Vyacheslav Ivanov’s Dionysian-mysterial Plot and his Mystical Anthropology (the Concept of «Thou art»). The First Article

Abstract

The article «Thou art» is the quintessence of Ivanov’s mystical anthropology. The understanding of this text as a palimpsest in which Christian theology, Sophiology, Gnosticism and Anthroposophy coexist established in the research literature. But it remains unclear what is the beginning which integrates such diverse semantic layers. Our purpose is to show that such a common denominator is the Dionysian-mysterial plot – a dialectically constructed narrative that goes back to the orphic myth of Dionysus' tearing. The research material was Ivanov’s poetic, philosophical, scientific and epistolary texts. We used comparative, hermeneutic, structural and semantic methods. In this study, we consider the meaning of the principle «thou art» in Ivanov's works, its genesis and the history of interpretation of Ivanov's mystical anthropology, we define the Dionysian-mysterial plot, describe its structure and analyze the handwritten history of the article «Thou art», which turns out to be directly related to the Dionysian-mysterial plot. The article «Thou art» has a rich history of interpretation, which, however, suffers from two disadvantages: anti-dialectical static nature and discreteness. To understand the principle of «thou art» we compare it with Ivanov' Dionysianmysterial plot. While analyzing the handwritten history of «Thou art», we show how, at the final stage of work on the text of the article, Ivanov adds several paragraphs in which Dionysian-mysterial motifs are concentrated, thereby emphasizing their significance for his mystical anthropology.