Viacheslav Ivanov was a pivotal figure in the Silver Age of Russian culture. Often overlooked in Russian literature, this poet, scholar, philosopher, religious thinker, translator, and teacher was a cultural catalyst. Author Michael Wachtel opens a new window onto twentieth-century Russian and European intellectual life with his definitive biography Viacheslav Ivanov: A Symbolist Life. In this Q&A, Wachtel offers a deeper understanding of Ivanov’s complex character, his influential relationships, and the historical context that shaped his extraordinary life.

Q: I’ve never heard of this writer. Why should I read an entire biography about him?

Michael Wachtel: The reason you’ve not heard of this writer is probably the difficulty in classifying him and translating him. Viacheslav Ivanov was a major poet, philosopher, religious thinker, scholar, and teacher. He was enormously influential in numerous areas: as an expert on the ancient world, as a theoretician of modern drama, as an insightful literary critic, as a poet with a unique style and the leader of numerous poetry circles, as a brilliant interlocutor. It is difficult to overstate his importance for the “Silver Age” of Russian culture (roughly the first two decades of the twentieth century). He remained influential even in the early years of Bolshevik Russia, but after his departure from the Soviet Union in 1924 his name was more or less erased from literary histories, and his works were not republished.

By any standards Ivanov’s life was extraordinary. He was surely the only person in the world who knew Theodor Mommsen (the German Nobel Prize-winning historian), Anatoly Lunacharsky (minister of education under Lenin), several members of the original Politburo (including Lev Kamenev), Giovanni Gentile (minister of education under Mussolini), Pope Pius XI, Martin Buber, and Jacques Maritain. And this list doesn’t even include luminaries of Russian culture like the composers Aleksandr Skriabin and Sergei Prokofiev, the theater director Vsevelod Meyerhold, and the ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev, as well as almost every significant poet and prose writer of the early twentieth century.

Ivanov lived a long life, about half of it outside Russia. He spent many years in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy and extended periods of time in England, Greece, and France. He could speak and write in all these languages so was not obliged to ghettoize himself. He also taught at the Soviet university in Baku (Azerbaijan) from 1920 to 1924.

Q: So he knew a lot of people and traveled extensively, but what makes his own life interesting?

Wachtel: It would be hard to find another so wide-ranging and well-educated writer, especially given the chaos of his times and his own continual displacement. Somewhat like Nietzsche (whose work he greatly admired), Ivanov began his career as a scholar of antiquity and then decided to become a poet. He was a brilliant linguist with the ability to write poetry in ancient Greek, Latin, German, French, and Italian. He was fascinated by the figure of Dionysus, whose worship he—unlike Nietzsche—saw as preparing the ground for Christianity. While deeply religious, he was also a mystic, who turned to the occult in attempts to communicate with his deceased second wife. (She tended to communicate with him in Latin, a language she seems to have mastered only posthumously.)

By temperament, Ivanov was a cultural catalyst. His Petersburg apartment served as a meeting place of all the leading intellectuals of prerevolutionary Russia. Modeled on Plato’s Symposium, the Wednesday gatherings (which lasted until the wee hours of the night and sometimes into the morning) brought together religious philosophers, poets, artists, musicians, and scholars. Everyone who was anyone was there.

Q: Can you tell me something about his personal life?

Wachtel: As in the rest of Europe, the early years of the twentieth century were a time of debate and radical experimentation. Sexual mores were being questioned in Russia just as they were elsewhere. In both his life and his thought, Ivanov was curious about these issues. He abandoned his first wife (and child) to live with the woman who would eventually become his second wife and give birth to his second (illegitimate) child. He was extremely supportive of Russia’s most famous homosexual poet, though he felt that bisexuality was superior to homosexuality. He also had a “Woody Allen” moment: After his second wife died, he married his stepdaughter, a liaison viewed as incestuous by the Russian Orthodox Church. This union, he explained, had been explicitly sanctioned by her mother from the world beyond. (For the record, his second marriage also ran counter to the doctrine of the Russian Orthodox Church, which, as a result of his betrayal of his first wife, forbade him to remarry.) And speaking of Woody Allen: Ivanov’s cycle of poems dedicated to his deceased second wife is called “Love and Death.” (They are very serious poems, I should note.)

Q: What should I know about Ivanov’s politics?

Wachtel: As a young man, Ivanov was rather conservative, but his second wife encouraged a turn to the left. He was horrified by the tsarist government’s violent response to the peaceful protests that precipitated the 1905 revolution. He rejoiced at the February Revolution, seeing the fall of the monarchy as the fulfillment of his own prophecies and anticipating a period of religious renewal. Not surprisingly, he was repulsed by the Bolshevik coup eight months later. Ivanov initially spoke out boldly against the brutality and godlessness of the new regime. However, he soon realized that if he wanted to survive, he had to cooperate with the authorities. Never denying his religious convictions, he became a high-ranking member of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, in which capacity he developed utopian ideas about theater, inevitably rubbing shoulders—and often disagreeing—with leading Bolshevik politicians. His attempt to leave Soviet Russia in 1920 failed when Lenin personally rejected his application, but after Lenin’s death in 1924, he succeeded in departing for Italy, where he spent the last twenty-five years of his life. In 1926, he became a Roman Catholic (Eastern rite). He did not make any public political statements in these years, but it seems that his greatest fear—shared by the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church that he so revered—was that Communism would spread to Western Europe. He thus seems to have accepted Fascism as a necessary evil. (However, he never even considered becoming a fascist, even though it would have made his life in Italy much easier.)

Q: How could the Roman Catholic Church welcome a man who viewed bisexuality as normal and who married his own stepdaughter?

Wachtel: Fortunately for Ivanov, the internet did not exist, so his “unorthodox” personal life and his earlier views were unknown to the Church. Moreover, they did not question him about such things. The only requirement for acceptance by the Roman Catholic faith was a willingness to reject the “heretical” teachings of Eastern Orthodoxy. (In fact, Ivanov refused to recognize these teachings as heretical, but you’ll have to read the biography to see how he got around this!)

Pope Pius XI was sufficiently moved by Ivanov’s plight that he gave him a stipend to allow him to write his magnum opus. Decades after Ivanov’s death, Pope John Paul read and admired Ivanov’s writings. He even cited them.

Q: What made you want to write this book?

Wachtel: I wrote my dissertation on Ivanov’s poetry, so I’ve been at work on Ivanov (though not exclusively!) for almost four decades. Already as a graduate student, I recognized that Ivanov’s life story was begging to be written, but much of the documentary evidence was languishing in Russian archives. I started my research in the Soviet years, when scholarship on Ivanov was officially discouraged. After the Soviet Union came to an end, a lot of people went to work publishing his letters and other unknown documents. I myself published more than a thousand pages of his letters (in German and Russian), using archives in about six different countries. I learned Italian so that I could read the correspondence from his last years.

I was friendly with Ivanov’s son, who passed away in 2003 at age ninety. He was one of the kindest and most charming people I’ve ever met. In fact, when I would go to work in the family archive, he sometimes let me stay in his second apartment on the beach outside of Rome. I’d like to think that he’d be pleased with my biography, though I’m sure he would have preferred it if I had avoided the scandalous moments (his own birth—the result of Ivanov’s relationship with his stepdaughter—being one of them).

Q: What do you hope to accomplish by publishing this book?

Wachtel: First of all, I want to introduce readers to one of the most erudite and original thinkers of the twentieth century. But second, in a time of general suspicion of Russians, I want people to appreciate that there was a historical “type” of Russian European who saw the universal as more important than the national. Ivanov took pride in his Russianness, but at the same time felt himself to be a European. He was comfortable everywhere, and after leaving the Soviet Union, he was ready to make his home anywhere that would have him, including such far-flung places as the United States, Egypt, and Argentina. (All his attempts at finding refuge in these countries failed, but he was eager to try.)

Finally, I’m hoping that some enterprising director will produce a biopic of Ivanov’s life. I’m ready to serve as screenwriter and advisor!

Q: How do you pronounce his name?

Wachtel: Viachesláv Ivánov.