Unravelling the Vsevolod Ivanovs

I've been a long-time fan of the fantastical, slavic-themed paintings of Vsevolod Ivanov. For those who don't know his work, there's a gorgeous five-minute video showcasing some of it here. Some of my fiction has been inspired by them. Hukka, my short story about a pilgrim searching for Zlata Baba - The Golden Woman of the Ugra - came into being after I was suitably dazzled by Ivanov's landscape The Sacred Lake of the Siversky Mountains. In this panorama, a sacred site above a frozen lake, is overtopped by a huge firebird steeple, while in the distance, a walled city nestles under the crags of impossibly spiky mountains. Another of Ivanov's landscapes, The Revelation of the Goddess, has featured as a location in several of my stories of the Seaside People (ie; Pomors).

Very recently, I've discovered the fantastical fiction of Vsevolod Ivanov, and I initially assumed, based on some commonality of theme, that they must be the same person. It quickly became clear, upon closer scrutiny, that they are not.

Vsevolod Borisovich Ivanov (b. 1950), the artist, stems from Belomorsk on the south-western shore of the White Sea. He graduated from the Tver art school in 1978 and is still alive and working.

I have a passing acquaintance with Belomorsk. I spent a night there once, a few years back, before making the crossing, by boat, to Solovki. Whatever the present-day issues challenging every Soviet-era town, the surroundings of Belomorsk are peaceful and the light is ethereal. Prehistoric, animal-form petroglyphs decorate some of the local caves.

Belomorsk is not so far from the magical Onega Bay, where another very fine scientist-turned-artist, St. Petersburg's Anna Mikhaylova, has set several of her surreal, petroglyph-inhabited landscapes. Here's one with swans, the original of which now proudly adorns my living-room wall, thanks to my happening upon an exhibition of hers at Gostiny Dvor, while I was sojourning in Arkhangelsk.

Vsevolod Vyacheslavovich Ivanov (1895 - 1963), the writer, was born in Lebyazhye, in what is now Kazakhstan. He wrote adventure and fantastical stories set in Soviet Central Asia. His first big hit was Armoured Train 14-69 (1922), a tale of derring-do set during the Russian civil war (in which he fought, having earlier run away from home as a teenager, to become a clown in a circus). I first discovered V.V. Ivanov through another of his civil war adventure stories, The Desert of Toub-Koy. Now an English translation of Armoured Train is winging its way to me as I write, courtesy of the nice people at AbeBooks.

V.V. Ivanov was one of the founders of the Serapion Fraternity writing group, in St. Petersburg in 1921. There he was mentored by dissident firebrand Yevgeny Zamyatin, who espoused the doctrine "True literature can be created only by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics."

Zamyatin was a fabulously interesting character in his own right. He had written The Islanders (1918), a satire on the English, while working as a naval architect, constructing icebreakers, on Tyneside. He then returned to Russia, but his famous, anti-Soviet dystopian novel We, was smuggled to the United States, and first published there in 1924. He was exiled by Stalin in 1931, and died in poverty in Paris, six years later.

It's pretty clear that V.V. Ivanov took Zamyatin's doctrine to heart. His fiction is shot-through with the occult lore of the deserts and steppes, whether lurking in the background of his adventure stories, or overtly as in tales like The Copper Lamp, The Opaline Ribbon and his picaresque semi-autobiographical novel The Adventures of a Fakir (1935). A good introductory collection of his work, Fertility, and Other Stories, was published by Northwestern University Press, in 1998.

As a postscript I might mention V.V. Ivanov's son, Vyacheslav Ivanov, an eminent Indo-European philologist, who became a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Program of Indo-European Studies at UCLA. He taught there in the period 1991-2015, and among the courses he offered was one on Russian Science fiction - a summary of which is here.