Il sonno di Ravenna. Alcune note sull’immagine della città nel simbolismo russo: Vjačeslav Ivanov e Aleksandr Blok

The Russian poets of the early 20th century were drawn to Ravenna due to Dante and its Byzantine heritage. This essay examines two poems dedicated to the city by two Symbolist poets, Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949) and Aleksandr Blok (1881-1921). The journey to Italy is documented in Ivanov's first collection of poetry, Pilot Stars (1902), which bears an epigraph from Dante's Purgatorio XXVII and offers a sort of Dantean reading, particularly in the Ravenna poem, titled La pineta. In Canto XXVIII, Dante evokes Ravenna's pine forest as an image of the "divine forest," in contrast to the “selva oscura”. In Ivanov's sonnet, the "shadow of Dante" flickers in the pine forest through an implicit literary reminiscence, but it is primarily reflected in the poet's attitude, whose gaze goes beyond the mortality and lost vitality sung in Blok’s poem (Ravenna, 1909), where the poet contemplates desolately the different layers of time "by calendar" of human civilizations. Ivanov seeks a sort of way out from sleep and mourning: that faint glimpse of life in the decay of the damp (mother) earth, humble and holy, illuminated by the gold of the mosaics. In conclusion, the poems of Ivanov and Blok offer two distinct perspectives on Ravenna and its Byzantine heritage. In Blok, the terrible dimension of the Eternal Feminine also emerges in the sleep of Ravenna in the "black gaze of the blessed Galla" capable of inflaming the tomb, as well as a similar comparison between eternity and temporality, albeit from the perspective of the incessant dialectic between death and resurgent life, is present in Ivanov's La pineta.