Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation is a study of the reception of Greek tragedy in Russian Symbolism and Acmeism, primarily focusing on the translation and reception projects of three writers who were trained in classical philology and the Ancient Greek language, and were invested in contributing to a “Slavonic Renaissance”: Vyacheslav Ivanov, Dmitri Merezhkovsky, and Innokenty Annensky. I discuss efforts by Symbolist writers to reintroduce tragedy as a revitalizing space for social and religious communion, citing the ancient origins of the genre as pagan ritual as their motive, eschewing the neoclassical tragic formula, which is informed by moral and/or political messaging for entertainment value alone. I am interested in illuminating how their translations of Greek tragedy, attendant theoretical writing on the revival of tragedy, and original tragic dramas were influenced by the two frameworks that I find to be most dominant over their approaches to artistic production: the nineteenth-century studies on tragedy by Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche, and the fin-de-siecle reengagement with the aesthetics of Russian Orthodoxy through mysticism. I argue that the meeting of these influences in the body of translated work belonging to Ivanov, Merezhkovsky, and Annensky represent a series of innovations in modern reception of classical tragedy that are unique to pre-revolutionary Russia, as they are defined by cultural signifiers, such as religious Slavic nationalism, that were systematically made irrelevant to Russian interests after the Bolshevik Revolution. In the context of Silver Age Russia, the ancient tragedies of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides were transformed by Ivanov, Merezhkovsky, and Annensky into manifestos for three unique approaches for the establishment of a Russian mode of tragic reception: Ivanov and Merezhkovsky, both leading theoreticians of Symbolism as a movement, diverge in their perceptions of Russia’s cultural and religious connection to ancient Greece. Annensky, known during his lifetime as a secondary school teacher and administrator, whose philological articles and poetry would be a founding pillar of Acmeism, aimed for his translations to broaden access for students to Greek tragedy and to be a gateway into classical philology that was not mired in mystical religion and the occult, as Merezhkovsky’s and Ivanov’s receptions were. This dissertation analyzes how these translations might be read in the present day, with and without the theoretical scaffolding of their erudite translators.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2026
Citation
Kennison, Olivia,
"On the New Significance of Ancient Tragedy: Translation and Reception of Greek Drama in the Russian Silver Age"
(2026).
Slavic Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:metzugrf/
Relations
Collection:
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Slavic Studies Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Slavic Studies department....