A Russian Aeschylus: Vyacheslav Ivanov’s Oresteia

• In Event: Classical Memories, Modern Identities in Russian Literary Imaginations

Abstract

In 1911, poet and classical scholar Vyacheslav Ivanov was contracted to complete a translation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, a trilogy of plays containing the Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides. Nine years later, in 1920, he delivered his final translation of the trilogy to his publishers in St. Petersburg. Here it languished, only published in its entirety in 1950, a year after Ivanov’s death in Rome. In my paper, I will discuss the ways this translation project animated Ivanov’s artistic production throughout the 1910s and beyond: how he referenced Aeschylus in his lectures and poems, how, with his translation, Ivanov hoped to show an Aeschylus who was “truly Greek” but also “truly Russian.” I hope to demonstrate how Ivanov’s preoccupation with the ancient poet evolved into a sentiment of personal kinship across time that Ivanov expressed over the course of years in a multitude of literary and philosophical works.

Author

• Olivia Kennison, Brown U