Three modes of "transparency" in the poetry of Vyacheslav Ivanov

The method we apply to the examination of the symbolic concept of "transparency" in the poetry of Vyacheslav Ivanov (poems from all of the poet's collections are used as material) can be called phenomenological: starting with "transparency" as the visibility/permeability of physical objects and empirically experienced states of the soul, we move on to "transparency" as a characteristic of the boundary between the material and ideal (in the Platonic sense) dimensions of the world, and from there to "Transparency" that has the quality of subjectivity and acts as a kind of "character" in Ivanov's poetic mythology. In the latter case, we proceed from the understanding of a typically "Ivanov's" symbol as a kind of crystalline prism, in which only one facet is always visible from one point of view, but all the other facets are simultaneously reflected in this facet. Thus, the image of "Transparency", to which the lyrical subject addresses his speech in the poem of the same title, is clearly linked to (or rather "interferes with") other feminine characters in Ivanov's poetry - Earth, Night, Memory, "the soul of twilight", etc., although this "Transparency" remains nothing more than the permeability of the boundary between "realia" and "realiora", elevated to the rank of a mythological subject. In addition, the article shows that even in the case where "transparency" refers to a property of a material object, this property/relationship itself is understood by Ivanov as symbolic, indicating a transcendental plane of reality, signifying the manifestation of the "noumenal" through the "phenomenal" and connected, as Sergei Averintsev noted, by a strictly "systemic" interdependence of individual images. Speaking about "transparency" in the sense of the open-to-view manifestation of the "higher" in the "lower", we assumed that this concept (in particular, through the image of coal, "transformed into a diamond") is quite applicable to the characteristics of art, as Ivanov understands it. Art is a mirror (cf. the poem "You, whose chisel, palette, lyre..."), which, following Yuri Levin, can be called "transparent" because it reflects not the appearance, but the essence of things, allowing the "logos" of the phenomenon to manifest itself through its material form. Since true art, according to Ivanov, is "realistic symbolism", it is "transparent" as if by definition, due to the fact that it operates with symbols, and a symbol is a form "through which reality flows", which has become directly visible. The article, among other things, notes that the logic of the development of the multi-faceted symbol of "transparency" is subordinated to the original principle of Ivanov's symbolism: the movement of "contemplation" from symbol to myth, when any more or less significant image tends to grow from the inanimate to the living, from an objective state to a subjective (although not necessarily personified) one. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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