Hellenism in Historical Imagination of Russian Modernists

Addressing the image of post-classical antiquity in Russian modernism, scholars commonly pay attention to the interest in Gnosticism, hermeticism and Oriental religions characteristic of the turn of the twentieth century. Yet the context in which reflections on the subject arose is not thoroughly investigated. The idea of Hellenism that Russian modernists had originated in German Altertumwissenschaft, namely in the work of J. G. Droysen who coined the term Hellenism in its modern sense. The study I propose aims to demonstrate how the way historians and philologists of the nineteenth century picture Hellenism as the “modernity” of antiquity and transfer contemporary realities to the said epoch allows intellectuals of the 1900s to involve Hellenism in their speculations on modern culture and its problems. Therefore, the research is based chiefly on the analysis of critical and theoretical essays of Vyacheslav Ivanov, Alexander Blok, and Andrey Bely as well as texts produced by the scholars of antiquity in the preceding years.