Vyacheslav Ivanov’s Tragedy Prometheus in the Light of Ancient Natural Philosophy (Parmenides, Empedocles, Plato, Plutarch)

The article aims to discover the ancient natural philosophical subtexts of the tragedy Prometheus by Vyacheslav Ivanov. The research material is the text of the tragedy and the author’s preface to it compared with the philosophical teachings of Parmenides, Empedocles, Plato, and Plutarch. The research was based primarily on the sources contained in Ivanov’s personal library. Comparative, hermeneutical, structural-semantic, contextual, and motivic-thematic analysis methods were used in the analysis. Traces of the natural philosophy of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles are evident first of all in the compositional scheme that Ivanov presupposes for his tragedy. Here the playwright uses the mythological symbolism of the four elements, most fully developed by Empedocles. The sequence of elements in Ivanov (fire-water-earth-air), their pairwise symmetry correlate with the opposition “male/female”, the most important for the tragedy, and are associated with the two central characters - Prometheus and Pandora. At the same time, as in Parmenides and Plato, the main symbolic role belongs to fire and earth as symbols of the active masculine and passive feminine principles. Ivanov’s compositional scheme is also connected with the cosmological geometric symbolism of Plato’s Timaeus, where the isosceles triangle is declared the main structural element of the universe and where the element of fire is associated with the pyramidal form. Platonic geometric symbolism defines the triangular (and pyramidal) form of Ivanov’s scheme. This scheme is iconically associated with the symbols of the Dionysian thyrsus and the Prometheus torch. The connection of the Prometheus myth with the Dionysian one becomes even more tangible with the involvement of Plutarch’s treatise On the Е at Delphi, which Ivanov repeatedly quotes. Special attention is paid to the combination of two motifs in Ivanov - the creation of people by Prometheus and the emergence of people as a result of mixing the Titanic and Dionysian principles. The basis for this combination is given in Pausanias’ Description of Greece and is also related to ancient natural philosophy. The research has led to two important results: (1) it explains why Ivanov correlates the theory of the four elements with the Prometheus myth and how this is related to the internal logic of the development of dramatic action; (2) it has also established a literary and philosophical bond that allows Ivanov to connect the motif of Prometheus’ demiurgy with Dionysian-Orphic anthropology.

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