Regarding Viacheslav Ivanov’s place in the history of Russian literature Mikhail Bakhtin wrote, “As a thinker and personality, V. Ivanov had a colossal importance” (Aesthetics of Verbal Art, Moscow, 1979, 374). Notably, Bakhtin’s list does not include “poet.” The author of several studies of Ivanov, Michael Wachtel provides a true biography where references to the writer’s literary and philosophical works are subordinated to the events of his life and provide much missing context for Ivanov’s prose and poetry. But who ever expected a biography of symbolism’s most illustrious, challenging, and contradictory figure (nicknamed “Viacheslav the Magnificent” by his contemporaries) to be so readable? Like the cats Ivanov adored, Wachtel gives him nine lives. Although thought of as the leading figure of symbolism in St. Petersburg, Wachtel reminds the reader of Ivanov’s more traditional Moscow roots. He sees the discord in Ivanov’s parents’ marriage between Slavophile and Westernizer orientations as permanently instilling in Ivanov an early and lasting desire to reconcile oppositions in everyday life and thought.

As a student Ivanov attended the 1889 Pushkin celebration where Fedor Dostoevskii proclaimed Russian culture’s universality, a concept vital to Ivanov in his lifelong exploration of these two writers’ works. Studies and contacts in Germany and Rome with major European intellectuals led Ivanov to delve deeply into classical literature and antiquity (Theodor Mommsen), archeology (Otto Hirschfeld), and philology (Ernst Curtius, Ferdinand de Saussure). But Wachtel explains that Ivanov’s early intellectual and occupational choices were more prosaically motivated by his need for money. During his first marriage Ivanov began a passionate affair in Rome with Lidia Zinovieva Shvarsalon, a married mother of three. She became Ivanov’s beloved muse during her lifetime and even after her death. Under her later nom de plume, Lidia Zinovieva-Annibal (the latter linking her to Pushkin’s famous ancestor), she wrote works that are now back in vogue. Wachtel very carefully spells out all the obstacles to their changes in family relationships in regard to the Orthodox Church’s strictures against divorce as well as other legal entanglements, another theme running throughout the biography.

Most previous studies of Ivanov’s life center on the couple’s return to St. Petersburg and the gatherings at their famous Tower apartment. Wachtel skillfully unravels the twists and turns of the cultural scene of those years. In a promiscuous atmosphere much like that of England’s Bloomsbury group, the cultural figures who visited and often lived in the Tower for long periods enjoyed it as a space for literary, gender, and sexual experimentation. Ivanov was bisexual and had affairs with both men and women. Wachtel carefully avoids lurid details, but adds a sardonic note to his portrait: “Ivanov’s ‘ethereal body’ may have been perfect, but he was clearly too much a slave to his physical body” (172). Wachtel surveys the burning social and political questions of the day, and provides detailed information on the history of the major figures, journals, and publishing venues of the Silver Age; widely considered to be the richest period of twentieth-century Russian culture.

Ivanov’s life radically changed in 1907 when Lidia suddenly died. Wachtel gives a carefully corrected version of the cause and circumstances of her death, like other factual corrections he provides throughout his text. An Orthodox Christian, Ivanov was an early disciple of Vladimir Solovʹev and sought discussions with major religious thinkers, such as Nikolai Berdiaev, Vladimir Ern, Pavel Florenskii, and others. Yet after Lidia’s death in 1907 he sought solace from the anthroposophist Anna Mintslova. The Tower period ended when Ivanov transferred his love of Lidia to her step-daughter, Vera Shvarsalon, who became pregnant with their son Dmitri. The ensuing scandal forced them to flee, first to France, then to Moscow. Although opposed to Bolshevism, Ivanov’s status and connections got him paid positions with cultural venues of the Soviet regime. He sought out teaching positions first in Baku and then, as the political situation worsened, in Europe, where he lived mainly in Italy. Opposed to Fascism, Ivanov still found work as a teacher, lecturer, and writer and re-established his prominence as a thinker and essayist, again corresponding with major European intellectuals. Like Solovʹev, he converted to a form of Catholicism reconciled to Orthodoxy.

But what of his poetry? Ivanov was widely anthologized earlier. Fifteen poems appear in the 1966 Modern Russian Poetry, whose editor Vladimir Markov noted that leaving Ivanov out would be like leaving Thomas Stearns Eliot out of an English poetry anthology. In contrast, the more recent Russian Silver Age Poetry (2015) includes only one Ivanov poem, the clearly programmatic “Alpine Horn.” Scholarship on Ivanov peaked in the 1980s and 90s with major studies by Russian and western scholars, world conferences and a four-volume collected works, edited by Dmitri Ivanov and Olga Deschartes (Olga Shor). She met Ivanov as a teenager and supported him and his children until the poet’s death in 1949. Wachtel warns the reader about her unreliable biography—a rather lurid account of the Tower years—but she should be acknowledged, along with Dmitri, as the founder of Ivanov studies. Wachtel’s detailed exploration of Ivanov’s life and personality hopefully will spur a revival of interest in this monumental figure. Largely based on archival sources, Wachtel’s generous and sympathetic portrait of Ivanov, is, like its subject, quite magnificent.