By the waters of the Tiber: Viacheslav Ivanov, Aleksandr Grechaninov and Russian culture in interwar Europe

Abstract

In Russia, the impact of the end of World War I was subsumed under the far greater impact of the October Revolution, which led to a bifurcation of Russian culture into Soviet and émigré branches. This article examines a hybrid literary and musical work from the interwar period: Viacheslav Ivanov’s nine Roman Sonnets ( Rimskie sonety, 1924) and the musical settings that the composer Aleksandr Grechaninov made of five of these as his Sonetti Romani in 1939. Here, both poet and composer seek to convey the experience of finding oneself in one of Europe’s most evocative historical and cultural locations. At the same time, their evocation of Rome forges a powerful historical narrative of the city’s prior inhabitants. Accordingly, Rome emerges as an intertextual palimpsest of literary and artistic references, which together create a powerful sense of cultural continuity to offset the loss of the artist’s original homeland.