Symbolism as a Project: Reviews and Prefaces by Vyacheslav I. Ivanov to the Collections of Poems by Young Poets

This article considers reviews and prefaces by Vyacheslav Ivanov to books by young poets who were just entering the literary world or were already well-known but connected to him through their status as his students (B. A. Leman, V. V. Borodaevsky, N. S. Gumilev, M. A. Voloshin, A. K. Gertsyk, M. A. Zenkevich, and E. G. Guro). The objective of this study is to utilize a comparative analysis of reviews and prefaces to elucidate the distinctive aspects of Ivanov’s mentoring approach, particularly in the context of nurturing emerging poets and in the evolution of his own artistic, aesthetic, and philosophical endeavours. This subject has not been adequately addressed in previous Ivanov studies. Ivanov’s reviews and prefaces reflect the sharp literary debates that characterized Russian literature in the late 1900s and 1910s. They offer a practical application of the theory of symbolism and address fundamental questions in symbolist literary criticism. These include the conditions under which creativity becomes truly symbolist and whether a verse writer can be considered a poet. They also explore indicators of a poet’s future development and the potential paths this evolution might take. Taken together, these reviews and prefaces create a unified symbolist project, including not only the system of ideas of Ivanov’s realistic symbolism (“realiorism”) but also the school that formed around Ivanov and its various communication practices (from meetings at Ivanov’s “Tower” to the Society of Zealots of the Artistic Word), and also directly correlate with Ivanov’s fundamental articles and reports that were published in parallel.