New Aeschylus: the myth about Dostoevsky in Vyacheslav Ivanov's philosophical prose

The article attempts to show that the poet and religious philosopher Vyacheslav Ivanov took from Nietzsche the dream of a new Aeschylus, who is able to revive the Dionysian tragedy-mystery. From his forerunner, the Russian writer also borrowed a method of philosophizing based on the creation of cultural and historical myths. With his help, Nietzsche created the image of the “despotic logician” Socrates. According to the same patterns, Ivanov created the myths about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the 1910s. The first writer got the role of Socrates, the second - Aeschylus. However, the author's myth had to be aligned with historical facts. Aeschylus and Dostoevsky worked in different genres, and therefore Ivanov needed the term “novel-tragedy”, designed to smooth out sharp corners. It was more difficult to turn Dostoevsky into a Dionysian artist who breathed new life into the ancient legend of the “suffering god”. But the theoretician of symbolism found in the novel “Demons” the “basic myth” about the “Soul-Earth” waiting for the heavenly Bridegroom. This is nothing more than one of the storylines of Ivanov's myth about the tearing apart of Dionysus. In his book about Dostoevsky, published in 1932, Ivanov revised earlier articles, abandoning “Slavophile” ideas in favor of Catholic humanism. At the same time, the myth of the new Aeschylus was supplemented with interesting details due to the fact that Ivanov found the storyline about the “Soul-Earth” in other Dostoevsky's novels. Mikhail Bakhtin understood well the myth-making, and not the philological nature of Ivanov's concept, as evidenced by his book Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics.