“In 1904, after their wanderings between Italy, Greece, and the capitals of Western Europe

“In 1904, after their wanderings between Italy, Greece, and the capitals of Western Europe, Viacheslav and Lydia, now married, returned to Russia with their extended family. Having spent a busy literary season in Moscow, the couple settled in St. Petersburg. By October 1905 they had moved to a spacious apartment on the fourth floor of a house above the Tavricheskii Garden, whose corner was built in the shape of a tower. The front rooms of their apartment, where they received their guests, were in the rotunda. Soon, the Wednesday evening symposia at the Ivanovs became famous in St. Petersburg and beyond as “The Tower” (Bashnia), a word that forever joined the locus and the rich inner life it harbored. For seven years the Bashnia rose above the imperial city as the tangible sign, the semeion antilogomenon of the hosts’ quest for transcendence. During the brief span of its existence (1904 to 1912), in the precarious interval between a failed revolution and the gathering storm of the Great War, “The Tower” served as an intimate stage for the spellbinding creativity of the Russian Silver Age. In the inspired presence of Lydia, whom the faithful renamed Diotima, Viacheslav presided over the play of ideas with grace and tact. A brilliant teacher, he had the gift of focusing his complete attention on each and every one of his interlocutors. “The Tower” drew visitors from all spheres of culture, many of them famous, others less. Some attended briefly and several came to stay, notably the poets Kuzmin and Voloshin, the latter with his wife, the painter Margarita Sabashnikova. Periodically, the eclectic and tireless Briusov would arrive from Moscow to initiate another literary project. Lunacharsky, the future commissar, would sit in, to listen and to demur. Andrei Belyi wrote his novel St.Petersburg (1911) at the Bashnia and that same year the Acmeist poet Gumilev brought his young wife Anna Akhmatova to read her early poems.”- SourcePortrait of Vyacheslav Ivanov, c. 1900’s. Photo attributed to Mikhail Zolotarev. -- source link

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