...Viacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov (1866-1949), was to become a major poet and leading theoretician of the Russian symbolist movement. (1) In 1886, Ivanov left Moscow and went to Berlin to study classical philology and history. During his stay in the German capital, he took part in Theodore Mommsen's famous seminar on Roman history and most probably got in touch with a number of Nietzsche's writings, which had been arousing quite some excitement in selective intellectual circles from the early 1870s on. (2) In his "Autobiographical Letter," written in 1917 at the request of the literary critic S.A. Vengerov, Ivanov relates how he left Berlin in 1891 and went to Paris, packed "with volumes of Nietzsche, about whom people started talking" (SS, II: 19). Although he did not indicate exactly which books he took with him and whether or not he had really read them, it is beyond all doubt that Nietzsche's thought exerted a decisive impact on the young scholar's intellectual development--"Nietzsche became increasingly and ever more powerfully the master of my thoughts" (SS, II: 19)--and even influenced the course of his personal life. (3) Ivanov admits that he was particularly struck by Nietzsche's first monograph, Die Geburt der Tragodie, which was first published in 1872, but came out with a new foreword and a new subtitle in 1886. This book, focusing on the dynamics of artistic forces crystallized in the duplicity of the "Apollinian" and the "Dionysian," prompted him to shift the focus of his academic attention from Roman to Hellenic history and to spend a year in Athens to study sources and remnants of Dionysian cults. (4) The specific intention of this move was, however, not to pursue the philosopher's hypothesis on the relationship between religion and literature in Greek antiquity, but "to overcome Nietzsche in the issues of religious consciousness" (SS, II: 21).

Although Ivanov's preoccupation with Nietzsche was relatively short-lived, it was intense and gave rise to the author's unceasing appreciation, in particular with respect to the figure of Dionysus. Nevertheless, his reading of Nietzsche's texts cannot be characterized as a form of indiscriminate copying or unquestioned epigonism. On the contrary, Ivanov accepted Nietzsche's aestheticized notion of the Dionysian--as derived from the ancient godhead, but completely disrobed of any religious connotation--with gratitude, yet only to use it as a stimulus to deepen his own religious insights. For him, Dionysus was not solely an artistic principle, but rather a genuine religious and metaphysical being. In order to deal with this contrast, Ivanov felt compelled to study the roots of "Dionysianism" and its relation to Christianity. He elaborated his viewpoints in two longer essays, "Ellinskaia Religiia stradaiushchego Boga" ("The Hellenic Religion of the suffering God," 1904) and "Religiia Dionisa: Ee proiskhozhdenie i vliianiia" ("The Religion of Dionysus: its Origin and Influence," 1905), and in the monograph Dionis i pradionisiistvo (1923).

Intersecting Biographies

It is important to notice that for Ivanov, as Stammler points out, Nietzsche's philosophy was fundamentally embedded in the developments of his biography: "Nietzsche's entire life was a profound mystical experience in broad, occasionally sublime, outlines, ending tragically in an abrupt collapse" (300). During the time Ivanov lived in Berlin, the nomadic philosopher was at first no more than an obscure publicist, relatively unknown to the general public. After his mental collapse in January 1889 and a short internment in mental hospitals in Basel and Jena, Nietzsche was cared for first by his mother in Naumburg, later--after his mother's death in 1897--by his sister in the famous "Villa Silberblick" in Weimar. The vicissitudes of the "mad philosopher" obviously contributed to his reputation, and in the late 1890s--although Nietzsche was no longer able to engage in any form of communication--he was literally "exposed" to ever increasing hordes of followers and sympathizers. This was the cultural context in which Ivanov developed his juvenile adherence to the mysterious thinker. At this point of time, the public exhibited a growing appetite for information about Nietzsche; this hunger can be attested to by the many publications and translations, by the appearance of biographical recordings and testimonies and by the attempts to valorize unpublished fragments, notes and letters. It is not a surprise that Nietzsche himself came to be more and more the icon of "untimely" ingenuity and a withdrawn, yet living agent of his own philosophy.

Precisely the tragic turn in Nietzsche's mental biography was for Ivanov a major critical impulse; it seemed to prove the one-sidedness and fixation of the philosopher's thinking. In spite of the fact that there are no explicit recordings of Ivanov's reading and that his reception took place at a very early moment in time (compared to the situation in the rest of Europe), we can assume that he was quite familiar with Nietzsche's published works. Most critics eagerly refer to his allusions to Die Geburt der Tragodie and Also sprach Zarathustra (e.g. Langer 77); yet specific expressions and phrasings witness undeniably that Ivanov had also read Die frohliche Wissenschaft (second edition in 1887). Ivanov quotes aphorism 341, entitled "Das grosste Schwergewicht" (SS, I: 724), refers to the concept of amor fati (SS, I: 720) and quotes Nietzsche's phrase "Incipit Tragoedia" (SS, I: 717). That Ivanov mentions "slave morality" (SS, I: 723) and the behavioral notion "Pathos der Distanz" (SS, III: 127) makes his acquaintance with Jenseits von Gut und Bose (1886) and Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887) plausible. Furthermore, Ivanov's writings also suggest a susceptibility to works that were not published until after his stay in Berlin, such as Der Antichrist (first appeared in 1895) and Ecce Homo (posthumously printed in 1908, censored by Elisabeth Nietzsche). And finally, in the context of his academic formation Ivanov was also familiar with Nietzsche's philological articles in the specialist journal Rheinisches Museum. (5) The fact that he did not express his profound familiarity with this contemporary philosophy immediately, yet waited for more than a decade to respond to it publicly, explains how Ivanov's reception could ripen into a complex personal and critical stance. We might summarize his critique as follows: however attractive Nietzsche's views on the Dionysian were, his focus on the will to power as distinctive anthropological mark tore his concept of Ubermensch away from its Dionysian roots. Consequently, Ivanov considered it his main philosophical challenge to restore this disrupted link. In the following, we will discuss the main aspects of Ivanov's critique with respect to Nietzsche's contents: the relation between Apollo and Dionysus, the anthropology of the Ubermensch, and the re-Christianization of Nietzsche's thought.

Dionysus: Spirit or God?

It is clear that Ivanov focused on the primary duplicity ("Duplizitat") of Nietzsche's concept of Greek antiquity: that between Apollo and Dionysus. However affirmatively he responded to the initial writings on this subject, he could not agree with the way in which Nietzsche elaborated them--most implicitly--later on. In short, he blamed Nietzsche for not acknowledging the duality of the figure of Dionysus himself, reducing him to cultic ecstasy and thereby discounting the suffering he equally incorporates. Only on the verge of insanity, he recognized--so Ivanov thought--Dionysus as a suffering god and as a prefiguration of Christ (SS, I: 720-721).

As is well known, Nietzsche developed the duplicity between the Apollinian and the Dionysian in the early 1870s. Apart from the argumentation in Die Geburt and the early philological writings, the concept of the Dionysian appears at regular instances in Nietzsche's writings, with interestingly high frequency in the last months of 1888, during which he re-composed a poetic cycle entitled Dionysos-Dithyramben. The Apollinian, however, disappears quite rapidly out of the footlight, as soon as Nietzsche's philological preoccupations begin to wane. Apart from specific reminiscences of his own early writings (e.g. in Ecce Homo), the concept hardly turns up again at all. As did many others, Ivanov has interpreted Nietzsche's pair of gods as representations of merely aesthetic or psychological forces (ERSB, 2: 64). The main reason for this was that Nietzsche himself explicitly associated Apollo with visibility and visualization ("die Kunst des Bildners," KSA 1: 25), whereas the Dionysian referred to the both painful and joyful experience enhanced by the collapse of the principium individuationis. It is, nonetheless, extremely important to notice that the philosopher does not denote his key concepts as such forces per se, but...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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