The Nietzschean stratum in Vyacheslav Ivanov’s tragedy Prometheus

Vyacheslav Ivanov’s tragedy Prometheus is full of subtexts, including Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, which was first identified by Valery Bryusov in his review of the tragedy. The association between Prometheus and Nietzschean thought has become a common place in the Ivanov studies, yet no scholarly work has examined it in depth. This paper aims at identifying the points of contact between Ivanov’s Prometheus and Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Promethean myth. The comparative analysis draws on Nietzsche’s philosophical essays and Ivanov’s artistic, philosophical, aesthetic, scholarly, and epistolary writings. The study reveals that Ivanov preserved the core tenets of Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Promethean myth, presented in his treatises The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, The Joyous Science, Beyond Good and Evil: 1) teomachism; 2) creative power of sin and justification of evil; 3) Luciferianism of culture, inseparability of creative and sinful-criminal principles. For Nietzsche, Prometheus is a mythological symbol of the tragic antinomy of existence, generating a titanic desire to overcome the principle of individuation, which is the metaphysical basis of the universe. This struggle ends in the emergence of the Overhuman. Ivanov’s Prometheus also overcomes the titanic principle of individuation, but, unlike Nietzsche, Ivanov shows the affirmation of a divine-human nature, rather than the emergence of the Overhuman. Both Ivanov and Nietzsche place the Promethean myth within the historical and religious clash between Antiquity and Christianity, yet their emphases differ. For Nietzsche, Prometheus is Christ’s antagonist, the true mediator between the divine and human worlds. For Ivanov, Prometheus is an ancient prototype of Christ, who challenges the distortion of the purity of religious truth. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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