ABSTRACT

The eminent scions of the Russian literary tradition, so renowned for its "psychological nature," had always suspected psychology of harboring just such an overweening ambition. Dionysus became a key figure in the world of Russian symbolism, just as Oedipus did in Freudian psychoanalysis. Russian modernist texts abound in direct and indirect quotations from Friedrich Nietzsche. The ancient religion of the dying and renascent god was attracting attention and adherents in a host of European cultures. The famous Scottish ethnographer James Frazer made an attempt to analyze religion by the methods of positivist science in which he interpreted all pagan and biblical narratives as derivatives of one and the same source—the cult of Dionysus. Medtner's friend Ivan Ilyin, a philosopher and junior lecturer at Moscow University, was treated around 1912 in Vienna by psychoanalyst Eduard Hitschmann, who was one of the analysts closest to Sigmund Freud.