VIACHESLAV IVANOV

Viacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949), poet and scholar, was born in Moscow, the son of a government official who died when the future writer was four years old. Ivanov was brought up by his mother, to whose gentle piety may be attributed his abiding devotion to the Christian faith. In 1886 he went to study under Mommsen in Berlin, where in 1895 he defended his doctoral dissertation (“De societibus vectigalium publicorum populi Romani”) on the Roman tax-farming system. In the 1890s occurred two events that were to shape his life: he discovered Nietzsche and he fell in love with Lidia Zinovieva- Annibal (a descendant of that same Gannibal whose blood ran in Pushkin’s veins). Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy led Ivanov to the cult of Dionysos, to which, as a scholar, he was to devote his life’s work; the intense and gifted Zinovieva-Annibal (herself a writer who was later to make a stir with her frankly lesbian novella “Thirty-three Freaks”) wakened the poet in him. After divorcing their previous partners, the two were at last married in 1899.

In 1905 the Ivanovs settled in St. Petersburg after their years of wandering in Italy, Germany, France and England. Their top-floor apartment opposite the Tauride Palace, known as the “Tower,” immediately became the meeting place of the capital’s liveliest and most original minds. The jours-fixes at the “Tower”—the famous “Wednesdays”—became, in the words of the philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev, himself a regular frequenter, a “refined cultural laboratory” where people of the most diverse interests—“mystical anarchists and adherents of the Orthodox Church, decadents and professors, neo-Christians and social democrats, poets and scholars, artists and thinkers, actors and public figures”—could interact. It would probably be difficult to overestimate the contribution of the “Wednesdays” to the cultural ferment of those extraordinary years; some mention has been made in the Introduction of the key role they played in the crystallization of a Symbolist theatre in Russia. The “Wednesdays” were never quite the same after Zinovieva-Annibal’s untimely death in 1907, although they continued for some years.

Ivanov remained in the Soviet Union for some years after the Revolution. A two month stay in a writers’ sanatorium in 1920, during which he shared a room with the literary historian Mikhail Gershenzon, resulted in the well-known Correspondence between Two Corners, in which Ivanov defended “memory”—the continuity of culture—against his opponent’s view of the Revolution as a liberation from the burden of the past. From 1920 until 1924 Ivanov was professor of classical philology at Baku University. In 1924 he left the Soviet Union for good and spent the rest of his long life in Italy, teaching and writing. Always a devout Christian (for him, unlike Nietzsche, the religion of Dionysos had always been the religion of the suffering god, not opposed to, but prefiguring Christianity), Ivanov was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1926—a step he regarded as a consummation rather than a rejection of Orthodoxy. Ivanov died in Rome in 1949. A collection of his later poetry, Westering Light, was published posthumously at Oxford in 1962.

Ivanov’s first collection of poetry, Pilot Stars, appeared in 1903, and, although he belonged to an older generation than Blok and Bely, he represented together with them the second, “mystical” wave of Russian Symbolism; like them, he had been profoundly influenced by the teachings of Vladimir Soloviov, and like them he viewed poetry as a religious apprehension of life rather than an aesthetic activity. Ivanov was a considerable, though never a popular poet; his poetry, which displays great formal mastery, is stately, erudite and full of sonorous archaisms, often bringing to mind his own description of St. Mark’s Cathedral:

Stooping you stand, a patriarch in rich

And heavy robes of forged brocade.

Together with Bely, Ivanov was the leading theorist of Russian Symbolism, and perhaps came closest to erecting an ordered and coherent aesthetic. For Ivanov, the symbol was the kernel of a religious myth, or, to put it another way, “myth is the symbol in its dynamic aspect.” The creation of myth was the business of art, and of the theatre in particular—hence the theatre’s central place in Ivanov’s thinking. He wished to create a theatre of mystery in which the spectators would be transformed into participants in a religious rite, achieving the mystic communion (sobornost) in which Ivanov saw the highest goal of art.

Following Nietzsche, Ivanov looked back to the origins of the theatre in Dionysian rite. The Symbolists, he said, should “look to those distant ages when myths were truly being created.” Unlike his fellow classicist among the Symbolists, Annensky (of whose work he nevertheless wrote a sensitive appreciation), Ivanov was drawn not to the “modern” Euripides (detested by Nietzsche), but to the dramatist closest to the ecstatic and religious wellspring of Greek drama—Aeschylus. It is upon the first of the Greek tragedians that he modeled his own dreams of heroic god-defiers, Tantalus (1904) and Prometheus (1915), works that, like Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound or the second part of Faust, must be regarded as dramatic poems rather than dramas.

The discrepancy between Ivanov’s oratorio-like, virtually unstageable plays and his longing for a vital renewal of the theatre, a “great popular art,” points to a certain unreality that vitiates Ivanov’s theoretical writings on the theatre. Nevertheless, his ideas had some influence on the theatrical avant-garde, particularly on Meyerhold.

VIACHESLAV IVANOV
THE NEED FOR A DIONYSIAN THEATRE
(FROM “PRESENTIMENTS AND PORTENTS”¹²)

It cannot be doubted that as the art of the stage belongs formally to the dynamic type of the arts, inasmuch as drama unfolds before us in time, its inherent nature is actively energetic; not only does it seek to enrich our consciousness by implanting within it a new image of beauty as an object of passive contemplation, but it also seeks to become an active factor in our spiritual life, to produce some kind of inner event in that life. As far back as the ancient Greeks, the “purgation” (“catharsis”) of the spectator’s soul was spoken of as the aim pursued and attained by genuine tragedy.

Nevertheless, the world-wide historical development of the theatre reveals a significant deviation from this primal self-definition of the theatrical Muse in the direction of plastic immobility. The drama was born, in Nietzsche’s words, “out of the spirit of music,” or, in more precise historical terms, of the choric dithyramb. In this dithyramb all is dynamic: every member of the liturgical choric ring is an active molecule in the orgiastic life of the body of Dionysos—his religious community. Out of the ecstatic sacrificial rite arose the Dionysian art of the choric drama. The sacrifice—genuine at first, later fictive—is the protagonist, a hypostasis of the orgiastic god himself, acting out within our circle the suffering lot of the doomed hero. The choric ring was originally a community of those who offered sacrifice and participated in the sacrificial mystery.

The subsequent fate of the Dionysian art is a result of the modification of the elements that constituted the original whole. The dithyramb becomes isolated as an independent lyric form. In the drama, the deeds and passions of the hero-protagonist take on exclusive significance, entirely absorbing the attention of those present and transforming former participants in a sacred drama and performers of a rite into spectators of a festive show. The chorus, long since detached from the community, becomes separated from the hero as well: now it is no more than an element accompanying the central event, repeating the peripeteia of the hero’s fate until finally it becomes unnecessary and even a nuisance. Thus the “theatre” (ϑε′ατρον), i.e. “spectacle” (spectacle, Schauspiel), comes into being. The actor’s “mask” thickens and the visage of the orgiastic god, the god whose hypostasis the tragic hero had once been, can no longer be glimpsed through it: “mask” has thickened into “character.”

In the age of Shakespeare, everything is designed to body forth this “character.” And the French theatre of the seventeenth century—is it not the apogee of the theatre’s approach to the plastic arts? The age that locked up the flowing music of nature in the frozen architectural forms of the gardens of Versailles, did it not render the faces of Melpomene no less static? We delight in the creations of that period of the drama as plastic creations. Like a statue, the hero stands before us, a living mechanism of muscles, each of which by its tension reveals the structure and movement of the rest. The logic of the fate with which we are solely occupied is such that all is interrelated and the loss of a single link in the pragmatic chain would destroy the whole. The development of the drama becomes the demonstration of a mathematical theorem, the stage an arena where the gladiators of passion and fate do battle. The crowd disperses, satisfied by the spectacle of the struggle, sated with killing, but uncleansed by sacrificial blood.

The new theatre gravitates toward the dynamic principle. Is this not true of the theatre of Ibsen, where, in an oppressive closeness, the electricity of unexpended energy accumulates and a few purgative thunderclaps break in demonic splendor, without, however, clearing the atmosphere of its ominous tension? Or the theatre of Maeterlinck, which leads us into a labyrinth of mystery in order to abandon us before an impenetrable door? Or the theatre of Verhaeren, where the crowd itself emerges as protagonist? Or Wagner’s drama of Tristan and Isolde, where the faces of the lovers swim up, convulsed with tragic passion, from the waves of murky chaos, the universal Meon,¹³ only to sink back and dissolve in it, paying as individuals by their death, in the words of ancient Aniximander, redemptive requital for their very coming into being, and leaving nothing before the mournful gaze of those who witness their fate but a boundless purple ocean of relentless universal Will and unassuaged universal Suffering?

The dynamic principle is perhaps most clearly manifested in the so-called realistic theatre, which aims deliberately to be terre-à-terre and thus expels the “hero,” making “Life” itself as a fluid becoming and never-resolving process the central figure, as it were, of the drama. Those who go to contemplate these cinematographs of everyday life are aware beforehand that no new knot of living forces will be tied before their eyes and that they will see no “denouement,” because “life” itself is the sole knot of that universal drama, an excerpt of which is about to be played before them, and reality has not yet provided the denouement. They will be satisfied if the dramatist brings to the fore a particular problem presented by “life,” if he poses a question suitable for discussion in the open forum of public opinion. But the dynamic principle of drama here finds complete confirmation. The spectacle’s aim is not so much aesthetic as psychological: the need to condense an inner experience common to all; to know horror on descrying and recognizing one’s own double; to hurl a torch into the black abyss yawning at our feet in order that a fugitive beam might illuminate its bottomless immeasurability. But in this there is a thrill that approaches the Dionysian—“rapture at the grim abyss’s brink.”¹⁴

If, then, the new theatre is again to be a dynamic one, let it be so to the limit. Following the example of the Ancients, who treated frenzy with ecstatic music and the exciting rhythms of the dance, it behoves us to seek a musical heightening of effect as a means of bringing about a healing resolution. The theatre must reveal its dynamic essence to the full; it must therefore cease to be “theatre” in the sense of “spectacle” alone. Enough of spectacles—we have no need of circenses. We wish to gather together in order to create—“to make”—communally, and not merely to contemplate; “zu schaffen, nicht zu schauen.” Enough of playacting—we want action. The spectator must become an actor—a participant in the ritual act. The crowd of spectators must unite in a choric body like the mystic community of the “orgies” and “mysteries” of old.

In the Dionysian orgies, the ancient cradle of the theatre, each participant had before him a twofold aim: to take part in the orgiastic drama and in the orgiastic purgation, to consecrate and to be consecrated, to summon the divine presence and to receive the blessed gift—a theurgic, active aim and a pathetic, passive aim.

The separation of the elements of the original drama led to an impoverishment of the community’s inner experience: it was permitted only to “undergo” the enchantments of Dionysos; and the ancient theoretician of the drama, Aristotle, consequently speaks only of the spectator’s passive emotions. It is not surprising that the action of the drama moves away from the orchestra¹⁵ (the circular area set aside for the chorus and bounded by the horseshoe-shaped auditorium) to the proscenium, which rises ever higher above the level of the orchestra. And so is drawn the charmed line between spectator and actor that, in the guise of the footlights, to this day divides the theatre into two alien worlds, one exclusively active, the other exclusively contemplative—and there are no arteries to link these two divided bodies by the common bloodstream of creative energy.

The footlights have separated the community, no longer conscious of itself as such, from those who are conscious of themselves only as “players.” The stage must step across the footlights and draw the community into itself, or the community must absorb the stage. This is an aim already acknowledged by some; but where is the means by which it is to be realized?

It would be useless to approach this aim by seeking to predetermine the content of the desired new drama. Whether the hoped-for theatre be a “theatre of youth and beauty” or the spectacle of “human happiness without tears” (as recently demanded by Maeterlinck the theoretician), a theatre of cherished memories or prophetic presentiments, of elusive fragrances or sacred awe, whether it be a didactic theatre seeking to inform or educate—a theatre-“platform” or a theatre-lectern—none of these programs provides the means to break the spell of the footlights. There are artifices whereby the intervention of the public may be facilitated; the audience can be provoked into shouting comments (such as are often heard at performances of Italian and French melodramas); if politics is involved, it is easy enough to transform the occasion into a public meeting; but of course none of this presents an aesthetic solution to the problem before us. Decorative innovations of a purely external nature are hardly more helpful: the modern theatre remains the same in spirit even when the open sky is blue above the audience’s head or the volcanic contours of beautiful Lake Albano can be glimpsed beyond the stage.

It is fruitless to attempt to establish a link between the question of the footlights and the question of what the subject matter of the drama of the future ought to be. In the drama of the future there must be room for everything—for tragedy and comedy, mystery play and crude popular farce, myth and social problem. What matters is not the “what,” but the “how”—“how” understood in both a musical and psychological sense and in the sense of the elaboration of forms capable of sustaining the dynamic energy of the future theatre. We see no means of fusing stage and auditorium other than by unleashing the hidden and fettered Dionysian element in the orchestral symphony and in the independent musical and plastic existence of the chorus.

At the present time the drama, on one hand, and the so-called “music drama” on the other lead independent lives; they flow in two separate channels, and the watershed between them seems impassable. A single flow of energy that feeds two parallel streams is diminished and enfeebled in each. Happily, there are signs that point to the temporary nature of the breach and to the inclination of the two streams to reach a point of confluence. Let us restrict ourselves to a single example. Is it not significant that Maeterlinck’s drama (Pelléas et Mélisande) stands in need of musical interpretation and finds it in the music of Debussy? But what is Debussy’s music to Pelléas if not a reductio ad absurdum of the Wagnerian principle of “endless melody” or, if you will, recitative determined at all costs to bar living speech and living drama from the charmed circle of music’s domain? It remains only to take one more step and speech will triumph over the convention of song, now watered down to a dreary declamatory recitative.

It is clear that the music drama must become simply drama; music will maintain and strengthen its dominance in the symphony and in the chorus, with its massed outbursts and varied groupings, polyphonies, monodies and soli, on a special stage for dancing or in the orchestra of a unified synthetic drama, the individual roles of which will be performed on the stage by dramatic actors.

The drama, in fact, is drawn toward music, because only with music’s aid is it able to express its dynamic nature, its Dionysian aspect, to the full; because music alone will lend the drama grandeur of style and make it the bearer of a genuinely national art—for the drama must not follow in the wake of the other arts but must lead them in the movement, ordained by the age, away from intimate and refined exclusiveness toward broad lines and commodious forms; from the miniature and the easel painting to the al fresco. Music must take into itself the drama of the word because alone it does not have the strength to solve the problem of synthetic theatre.

Only a cultural and historical conflict brought about by slowness in overcoming deep-rooted traditions can, it seems, explain the inner anomaly of Wagner’s work, which excludes from its “ringdance of the arts”—in clear contradiction of the synthetic principle—not only the dramatic actor but also the chorus (in the proper sense of the word) with its singing and orchestics. It is true that, as far as the chorus is concerned, Wagner’s formula rests upon some theoretical justification, criticism of which, however, is facilitated by none other than Wagner himself, inasmuch as he not only accepts the idea of the chorus in theory, but even views it as the true vehicle of the tragedy played out by the actors.

The chorus for Wagner is the very substance of the drama, the very Dionysian element, as we would express it, that brings it into being; but this chorus is hidden and without speech: it is the orchestral symphony, expressing the dynamic basis of existence. This symbolic, wordless chorus is dumb Will, whose unceasing surge casts up on the theatre’s illusory island of Apollonian dreams human forms and voices of “endless melody.” Those who gather at the Festspiel are envisioned as molecules of the orchestra’s orgiastic being; they participate in the action, but only latently and symbolically. Wagner the hierophant does not grant the community choric voice and word. Why not? The community has the right to this voice because it is seen not as a crowd of spectators but as a gathering of participants in an orgiastic rite.

It might be objected that the orchestra represents a metaphysical chorus of universal Will; a human chorus, even as a mystical assembly, would be the voice of a consciousness no more than human. Such an objection fails because the singing of the chorus would not replace the symphony but simply become an integral part of it. The symbol of the choric word would worthily represent the Dionysian spirit of humanity caught up in the infinity of cosmic ecstasy, serving as that ecstasy’s conscious and active vehicle, like the mythical Hippa, who received the new-born Bacchus into her snake-entwined cradle. Apart from this, some secret law of aesthetics demands that the artist be anthropomorphic in all things, avenging itself on those who trangress it by cursing them with amorphousness, dryness and monotony.

Wagner stopped in mid-course, leaving his final word unspoken. His synthesis of the arts is not harmonious and not complete. With a onesidedness at odds with his overall conception, he gives prominence to the solo singer and neglects the spoken word and the dance, mass vocalism and the symbolism of the multitude. In Wagner’s music drama “as in the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, wordless instruments strain to give utterance to the longed-for and ineffable. As in the Ninth Symphony, the human voice, and it alone, will speak the Word. The chorus must be resurrected completely, in the fullness of its ancient rights. Without it there is no communal drama and spectacle prevails” (“Wagner and the Dionysian Drama”).

Thus, the formula for a synthetic drama which we have outlined demands first of all that the stage action should arise out of the orchestral symphony and be circumscribed by it, and that this same symphony should be the dynamic basis of the action that interrupts it with self-contained dramatic episodes—for out of the Dionysian sea of orgiastic emotions rises the Apollonian vision of the myth, to disappear again in those same ecstatic depths, having illuminated them by its miracle, when the circle of musical “catharsis” is completed; secondly, it demands that the chorus should become both part of the symphony and part of the action; thirdly, that the actors should speak and not sing from the stage.

A corollary to the second demand, a condition of its realization, is that the orchestra must be restored. The auditorium must be cleared for choric dance and choric action; it should resemble the flat bottom of a hollow surrounded by sloping hills, accessible from all sides and occupied in front by a stage, with banks for the spectators on the remaining sides. The musicians of the orchestra should either remain unseen in the cavity reserved for them in the Wagnerian theatre or they should be deployed elsewhere. The coryphaeus of the instrumentalists, dressed in a costume matching that of the chorus, with his magic wand and his rhythmic gestures of an all-powerful magician, does not offend our aesthetic sensibility: he may stand in full view of the entire community.

The chorus is most easily envisaged as a double one: a small chorus directly connected with the action as in the tragedies of Aeschylus and a chorus symbolic of the community as a whole and capable of being arbitrarily enlarged, a chorus, consequently, which is numerous and which intervenes in the action only at moments of the highest exaltation—an example is the dithyrambic chorus in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The first chorus, naturally, introduces more action and orchestics into the synthetic drama; the second is restricted to the more spirited rhythms, it forms grand ensembles (processions, theorii), making its effects by its massed might and by the collective authority of the community it represents. The autonomy of the chorus allows scope not only for a wide variety of musical forms but also for constant innovation in the devising of choric intermezzi, thus ensuring that the chorus will serve as reservoir of the creative power of the orgiastic communal consciousness.

Undoubtedly, a necessary precondition of these changes is that the theatre should renounce not only the realism of everyday life but also to a great extent the desire for theatrical “illusion.” Neither of these sacrifices, however, is likely to frighten our contemporaries and is, of course, still less likely to frighten the popular masses of the future, with their immemorial prediliction for the ideal style. It seems that both everyday realism and stage illusionism have by now said all they have to say; the present age has completely exhausted their possibilities. At all events, in envisaging a new kind of theatre, we do not deny either the possibility of other kinds of theatre coexisting with it—both those we already know and utilize and others as yet undeveloped from obsolete or obsolescent forms.

There is no doubt that the theatre of the future, as we envisage it, would be an obedient instrument of the mythopoeia that, by force of inner necessity, will surely arise out of truly symbolic art if it ceases to be the property of isolated individuals and finds harmonious accord with the free development of the national spirit. For this reason, the most suitable forms for the synthetic drama would be a divine and heroic tragedy similar to that of the Ancients and a mystery more or less analogous to that of the Middle Ages.

These forms are more flexible than might appear at first glance. The political drama can be wholly fused with them, thus acquiring for the first time a choric, i.e. a symbolically nationwide resonance. Let us not forget that the mythopoeic tragedy of the Greeks was often at the same time a political drama, and that the community that celebrated in its theatre the festivals of the Great Dionysos was naturally transformed into a village community meeting, casting its enthusiasm or its hatred into the civic scales of the popular assembly or the council of elders. A similar influence, though even greater in degree, was exerted on public opinion by high comedy—the comedy of Aristophanes.

Only in the choric forms of a musical drama will comedy, long chained to the mundane realities of everyday life, find the courage to take wing; these forms alone will enable it, without ceasing to make us laugh—on the contrary, by resurrecting the divine orgiastic feast of laughter—to transport the crowd to a world of the most grotesque and unbridled fantasy, while at the same time serving as an organ of free social development.

1906

VIACHESLAV IVANOV
ANNENSKY AS DRAMATIST
(FROM “THE POETRY OF INNOKENTY ANNENSKY”¹⁶)

Annensky, the humanist and translator of Euripides, himself became a dramatist—a pupil and imitator of the tragedian he loved, his continuator and perfectioner, as it were, in artistic invention and illusionistic convention. He chooses as his themes those treated by Euripides in tragedies that have not come down to us; in place of the lost Ixion, Melanippe, Laodamia and Thamyris he has created his own four identically titled dramas.

This was his caprice and no pretensions are implied in it: just as Annensky consciously and deliberately guards against all restrictive externally imposed canons of school and style, so he clearly and unmistakably prefers artistic license to any kind of archaizing or stylization. Truly, such was the way in which he worked, and such the conditions, that the poet’s praise of the free dreamer, the gondolier-storyteller, can well be applied to him:

He loves his song;¹⁷ he sings to please himself,

Taking no further thought, unknown to fame,

To fear or hope …

Annensky wrote dramas on ancient themes not because he wished thereby to demonstrate some aesthetic thesis, but because ancient myth was close to him and seemed to him to have general validity and human—no more than human—significance, to be of sufficient flexibility to allow modernization and of sufficient scope to accommodate the most recent developments of Symbolism; and because he had grown accustomed to living among these dreams of Greece, or rather to beguiling himself with his own self-sufficient “reflections” of Greece; and because it was Euripides and none other who had served him as intermediary between the divided worlds of the modern personality and the classical spirit, and he imagined himself able to converse across the centuries with the first tragedian of the individual personality; and, finally, because his lyricism required a chorus, understood in an ultra-Euripidean sense infinitely remote from its original function, as musical accompaniment and “musical entr’acte,” and no other dramatic form could offer this lyrical resource—more than that, the catharsis of a forlorn and isolated spirit. Neither was it possible to find in any other form of drama the element of the “touching,” as he understood it, and the element of the contemplative: the opportunity to stand apart and gaze sympathetically on his hero without identifying with him, to be moved by and at the same time to weep for his dramatis personae, who always perform their tragic actions innocently and always under compulsion, never from excess of strength or in a spirit of defiance, always from the consciousness they feel of the constriction and poverty of their “incarnation”—not from “fullness,” as Nietzsche demanded, but from insufficiency and “hunger.”

Annensky thought he could understand Euripides’ “new man” of long ago, perceiving in him the same disharmony and division he sensed in himself—a personality that, having freed consciousness and selfhood from the bonds of an outmoded social and religious collective, now found that it was locked up within itself, deprived of meaningful union with others, incapable of opening the door it had slammed shut on itself and of emerging from its cage to assert itself with might and majesty in rebellion or freely to submit like the god-fighters and submissive ones of Aeschylus or, finally, to fashion from itself one of the generalized and normative types of common humanity like the heroes of Sophocles … Oh, he was incapable of religious submission, to the secret of which the “new soul” was profoundly oblivious, but neither could he turn to brute force, even if only in his dreams, like Nietzsche—and he locked himself in his “underground,” there quietly to “reflect” both the sunlit arrogance of the deafening world and the quiet suffering of wounded, unloved, earthbound souls.

Tragedy, in the strict sense, could not arise from this psychology; there did gape within the poet himself the abyss into which freedom—not compulsion—hurls the genuine tragic hero at the crossroads of his ultimate choice, like that Roman who leapt with his horse into the widening breach, freely offering himself as a sacrifice to the gods of the underworld for the redemption of the threatened city. However, Annensky was generally faithful to the Euripidean tragic formula, developing to their fullest extent the possibilities suggested by Euripides and, as it were, convincing us yet again that the aesthetic and psychological phenomenon known in modern Europe by the name of décadence is the revival of something we have inherited in entirety from the Ancients, a final inference drawn from something of which the characteristic features and formal traits had been apparent ever since Hellenic religion began to fall into decay.

Only a single outstanding feature, in essence, marks Annensky’s dramas as unclassical in form, and here historical distance is seen to be more powerful than aesthetic and psychological closeness. What we have in mind is not the romantic spirit in the conception of the poet’s first three dramas, something perfectly comprehensible to the ancient world, and not, of course, peculiarities of poetic tone and diction in these three dramas, not even the eclectic barocco of Thamyris Kitharodos. We have in mind the absence of the mask, with all the consequences its removal entails for the entire dramatic style.

For the mask compels the dialogue to be typical and rhetorical and concentrates the psychological interest in a few decisive moments of the drama’s peripetaia, while the removal of the mask transforms the course of the dramatic action into a ceaseless ebb and flow of small, fleeting, half-conscious and mutually contradictory experiences. But then, Euripides himself is noticeably constricted by the static nature of the mask; it seems that he would have preferred the vividness and mobility of the uncovered face—did he not, after all, lower the buskin and make the chorus, once the vehicle of an unshakable objective norm, the voice of lyrical subjectivism?

One is tempted to define the tragic pathos of Annensky’s dramas as a “pathos of distance” between earthly and human and the heavenly and divine and, springing from this, a pathos of resentment felt by mankind and for mankind; the idea that unites these works might be defined as that of the impossibility of love’s realization on earth. The guilt of Annensky’s guiltless heroes lies in the fact that they love too far above themselves; but true love—such is the poet’s thought—does not arise, or at least cannot be realized, on the same plane for both lovers, the plane, that is, of earthly existence. Love selects for its object that which is truly worthy of love, the quintessentially real, either in the world beyond or in some temporary incarnation. In the first case, the soul striving to gain possession of the beloved is involuntarily guilty of pride and theomachy, like Ixion, who is easily absolved of his former crime but whose love for the divine Hera cannot be forgiven, or like the lyre-player Thamyris, the “unloving” lover of an Olympian Muse. Melanippe—the heroine of a beautiful and touching drama of a purely Euripidean cast—is condemned, like Thamyris, to blindness and to the long entombment of a soul that has renounced all earthly things in a body that pitilessly continues to live, as retribution for loving blue-curled Poseidon and for wedding a god, a thing forbidden to mortals. Love in Laodamia, the most exquisite and perfectly realized of the poet’s three “Euripidean” dramas, is realized only through earthly separation and the liberating funeral pyre; to mortal understanding, it is realized in illusion and self-deception and is real only to the gods.

Suffering is the distinctive mark of genuine love, which is always in one way or another directed toward an unattainable object; it is its titre de noblesse and the criterion of its authenticity. This suffering is a mark of human dignity before the gods, even perhaps of human superiority over them. It is not in the nature of the gods to love: they are blessed.

—You think the gods can love? Was ever one

Unknown to suffering, unburned by doubt,

Given the power to love? A love devoid

Of thrill and mystery … The diadem

Of ice that crowns those distant heights, O Queen—

In sunlight it beguiles the eye, but nymphs

Love not its chilling irridescence.

—Can that be why great Zeus abandons us

And grows enamored of your maids? . .

(Ixion)

Yes, the gods become enamored of mortal maidens, as mortal heroes do of goddesses; and every time the divine element approaches the mortal, a human being is destroyed. Between gods and men a great gulf has been fixed. “How do you live, divine ones? With feasting and with love?” the leader of the chorus asks Hermes in Laodamia. Hermes replies:

O no! Feasting we find as dull as you—

The wise, at least, among you—and Eros’ feast

Beguiles us rarely … Seated at the board,

We read our scrolls. The bright and busy world

Is interesting to us; it gives us notes

For music, colors to paint pictures with:

It holds the atoms of another being …

There is an Orphic verse:¹⁸ “Olympus is the smile of the god; his tears are the race of man.” This line could well serve as an epigraph to all Annensky’s dramas. The relationship between the two worlds is such that disaster and torment on earth are equivalent to the blessing of the gods; what is bitter here is sweet there. An individual’s assertion of his divine I ruptures his links with the earth and calls down inevitable retribution on his head; but there, on the divine plane … Beyond this point, however, our poet does not venture; here he finds himself too lacking in the strength of religion—or is it only a chaste reserve?—to make any kind of assertion. One thing he knows: on earth man has become profoundly forgetful of what he may once have known in heaven—he is forgetful of everything, of his very divinity, the memory of which reveals itself not in man’s consciousness but in the virtue of the noblest, in the love of something that does not exist on earth and in “unlovingness” toward earthly things.

There is another thing we shall learn from the poet in answer to our questions and our doubts as to whether that divine reality exists and whether our tears—the smile of the gods—will restore to us that lost and forgotten divinity. In Thamyris, at the catastrophic moment that decides the hero’s fate, we see gazing down from the heavens into the mirror of the world the ethereal countenance of the smiling Zeus. A striking image! Does the blessed father of the gods and of men know that all this pain and disaster below is the means by which man, transfigured by his sufferings, will return to his ancestral home, be he Herakles or the unchained Prometheus with the osier-wreath of peace upon his head and the iron ring of submission about his wrist? Or is it simply humor, the irony of the heaven-dwellers at the expense of man, that “long-legged cicada,” in the words of Goethe’s Mephistopheles? … *

It was here that the “underground” in the divided soul of our new Euripides took its inception, that “underground” he liked to exhibit as a mask of “cynical” scepticism, but to which he himself, in one of his most profound and revealing poems, gave a better name—“bewilderment.”

1916

* Let us compare the following thought from Annensky’s article “The Artistic Idealism of Gogol”—one of the few places in his work where he gave direct expression to his view of the world: “We are surrounded by, and probably compounded of two worlds: the world of things and the world of ideas. These worlds are infinitely removed from each other, and in the whole of creation it is man alone who is their profoundly humorous—in a philosophical sense—and logically irreconcilable combination.”