The Plan for a Soviet Academy in Rome (1924): Viacheslav Ivanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Petr Kogan and Others

In spring of 1924 Viacheslav Ivanov was invited to Moscow to participate in the June celebrations of the 125th anniversary of Aleksandr Pushkin’s birth. The months he spent in the capital reflect an unusually active social schedule. As his address book of the summer of 1924 indicates, he met with a wide range of people: composers and performer, poets and prose writers, theater directors, literary scholars, priests and theologians, art historians and museum curators and others. Many of these people were in one way or another connected to the activity of the State Academy for the Study of the Arts (GAKhN). It was in fact for GAKhN that Ivanov gave a series of well-received lectures. After receiving his passport to travel to Italy on 4 July 1924, Ivanov decided to postpone his departure for an entire month. It would seem that this delay was connected to the need to draw up a project for the creation in Rome of a Soviet State Institute for History, Archeology and Art History. The project was supported by Petr Kogan, the president of GAKhN, and by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the head of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment. The Institute was envisioned as an organization that would serve both researchers and students, following the models of the corresponding academies in Rome — the French Academy, the French School of Archeology, the German Archeological Institute, etc. As Ivanov formulated it in the first plan that he gave to Lunacharsky on 24 August 1924: “The absence of Russia in the arena where cultured peoples are jointly and competitively pursuing scholarly work and cooperating in advanced scholarly colloquy is a kind of voluntary exclusion from contemporary civilization and an indirect affirmation of false rumors about the decline of our culture.