Greek “Lament” by Vyacheslav Ivanov

Abstract

This article publishes a Greek poem composed by the Russian symbolist Vyacheslav Ivanov in Rome on September 2, 1893. The author’s signature below contains an indication of the genre (“threnos”, i. e. “lament”): the combination of iambic trimeter with the author’s title “threnos” can be found in the Carmina de se ipso by Gregory Nazianzin. Despite the Greek meter, language, and vocabulary borrowed partly from epic poetry, Ivanov is oriented toward the Russian Romantic tradition in choosing as a key theme the longing for the “sweet north” contrasted with the south, a representation of an earthly paradise. Other Romantic motifs include exile and envy of free birds. References to ancient mythology are expressed in the images of the garden of the Hesperides and the country of the Hyperboreans: whereas the garden of the Hesperides, conceptually linked in Ivanov’s poetry with the South, is an idyllic space metaphorically referring to Italy, Hyperborea is traditionally associated with Russia. The white-winged birds aspiring to the Hyperborean home are swans, and thus here appears implicitly the metapoetic theme developed by Ivanov with the Hyperborean myth in later poems. The genre and theme of exile point to the influence of Ovid’s Tristia: a year earlier, Ivanov had written an elegiac epistle to A. M. Dmitrievsky entitled Laeta, in which he recognizes Rome as his new home, and instead of homesickness, there is a motif of longing for a friend.

Keywords:

Vyacheslav Ivanov, Romanticism, “homesickness” motif, neo-Hellenic poetry