40246916

Dante in Russian Symbolist Discourse
Author(s): John M. Kopper

Source: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1 (1994), pp. 25-51
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40246916
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Dante in RussianSymbolist Discourse

JOHN M. KOPPER
[Dante] became in turn a heretic, a revolutionary, and the fervent defender of a unified Italy- in each instance according to the
requirements of the time.
- Aleksandr Veselovsky1
On all the earth our only model.
- Valry Briusov2
Russia marked the six-hundredth anniversaryof 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 readersranging 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 reconfigurationof the Russian understanding
of Dante. Interpretations that had hitherto been the idiosyncratic fruit of
individual writers were rapidlydrawn together into one discourse, and the
Florentine poet became a critical fulcrumon 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
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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 consistent and widely used non-Russian subtext. Thus Dante's importance to
early twentieth-century Russian letters goes well beyond the mere frequency 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-Europeancontext.
After establishing the parametersfor 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-byyear 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 Valry Briusov's poems of the years 18981907, 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"artifact 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 forwardto 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'sconstruct.
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.
DANTEAND RUSSIANSYMBOLISM
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 inaugurateuse 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 . . ." ["Idale my poshli . . ."] and "Then I
saw a black swarm of demons" ["Togdaia demonov uvidel chernyi roi"]).5
Gogol's deep sympathy with the ethical impulse of the Commediainspired
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-tosalvation 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'sgreatest 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.8It is no coincidence that these studies appearedduring the
decade of Russian Symbolism's programmaticcodification and the subsequent years- the period of its eclipse in literarypolitics- when Symbolism bore its most enduring artistic fruit. Dante was a discovery of the
Symbolists. Periodicals like Vesy [The Scales]and Zolotoeruno [The Golden
Fleece]are filled with fragmentarytranslations 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
28
COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
STUDIES
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 popularizedin 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 inventories of imitations and parodies.10More recently, both Soviet and AngloAmerican Slavists have studied the impact of Dante on certain writers,
particularly Pushkin, Gogol, Blok, and Ivanov.11But 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 Symbolists, Dante had such a history.
It was the era's most articulate and enthusiastic spokesmanfor the texts
of foreign literatures, Valry Briusov,who firstamong the Symbolist poets
gave a nuanced reading of Dante. Two poems in TertiaVigilia,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 countenance" ("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").12And in "Dante" Briusov formulates 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: "indifferentto 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 Venetians of "Dante v Venetsii" fall silent in recognition of this truth. He is a
statue of dogmatic conviction, but the particularsof 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" Briusovperformsa 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
29
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"]),14the imagery transformsthe poet's progressthrough Venice into
a reflection of Dante's journey through the underworld. Briusov's"Dante"
is an exceptionally pliable metaphor. Traitssuch as unchangeability or the
topographyof Hell may be separatedout 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," "Trulyyou long
dwelt in hell!" ("Voistinu ty dolgo zhil- v adu!"), Briusov's sympathy
with the Florentine poet is pricked by the modern awareness that contemporary 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 ingredients 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 reassessment 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 Merezhkovskymade no
30
COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
STUDIES
effort to give Dante a historical identity. Other than some translations of

cantos from Infernocompleted in 1885 and a short piece written fifty years
later in emigration Merezhkovsky rarely referredto Dante in print.15Yet
the post mortemhe performedon 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 yearsdividing this essay from
the 1914 essays by Ellis in Trudyi dni [Worksand Days] marka 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'sDante.
In "On the Reasons" Merezhkovsky enumerates the great artistic ages
of European civilization- Periclean Athens, Augustan Rome, Renaissance 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."16The force which stamps an
artistic age at its acme is universal and popular, the "genius of the people,"17but modernity destroys this powerful reservoir of energy by partitioning it. In a calculated and selective reading of nineteenth-century
European literature, Merezhkovskydisambiguatesnot one but two spirits,
a triumphant, godless utilitarianism, culminating in the criticism of
Pisarev and Chernyshevsky and the French roman exprimental 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, Merezhkovskypromotes idealism as
the essential expressive mode of Russia, and besides retroactively enrolling the canonically great Russian writersof 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 literatureof a
free and godly idealism."18
Merezhkovsky's conviction that the "genius of the people" is specifi-
31
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 autopsy 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" ("GriadushchiiKham"):"Only the coming of Christianity possesses the power to vanquish philistinism and the coming
vulgarity" ["meshchanstvo i khamstvo griadushchee"].19In an explicit
reference to the Slavophile lexicon of Aleksei Khomiakov, Merezhkovsky 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
religiouscommunitywill save Russia."20The rintgration 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 supremacy of positivism, the capitulation of Orthodoxy, and the rootlessness of
the lower classes ("bosiachestvo").
Merezhkovsky'sIsaiah-like diagnosis of Russia'smalaise did not require
the remedy of a Messiah, but it gave direction to the intelligentsia's efforts
to reformulatethe 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 luminaryof 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 FirstCircle of Hell who, with
the latterday additions of Shakespeare and Goethe, represented a European past that Russians felt obliged to know. At the beginning, then,
Dante was appropriatedas a word, with no more semantic content than
"Homer."In a characteristically peremptoryhonor roll of the turn-of-thecentury's cult authors Andrei Bely would refer to Dante: "There was no
32
COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
STUDIES
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 immortals 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 Francheskada Riminiin the following words: "True, the terrorsof Chaikovsky are closer to Dostoevsky than
to Dante, but for all this they are genuine terrors, not the conventionally
sinister effects used by Rakhmaninov."22Reviewing for Apollon Mikhail
Fokin's ballet version of Chaikovsky's Francheskada Rimini,EduardStark
would condemn the choreographer'sfailure to convey the "severe medieval atmosphere which imbues Dante's poem."23Bard 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 readersfrom Gustave Dor's illustrations, a
brooding character drawn in the taste of Lermontov.
Merezhkovsky'scultural critique, however, continued to define acquisition standardsfor Russia'smuseum of heroes, and as the age began scrutinizing its idols, certain figures (Schopenhauer and Hamsun among them)
receded in importance. Others, like Goethe, embodied the "geniusof the
people" but could not meet Merezhkovsky'sstringent 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 religious structure. Dante, on the other hand, showed remarkableresilience.
He became a crucial support for the theoretical edifice built by the Symbolists 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'sDante was a
catholic image, implicitly available to all moralists of contemporaneity,
Bely's was virtually the opposite: a territoryto 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 understandhim." Likewise, "The
Symbolist struggle sweeping Europe carries us toward an eternal sea, to-
33
ward universal religious symbols. Remaining withall an artist, Dante developed for us this system of religious symbols."24Bely's Dante was a battle
standard raised in partisan war.25The sectarian possessiveness of the
Scartazzinireview would survive the Symbolist movement to blossom in a
late flower, Mandelshtam's Conversationabout 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."26This 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 "problemof culture," Bely notes:
There were many poets and mystics before Dante, but Dante
stands for us as the forerunnerof the Renaissance, not Ruysbroeck
or Brunetto Latini.27Why? 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, wrappedup in one whole. This "whole"
is culture. Dante is the creator of culture.28
Bely appropriatesDante because of his resistanceto 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 worksof all artists whose
lives spanned the thresholds of history.29In Bely's eyes Dante's candidacy
for nastavnichestvoderives from his historic union of roles, a fate conditioned not only by his genius but by the time.
34
COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
STUDIES
While Bely's image of Dante is charged with a meaning born in late

medieval culture, the historical moment representedby 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 profoundupheaval, subject to
religious schisms, dizzyingpolitical realignments, and the ongoing destruction of the myth of a Christian imperium.The Belyian Dante drawssemantic weight from the particularhistorical conditions of pre-RenaissanceItaly
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 inspired 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 sufferingtemporaryeclipse, was
not permanently displaced by this Merezhkovsky-Bely-Ellismodel. 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 personalizedrelationship of poet and precursor that Briusov created and the Belyian figureof 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 closeness based on temperament. These affinities were remarkedby the poets
themselves and by their contemporaries.
In order to understand the transformationwhich 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 Symbolists Ivanov best knew Dante's work. Even the most casual comparison of
the translations he and Ellis printed over the years in Vesy, Zolotoeruno,
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 surpassedthat 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
35
Ivanov, Dante was not a sword to be raised in polemical discussion but a

mind with which to converse. The special marriageof intellection and art
that distinguishes Dante's poetry strongly attracted Ivanov, who throughout his career, but particularlybefore 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!' ").0 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 paraphrasesof many of Dante's most noted images. For example, Balmont quotes Cacciaguida'sprophecy 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").31Balmont's
adaptation of Dante obviously lacks complexity, and the citation serves
more to register the Russian writer'spolyglot erudition than to establish a
precise and coherent bridge between two poetic voices. But the device
itself is remarkablyserviceable, 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
36
STUDIES
COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
Divine Comedy in need of a gloss and expands Dante's lines in order to

contrast the earthly and heavenly.33In "Dukh," whose epigraph is itself
taken from the exordium of Paradiso33, Ivanov paraphrasesDante's vision of God.34At 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 Mallarm but a writtenworld, 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.35As Pamela Davidson
has asserted, he saw "the Middle Ages as a period in history which exemplified the spiritual and poetic ideals to which he aspired."36Davidson has
exhaustively studied Ivanov's emendation of Dante, particularly his efforts to create a Christian figure in harmony with both Vladimir Soloviev's cult of Sophia and Nietzsche's Birthof Tragedy,a text that exalts the
virtues of Dionysian release and the loss of individuality.37Leaping the
centuries, Ivanov's achronological genealogies also discover a reassuringly
close relationship between Dante and the immediate forebearsof Russian
Symbolism. For Ivanov Dante chiefly offers a model of the "artof 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 correspondinglyunified and universal art. "Art of the cell" is an "art of the metaphysical will. Contemplation ... is directed ... at the inner and the universal."38Such 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 ("vsenarodnymi
vselenskim").39Ivanov can conclude that Dante is not merely a symbolist
but a Symbolist.
The 1913 essay "On the Limits of Art" ("O granitsakhiskusstva")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 Schopenhauer, 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
37
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 figureof The Divine
Comedy, Ivanov defines art as a repeated ascent to and descent from higher
reality. He faithfully echoes the rhetorical ambiguityof "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."40Ivanov thus uses
Dante to refute the idea that empirical interpretationand symbolic transformation are in conflict, an idea he would expresselsewhere.41The 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 examplewhich 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
symbolizesfor Ivanov the passageof artistsout of and back into themselves
in their transcriptionof spiritualevents, the plan of Paradisoitself becomes
the model for artistic, and specifically literary,operations. This reincoding
of The Divine Comedy as an ars poeticaallows Ivanov to see Dante as the
significant theorist of Symbolist poetry, and with his conversion of Dante's
work into a metaphor for aesthetic processeshe goes far beyond any earlier
Russian writer in his appropriationof the poet.
The family tree of Symbolists which Ivanov established had the intended effect of placing the genealogist on the branch. Ivanov'scontemporaries 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."42Chulkov 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 understandwith-
38
COMPARATIVELITERATURESTUDIES
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,

wrote:
invoking the Symbolist theory of a national art,
The popular art of Viacheslav Ivanov is the art of Dante, Dostoevsky, Goethe, and Kleist, the high art of interpreting and even
creating the people's soul. It has nothing in common with psychosocial 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
To
a
extent
the
"Danteana"
section
of the conSymbolist journal.
large
i
dni
issues
of
a
Dante
constrained
the
Romantic
by
cluding
Trudy
portrays
which
the
Yet
the very
Symbolist period.
commonplaces
persisted through
would
contribute
to
the
movement's
sense of
of
these
redundancy
images
a shared language. This "agreed-upon" Dante would represent for Symbolism a tie with European Romanticism, its immediate precursor in attempting to reforge the link with transcendent experience that had been ruptured 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 nineteenthcentury Russia had held to be as remote as he was important. Through the
39
offices of Van der Meulen, Dante's text presents in simplified form a plot
reconstructed as a sequence of emotions. In all of these Trudyi 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 antithetical 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 understandable why Dante found asylum in Ravenna. This is a city for rest and quiet
death."46Like 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'
Danta s profilem orlinym\O Novoi Zhizni mne poet").47The previous year
Blok would write of the inner voice that guided "the medieval Dante,
brooding lover of the heavenly Beatrice."48But 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.' "49And 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
40
LITERATURE
STUDIES
COMPARATIVE
These quotations make clear that during his Italian journey Blok in fact
internalized not Vergil but Dante. An extraordinarynumberof contemporaries would later associate Blok the person with their image of Dante. In
her poetic cycle "Vospominaniia ob Aleksandre Bloke," Nadezhda Pavlovich 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 profiFchistyi i surovyi,
Vot kapiushona vokrug!
Pokhozh na Danta, strogii, temnyi,
Sred' tikh prazdnichnykhognei,
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."52And in 1922, the year after Blok died- a date which
coincided with the six hundredth anniversaryof Dante's death- Nikolai
Minsky devoted a monograph to Dante and Blok in which they appearas
" 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:
41
In the middle of life's journey, at thirty-five yearsof 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.5
The Dantification of Blok, inauguratedby 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 Zolotoeruno, Vasily Rozanov initially adopted for Soloviev the
leitmotif"student of Dante," promoted him to Dante's position ("[Soloviev] 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 preziralsoneta").55In 1913, Briusov would call Emile Verhaeren
the "Dante of contemporaneity."56What 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, desperately 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 unparalleled 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 superposition had the same goal: the construction of an artistic divinity that would
link Russians with an earlier time and prove impervious to the incoherence which afflicted a culture in the throes of revolutionary change. The
transformationof 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.
42
COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
STUDIES
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 throughDante, 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 requiresCatholicism 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 reinterpretation. 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 structuring transcendental experience and exemplifies the integration of fragmentary perception into a unified vision. While Dante, unlike twentiethcentury 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
43
the Symbolists' sometimes neo-Romantic sensibility, were marked by a

unity of outlook and a totality of vision to which the resourcesof 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 assemblageof
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 empiricism 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 paraphrasesof 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. Josphin
("Sr") Pladan's Salons de la Rose-Croix staged in Paris between 1892
and 1898 offered a model for reupholsteringa tradition of religious poetry
and gave Ellis a style, oscillating between the programmatic and the
exalted, for representing that tradition.58The Anthroposophists' cult of
Goethe at Rudolph Steiner's Utopiancommunity 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
44
LITERATURE
STUDIES
COMPARATIVE
Dante, there appeared a poem with opposite intent. T.S. Eliot's "The
Waste Land"parodies The Divine Comedyby 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 culturalreligious totality debated by the Russians.59
Five years before "The Waste Land," William Butler Yeats would write
in "PerArnica Silentia Lunae" that Dante was "the chief imagination of
Christendom," an epithet that Ellis would have accepted. But Yeats's
concern in this libellusis Dante's reconciliation of personal history with
the edifice of allegory.60In "William Blake and His Illustrations to the
Divine Comedy"(1924), Yeats is impressedby 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."61By 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"Comedy, also deprives the poet of all religious definition except his own transcendence. 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 solutions 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
45
and a symbolist aesthetic and the means thereby for Russia to effect its
escape from the materialismof Europe. More importantlythey 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 transferredonto Russian writing
about Dante (Ellis and to a lesser extent Bely are prime instances). It
explains too why Russian Symbolism repeatedly emphasized Dante's potential 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 progressiveseries of identifications with him that finally surpassedanything in contemporary European
letters: the transposition of the Symbolist interest in tutelary figuresonto
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 becomesDante.
Dartmouth College
NOTES
1. A. N. Veselovskii, "Dante i simvolicheskaia poziia katolichestva," (1866), Italiiai
voTjozhdenie(1859-1870), Sobraniesochinenii(St. Petersburg:Akademiia Nauk, 1908) 1:
46-47. I would like to thank Boris Averin, BarryScherr, 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 Interlibrary 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,pomy: 1892-1909, Sobraniesochineniiv
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
poma (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 "Friendsof 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
46
I. N. Golenishchev-Kutuzov, "Dante v sovetskoi kul'tury," IzvestiiaAN SSSR, Seriia literature i iazyka 24.2 (March-April 1965): 129-34; I. N. Golenishchev-Kutuzov,
TvorchestvoDante i mirovaiakultura (Moscow: Nauka, 1971) 487-93; and N. G. Elina,
"Dante v russkoi literature, kritike i perevodakh," Vestnikistoriimirovoikultury (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 Conversationabout
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, Stikhotvoreniia1825-36 gg, Sobraniesochineniiv 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 bureaucreatto 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, Sobraniesochineniiv 30 tomakh(Moscow: 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 Paradiseand
makes him a model bearer of the "philosophy of action." Herzen, Sobraniesochineniiv 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'sThe Un-divineComedy, 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'sDie Kulturder Renaissancein Italien appeared in St. Petersburgbetween 1904
and 1906. Sergei Rakhmaninov produced Paolo i Francheskain 1905 to widespreadacclaim.
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 Poetryand a host of poems
containing references to Dante. The following year three translations of D'Annunzio's play
Francescada Rimini appeared, including one by Valry 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 Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry was published in Zaimovsky's translation in 1912. Three
years later the work of Francesco Flamini was translated as BozhestvennaiakomediiaDante:
Posobiedlia 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
ukazatel russkikhperevodovi kriticheskoiliteraturyna russkomiazyke,
Aligeri: Bibliograficheskii
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 Zolotoeruno 3/4 (1908): 67-69.
DANTE AND RUSSIAN SYMBOLISM
47
10. Besides the articles of Golenishchev-Kutuzov and Elina cited above, see Igor Belza,
"Francesco Frola, Dante e la Russia," La Paroladel 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 Dantovskiechteniiaseries by Eaghor
G. Kostetzky in Deutsches Dante Jahrbuch58 (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.: Bibliograricheskiiukazatel',"Dantovskiechteniia 1987, ed. Igor' Belza
(Moscow: Nauka, 1989) 222-72.
11. See for example M. N. Rozanov, "Pushkin i Dante," Pushkini ego sovremenniki37
(1928) 11-41; D. D. Blagoi, "Dante v soznanii i v tvorchestve Pushkina," Istoriko*
and
filologicheskieissledovaniia(Moscow: Nauka, 1967) 237-46; Marianne Shapiro, "Gogol
"
Dante," Modern LanguageStudies 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 problme literaturnykh sviazei),"

Dante i vsemirnaialiteratura,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 MariarosariaCardines, "The Harrowing of Hell and Resurrection: Dante's
Infernoand Blok's Dvenadtsat," Slavonicand East EuropeanReview63.3 (July 1985): 33748; Pamela Davidson, "Vyacheslav Ivanov and Dante," VyacheslavIvanov: 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 Imagination 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 {VestnikEvropy,[1908)
3: 303-4, 316), and an essay linking Dante to Gogol, "Mertvyedushi: Glava iz tiuda o
Gogole," VestnikEvropy 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
russkaialiteratura(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'sDante (Brussels: Petropolis, 1939), and his filmscripton 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 SobranieSochinenii,24 vols. (Moscow: Sytin, 1914) 18: 179.
17. Merezhkovskii, "O prichinakh" 180.
18. Merezhkovskii, "O prichinakh" 275.
19. Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, "Griadushchii Kham," PolnoeSobranieSochinenii14: 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
obozreniein 1864 under the title "O tserkvi," reprinted Sochineniiabogoslovskie(Moscow:
Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1900) 2: 1-26 in Polnoesobraniesochinenii.
21. A. Belyi, "Vospominaniia ob Aleksandre Bloke," Zapiskimechtatelei6-7 (1922): 22.
22. Emilii Medtner, " 'Skupoi rytsar' i 'Francheska da-Rimini' [sic]," Zolotoe runo 1
(1906): 123. The review appears under the pseudonym "VoFfing."
48
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES
23. EduardStark, "Novye balety M. Fokina," Apollim 10 (1915): 66.

24. Andrei Belyi, "Skartatstsini,"Vesy 11 (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 mirosozertsaniiDante," a subsection of his unpublished "Bibliografiiafilosofii" 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 poziia,"
a mis-citation of Veselovsky's "Dante i simvolicheskaia poziia 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'sbook 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 "Bibliografliafilosofii"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 srednevekovaiapoziia (Vestnik
Evropy 1886 t. 4); Pinto. Dante. SP. 1866; and Simonds. Dante, ego vremia. SP. 1893." See
Bely's "Bibliografiiafilosofii," 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 existence. All the distances in the circles and spirals of Hell can be reconstructed on a scaleddown 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 gradualchanges 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 Chierheitder
gheestelikerBrulocht(1350, translated as The SpiritualEspousals). Brunetto Latini (c. 12201294), known today primarily for his appearance in Inferno 15, was the author of Li livres
dou Trsorand 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 MargaritaMorozova: "And I,
like a worthless Ghibelline at the feet of the Guelfs, am wordless and without purpose, her
entertaining paladin" ["I ia, kak giblyi GibellinXUGvel'fov nog, - bez slov, bez tseli: \Ee
poteshnyi paladin ... "]. Andrei Belyi, "Pervoe svidanie," Poziia, proza Sochineniiav
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),
49
borrowsfrom Dante its imageryof 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 KotikLetaev with complete assurance. Nietzsche, Steiner, Dante, Soloviev, and
the Goethe of "The Mystery of Faust"(being rehearsedat 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, Sobraniesochinenii,4 vols., ed. D. V. Ivanov andO. Deschartes (Brussels:
Foyer oriental chrtien, 1971) 1: 789.
31. K. Bal'mont, "Dante," hbrannoe: Stikhotvoreniia,perevody,stat'i (Moscow: Khud.
Lit., 1983) 52-53. Cf. Paradiso17: 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 PoeticImaginationof 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 Imagination130.
38. Ivanov, "Kop'e Afiny," Po zvezdam(St. Petersburg:Ory, 1909) 47.
39. Ivanov, "Kop'e Afiny" 5 1.
40. Ivanov, "O granitsakh iskusstva," Trudyi dni 7 (1914); rpt. SS 2: 640.
41. Ivanov, "Dve stikhii v sovremennom simvolizme" (1908), rpt. SS 2: 543.
42. G. Chulkov, "Pot'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 zarubezhnykhknizhnykh pisatelei,
1962) 152.
45. Ellis, "Uchitel' very," Trudi i dni (1914): 63-78; N. Solovetskii, "Bozhestvennaia
komediia," Trudii 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,"
Svobodnaiasovest': LiteraturnO'filosofskii
sbornik,2 vols., (Moscow: Sytin, 1906) 1: 110-38.
Four years after Svobodnaiasovest' Ellis published a series of reflections on Dante in his book
Russkiesimvolisty.The Dante of Russkiesimvolistyis 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
50
sonnets of Dante and Petrarch. Ellis, Russkiesimvolisty (1910; rpt. Letchworth: Bradda,
1972) 234, 238, 264.
46. Aleksandr Blok, Sobraniesochineniiv 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) 3536.
52. Sergei Gorodetskii, "Vospominaniia ob Aleksandre Bloke," Pechat' i revoliutsiia1
M
(1922): 75, quoted in Khlodovskii, 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 tkind, "Ten' Danta," Voprosyliteratury11 (1970): 30; Gerald Pirog, AleksandrBlok's
'ltaljanskie stixi: Confrontationand Disillusionment(Columbus: Slavica, 1983) 51.
55. V Rozanov, "Izstarykh 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
Sobraniesochineniiv semi tomakh, (Moscow: Khud. Lit., 1975) 6: 409-16.
57. Irina Paperno, "Pushkin v zhizni cheloveka Serebrianogo veka," CulturalMythologies
of RussianModernism:From the GoldenAge to the SilverAge, 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
figuresbecame the targetsof these "borrowedlives." 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 Symbolismin France:
josphin Peladan [sic] and the Salons de la Rose-Croix(New York:Garland, 1976) 168, 291.
59. T.S. Eliot, "Dante," The SacredWood(1920; rpt. London: Methuen, 1950) 159-71;
"Dante," SelectedEssays, 1917-1932 (New York:Harcourt, Brace, 1932) 199-237.
60. W B. Yeats, "PerArnica Silentia Lunae," Mythologies(New York:Macmillan, 1959)
321.
51
61. W. B. Yeats, "William Blake and His Illustrations to the Divine Comedy,"Essaysand
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 literatito
various circles of hell, purgatory,and heaven offered a precedent to the literary factions of
early twentieth-century Russia.

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Dante in Russian Symbolist Discourse

Author(s): John M. Kopper

Dante in RussianSymbolist Discourse

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

The enthusiasm for Dante in Russia after 1900 was unprecedented.

element of Dante's nineteenth-century portrait, his timelessness, onto the

effort to give Dante a historical identity. Other than some translations of

cally religious would help to restore to turn-of-the-century Russia the

While Bely's image of Dante is charged with a meaning born in late

Ivanov, Dante was not a sword to be raised in polemical discussion but a

Divine Comedy in need of a gloss and expands Dante's lines in order to

one another by their "distance"from the transcendental world. Dante not

And Fedor Stepun,

invoking the Symbolist theory of a national art,

In the middle of life's journey, at thirty-five yearsof age, Blok, like

Symbolism, in the aesthetic of Blok's literary allies, was universal.

the Symbolists' sometimes neo-Romantic sensibility, were marked by a

DANTE AND RUSSIAN SYMBOLISM

k terne 'Blok i Dante'),"

Nauchnye doklady vysshei shkoly "Filologicheskie

nauki"4 (1965): 58-65; Khlodovskii, "Blok i Dante (K problme literaturnykh sviazei),"

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

23. EduardStark, "Novye balety M. Fokina," Apollim 10 (1915): 66.

DANTE AND RUSSIAN SYMBOLISM

DANTE AND RUSSIAN SYMBOLISM

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