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Abstract
This dissertation is a study of the main themes and structure of the book Eros, a collection of thirty-three lyric poems written in 1906 by Viacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov (1866–1949). The collection is among other things the account of Ivanov's attempt to stimulate a poetic renewal through an erotic association between himself, his wife Lidiia Ivanova, and the younger poet Sergei Gorodetskii. Ivanov renders the affair in terms of a Dionysian visitation, which ends tragically and yet provides a catharsis and the promise of spiritual and creative rebirth. An example of the conjunction of seemingly incompatible influences from Friedrich Nietzsche and Vladimir Solov'ev, Eros is examined in the context of the “mystical anarchist” movement of 1906, as the extreme expression of Ivanov's Promethean impulses, and as a poetic rendering of theories of Platonic eros that were current in the literary soirées of the period. An expression of Ivanov's syncretic “myth” of unity, the lyric cycle is also considered in light of Ivanov's theories of the roots of the drama and the Dionysian dithyramb. Eros is read as an example of Russian Symbolist “life-creation,” (zhiznetvorchestvo) in which the boundaries between life and art are deliberately blurred.
