Futurist and Acmeist
Georgy Vladimirovich Ivanov was born on November 10, 1894 near Kovno (now Kaunas) into a noble family with long military traditions. The estate, the portraits of his ancestors, their gaze – Ivanov will remember all this, being already a famous poet.
Already in his childhood, he could feel the fragility of everything that from birth seemed strong and unshakable: his father died early, the estate burned down after a fire. But, reading the autobiographical pages of his memoirs “Petersburg Winters,” one cannot escape the impression that at that time Georgy Ivanov was too young and too careless to dwell on the bitter and difficult.
His passion for poetry began in the cadet corps, where he entered, following family tradition. Soon this interest became the main concern of his life. As a teenager, he met famous writers, and at the age of fifteen, he first crossed the threshold of Alexander Blok’s apartment.
“What struck me most,” Ivanov recalled, “was how Blok spoke to me. As with someone he had known for a long time, as with an adult, and as if continuing an interrupted conversation. He spoke in such a way that not only did my excitement go away, I simply forgot about it. I I remembered it with renewed vigor only later, two hours later, going down the stairs, with a copy of the first edition of “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” given to me by Blok with the inscription “In memory of the conversation”…” This meeting will largely determine my poetic fate Ivanov, but years later. He still had a long path of passions and disappointments ahead of him.
The first was futurism. Young Ivanov was shocked by the verbal impudence of David Burliuk and Velimir Khlebnikov. But, quickly falling behind the Cubo-Futurists, Ivanov joined others, with the prefix “ego,” where Igor Severyanin was in charge. Their personal acquaintance turned into friendship. Most of all, the aspiring poet was struck by the noisy literary life: restaurants where writers gathered, performances – certainly with a red bow around the neck instead of a tie. Ivanov’s mother, born Baroness Bir-Bratz-Brauer van Brenstein, was a strict woman, and her son tied his elaborate bow just before the concert at Severyanin’s apartment.
In 1912, Ivanov’s first collection of poems, “Sailing to Cythera Island,” was published. The name was borrowed from the 18th century French artist Antoine Watteau. In the room where he played as a child, a portrait of his great-grandmother by Levitsky “hanged between two large vases of imperial porcelain, painted with motifs from the Sailing to the Island of Cythera.”
These verses did not make much of an impression. Only Nikolai Gumilev saw the beginnings of something extraordinary in Ivanov: “The first thing that attracts attention in Georgy Ivanov’s book is the verse. Rarely among beginning poets is it so refined, sometimes swift and fast, more often only slow, always in accordance with the theme. Therefore, each poem, when read, gives an almost physical feeling of contentment.” His review served as the reason for inviting the aspiring author to the “Poets Workshop”.
Russian dandy
In May 1918, Blok wrote an essay “Russian Dandies” about the “greenhouse” man who amazed him: “The young man, without being at all pretentious, began to read something called “Tango.” There were no words there, there were no sounds; if only I did not see the young man’s face, I would not listen to his poems, which were a popular mixture of futuristic exclamations and symbolic whispers, but from the simple and serious face of the reader I saw that he did not need any popularity and that there were, obviously, ten to twenty people. who appreciate and know his poems. There was nothing fake and pretentious about him, despite the fact that all the words of the poems that he uttered were fake and pretentious.”
The appearance of young Ivanov, his external life – artistic cafes, poetry clubs and poetry, poetry, poetry – were strikingly reminiscent of this “Russian dandy”. Of course, painted lips, shiny partings, hair to hair – all this was a masquerade, just as Severyanin’s red bow, or Mayakovsky’s yellow jacket, or Vasily Kamensky’s painted face was a masquerade.
In 1919, Ivanov intends to republish his book of poems, the book “The Upper Room”, with the addition of later poems. The manuscript gets reviewed by Blok. The end of his review was terrible and full of prophecies: “Listening to such poems, you can suddenly cry – not about the poems, not about their author, but about our powerlessness, about the fact that there are such terrible poems about nothing, not deprived of anything – not talent , neither intelligence, nor taste, and at the same time – as if these poems do not exist, they are deprived of everything, and nothing can be done about it… G. Ivanov’s book is a monument to our terrible era, moreover, one of the brightest, because The author is one of the most talented young poets. This is a book of a man slaughtered by civilization, slaughtered without blood, which for me is more terrible than all the bloody spectacles of this century…”
Poet of the Empire
Georgy Ivanov, like Gumilyov, was a poet of the great empire. His poems could not have been born outside the empire, or at least in the shadow of the former empire. How an empire cannot exist without an emperor. That’s why it will come out much later from his pen:
Enamel cross in buttonhole
And a gray cloth jacket…
What sad faces
And how long ago it was.
What beautiful faces
And how hopelessly pale –
Heir, Empress,
Four Grand Duchesses…
Behind the last three points – the war of 14, the revolution, the civil war, the death of the empire and the execution of the royal family. The new Ivanov begins with this disaster.
Photo: wikimedia.org
Emigrant
Little is known about Ivanov’s life abroad. After Berlin there was Paris, where he and his wife, writer Irina Odoevtseva, lived most of their lives. At the Green Lamp meetings, the leading role in organizing which was played by Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius, Ivanov was the permanent chairman. Published in the most famous Parisian newspapers and magazines.
“We lived quite comfortably,” Odoevtseva recalled, “on the monthly pension of my father, who kept an apartment building in Riga. And when my father died in September 1932, we received a large inheritance and lived almost richly – in a luxurious area of Paris, next to the Bois de Boulogne . And they furnished themselves wonderfully with stylish furniture. They even hired a footman.”
Ivanov rarely entered into literary struggle, but each of his attacks towards his opponents – especially Vladislav Khodasevich and Vladimir Nabokov – was on the verge of scandal. His memoirs and essay “The Decay of the Atom” enjoyed the same reputation. This “poem in prose” seemed to most contemporaries the height of indecency and cynicism. Only a few saw that the “disintegration of the atom” is the disintegration of culture and the disintegration of human consciousness. Life has lost solid ground under its feet, has lost its meaning – all that remains is “world nonsense.”
A book of his poems “Roses” and another – with a title almost repeating his first collection: “Sailing to the Island of Cythera” – not only confirmed the poetic reputation of Georgy Ivanov, but made it obvious that his lyrics are an unprecedented word in Russian literature:
The stars are turning blue. The trees are swaying.
Evening is like evening. Winter is like winter.
All is forgiven. Nothing is forgiven.
Music. Darkness.
We are all heroes and we are all traitors,
We all believe the words equally.
Well, my dear contemporaries,
are you having fun
World War II
The Second World War took everything from Ivanov and Odoevtseva: there was no house in Riga, no jewelry – nothing from their previous prosperity. For ten years they will live on rare literary earnings, then they manage to get a job in a nursing home in Hyères, in the south of France. Ivanov did not lose only his rare poetic gift.
This is the ringing of bells from afar,
These are threes with a wide run,
This is Blok’s black music
Snow falls on the shining one.
Beyond life and the world,
In the abysses of the icy ether
I still won’t part with you!
And Russia, like a white lyre,
Above a snow-covered fate.
Russia theme
Russia is a special topic in Ivanov’s poetry. She is felt in his poems even when her name is not spoken:
You are covered with snow, happiness,
Carried centuries ago
Trampled you by boots
Soldiers retreating into eternity…
The poem was written before World War II. Of course, Ivanov could remember the “soldiers retreating into eternity” of the 14th war and the civil war, but incredibly these lines best convey the year 1941, the first months of the Great Patriotic War. And there is nothing fantastic here. The image of the homeland is so accurately captured in these lines that it truly takes on the features of eternal Russia.
Return to Russia
He wrote about this in one of his last poems dedicated to Irina Odoevtseva:
Sprayed with a million tiny particles
In the icy, airless, soulless ether,
Where there is no sun, no stars, no trees, no birds,
I will return – as a reflection – in the lost world.
And again, in the romantic Summer Garden,
In the blue whiteness of St. Petersburg May,
I’ll walk silently through deserted alleys,
Embracing your precious shoulders.
Georgy Ivanov did not return to Russia alive. He died on August 26, 1958, in a nursing home in Hyères-de-Palmiers in France and was buried in the municipal cemetery there. In 1963, his remains were transferred to the Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois cemetery near Paris.
Source: rg.ru
