Developing poetry into a form of theurgy (“divine work,” from the Greek θεουργία) is perhaps the most heraldically proclaimed yet scantly defined preoccupation of the Russian Symbolist poet Viacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949). The Symbolist movement’s philosophical progenitor, Vladimir Solov’ev (1853-1900), sounded the clarion call for theurgic art in his treatise Crisis of Western Philosophy (1874), however the concept of theurgy dates to late antiquity, when the Neoplatonist philosophers Iamblichus (c. 245–c. 325 CE) and Proclus (412–485 CE) posited theurgic ritual as superior to theological discourse. While it has been established that Ivanov followed Solov’evian paradigms in creating theurgic art, the Neoplatonic context of Ivanov’s engagement with theurgy has remained hitherto unexplored in Slavist scholarship.

This dissertation argues for Neoplatonic theurgy as an active constituent in Ivanov’s poetics and theory of the symbol. Being an accomplished classical historian and philologist as well as a poet and theoretician, Ivanov incorporated both Solov’evian and Neoplatonic theurgic ideas into his highly allusive, richly symbolic, and archaically stylized poetry. Neoplatonism supplied Ivanov with a notion of the symbol as a conduit of divine mysteries, a mythopoetic device, and a functional element of ritual practice. With the aid of theurgically charged symbols, Ivanov sought to construe Dionysus and the Orphic mystery rites associated with him as predecessors to Christ and the Christian sacraments.

Ivanov’s theurgic project is particularly exemplified by “Suspiria,” a poetic cycle which draws symbolic parallels between Orphic and Christian rituals. The epigraph to “Psyche,” a poem contained in the cycle, features a quotation from the Orphic gold tablets (ancient leaves of gold foil bearing hexametrical post-mortem instructions for initiates into Dionysian mystery cults), which Ivanov discusses in theurgic terms in his philological treatise Dionysus and Predionysianism. Cross-referencing Ivanov’s philological and poetic works reveals that his research on ancient theurgy provided material that he re-deployed as theurgic symbols in his poetry. The “Suspiria” cycle’s streamlining of Orphic mystery rites with Christian sacraments is not merely a representation of a historical lineage, but an enactment of theurgic ritual through symbolic poetry.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov subtitled Sadko “an Opera-Bylina,” a gesture which both reveals his compositional approach, and gives the piece a sui generis designation as an operatic and folk-epic hybrid. The composer drew from an extraordinary range of textual and musical material to fashion Sadko, a work that is thoroughly imbued with references to Russian folk culture. His primary source texts were the Russian byliny: folk-epic poetry that had circulated orally for some seven centuries before being collected and transcribed in the nineteenth century. While Rimsky-Korsakov’s preoccupation with folklore represents a thematic continuation of his prior operas, his approach to his source material takes a decidedly antiquarian and philological turn in Sadko.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s transmutation of the byliny into operatic form involved his development of a set of narrative strategies that approximate the storytelling conventions of the source texts. Rimsky-Korsakov includes multiple narrators in the opera who present Sadko’s tale through different narrative frames, chronotopes, and musical idioms. The arias of each narrator constitute moments of heightened narrativity, in which the events of the plot are condensed, refracted, retold, and foretold through the prism of diegetic song. The diegetic passages, though generally critiqued as moments of stasis in the dramatic action of the opera, are in fact the active fulcra of the narrative, foretelling, even generating, its subsequent events as well as offering retrospective viewpoints on prior events from alternate narrative perspectives. The diegetic songs communicate implicit details about the narrators’ respective positions in the social strata, and their underlying alliances with other characters. Sadko not only tells the story of the eponymous hero, but foregrounds the mechanisms, modalities, and multidimensionality of telling itself.