Combine roots and stars. A review of the book: Pavlova L.V., Kayanidi L.G. My garden is on a high mountain: the symbolism of plants in Vyacheslav Ivanov's poetry. Smolensk, Svitok Publishers, 2019, 338 pp

This article reviews a monograph devoted to the poetic practice of the symbol in the works of Vyacheslav Ivanov. The development of Ivanov studies and its current state in our country and abroad invariably focuses primarily on the religious and philosophical aspects of Ivanov’s spiritual heritage, putting his theoretical works at the forefront, and examines the theory of symbolism, dionysianism, and the theory of tragedy in detail. Philological research itself is usually devoted to archival research, issues of textual analysis, commentary on texts, and it is of a comparative nature. Against this background, the ignorance about his poetic practice is striking, while the poet emphasized that it was in poetry that he expressed his views most fully. The monograph by L.V. Pavlova and L.G. Kajanidi under review is a part of the large project carried out by these authors over the year - the creation of the Dictionary of Vyacheslav Ivanov’s Symbols. The work is carried out in the main thematic sections (“Gems”, “Flora”, “Fauna”, etc.) and is consistently reflected in monographs, among which the peer-reviewed book on flora is the third one. The research methodology is original: the analysis and description of the semantics of images-symbols are based on the data of 1) the frequency dictionary, 2) the functional thesaurus, 3) the dictionary of figurative paradigms, 4) the original software system “Hypertext search for companion-words in authorial texts”. In general, L.V. Pavlova and L.G. Kayanidi convincingly prove the relevance of the adhesion of flower symbolism with the theme of creativity, religious mysticism and cosmology characteristic of Ivanov’s poetic system and mythopoetic symbolism as a whole. Ivanov’s system of plant symbols goes back to the World Tree. Ivanov’s attitude to trees turns out to be ambivalent: he recognizes their closeness to man, at the same time the relation of man to the tree seems unnatural and antihuman to Ivanov.