A major poet and theorist of the symbolist literary movement in Russia, Viacheslav Ivanov left an elaborate and influential body of work on art, culture, and religion. To the chagrin of his contemporaries, he never formalized his protean and wide-ranging ideas as a philosophical system. However, Ivanov's writings can be divided into several core areas, which succeeded each other at the center of his attention: the ritual roots of tragedy; the artwork as symbol of the transcendent; the role of art in creating historical myth; and the prospects for a religious revival in modernity. Despite his protean views, Ivanov can be seen as a philosopher in the hermeneutic tradition for whom the world reveals itself as an historical continuum of discrete acts of expression and understanding.

Biography

Born in Moscow, Ivanov was educated as a classical historian and philologist at the universities...