M. 0. Gershenzon and V.
I.
Ivanov
A CORRESPONDENCE
BETWEEN TWO CORNERS
(EDITORIAL
NoTE.- The following twelve letters, which
form one of the most expressive and orginal works of post-revolution–
ary Russian literature, were written in the summer of 1920 when,
after suffering terrible privations during the Civil War,
t~e
two con–
valescent authors shared a room in the Sanatorium for Scientific and
literary Workers .near Moscow.
Michael Osipovich Gershenzon (1869-1925), author of
The
Wisdom of Pushkin
and several important historical and critical stud–
ies of the leaders of the Russian intelligentsia in the first half of the
nineteenth century, was among those intellectuals who evaluated the
Bolshevik Revolution not in terms of its stated theory and program
but as an upheaval of incalculable and elemental power, liberating
man from the excessive accumulation of cultural values and thus
releasing him for a new start as "a naked man on the naked earth."
This standpoint, characterized by some Russian critics as a new
kind of uRousseauistic nihilism," is disputed in the "Correspondence"
by Viacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov (1866-), who, after 1905, headed
·
the Petersburg school of symbolist and metaphysical poetry. An out–
standing scholar of classical literature and ancient history, he studied
in his youth under M ommsen and wrote his dissertation on the tax–
farming companies of ancient Rome. Deeply Westernized in his in–
terests and outlook, he wrote brilliant literary essays, a study of the
Dionysian cult, and a number of poetic works remarkable for their
erudite content and hieratic majesty of diction and tone. The philos–
opher Leo Shestov named him uviacheslav the Magnificent." Now
eighty-three years of age, Ivanov, who has been converted to Cathol–
icism, is living in Rome.
The theme of Western culture and its fate has seldom been
951
