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May 7
Session III:
Poems by Osip Mandelstam and Vyacheslav Ivanov;
Hedonistic nights at Vyacheslav Ivanov’s Tower, polemical battles between the Symbolists and Acmeists
Modernism in opera: Prokofiev's "Scythian Suite"
Sergei Prokofiev's "Scythian Suite," written in 1915 and premiered in 1916 at the Marinsky Theater in St. Petersburg.
Questions for discussion:
How can we differentiate between the arguments of Ivanov and Mandelstam? How do their perspectives converge?
How can the differences in their artistic perspectives be seen in their poems?
Ivanov -- Nietzsche and Dionysus.pdfA central text for the Russian Symbolists was Friedrich Nietzsche's 1871 study "On the birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music," in which he introduces a dichotomy of the Dionysian (chaos) and Apollonian (order). The Symbolists felt aligned with the Dionysian: wildness, passion. In this essay, Ivanov, who wrote extensively on Dionysus worship in the ancient world, discusses how Dionysus and Nietzsche are key to Symbolist perspective.
Mandelstam on Symbolism.pdfIvanov's perspective on Symbolism and its debt to Dionysus was not convincing to everyone, including the younger poet Osip Mandelstam, who found himself more aligned with the Apollonian. This was the beginning of a movement in answer and opposition to Symbolism called Acmeism, which Mandelstam describes in this essay.
Ivanov and Mandelstam.pdf"The Alpine Horn" by Vyacheslav Ivanov
"Insomnia," "Petersburg," and "Leningrad" by Osip Mandelstam
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