Pincus-Witten, Occult Symbolism in France: joséphin Peladan [sic] and the Salons de la Rose-Croix (New York: Garland, 1976) 168, 291.

59. T.S. Eliot, "Dante," The Sacred Wood (1920; rpt. London: Methuen, 1950) 159-71; "Dante," Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932) 199-237.

60. W B. Yeats, "Per Arnica Silentia Lunae," Mythologies (New York: Macmillan, 1959) 321.




61. W. B. Yeats, "William Blake and His Illustrations to the Divine Comedy," Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961) 139, 142.

62. Ellis's implied denunciation of "non-believing" readers of Dante reflects the degree to which literary currents in Russian between 1900 and 1920 saw themselves as mutually exclusive. Within the so-called "second generation" of Symbolists, certain writers - Bely and Ivanov in particular - saw their work as a form of devotional activity. Those outside the chosen circle were heretics. Dante's unhesitating consignment of his fellow literati to various circles of hell, purgatory, and heaven offered a precedent to the literary factions of early twentieth-century Russia.



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