Plant, Metaphor, God: Thinking Mythically in Viacheslav Ivanov's Essays

Abstract

This article focuses on the essay‐manifestos of symbolist poet and classicist Viacheslav Ivanov. I discuss four essays dedicated especially to the workings of poetic thought and the task of the poet (“The Testaments of Symbolism,” “The Symbolics of Aesthetic Principles,” “Two Elements in Contemporary Symbolism,” and “Crisis of Individualism”), and identify a number of poetic tropes at work in the prose of Ivanov's argument. While offering a mythologized history of how poetic language once worked in antiquity and a program for how it ought to work now, Ivanov employs instances of the very poetic language he advocates. His recurring use of agrarian metaphors–images of the grapevine and of ears of grain–in his essays effectively creates a mythic subtext. Ivanov thus invites the reader to participate, on the level of metaphor, in the ritual of the gods of the vine and grain–Dionysus and Demeter. I conclude the article with readings of two of Ivanov's lyric poems dedicated to these gods, thus bringing the framework developed in the essays to bear on poetic practice. In addition to refining Ivanov's contributions to literary modernism, the article also argues for lyric devices as capable of accomplishing intellectual and philosophical work, thus putting forth an intervention in contemporary theoretical conversations about what poetry is and what it can do.