Valerii Briusov: Russian Symbolist

Valerii Briusov Russian Symbolist Daniel C. Gerould Portrait by Vrubel' Mikhail (1906) The most versatile and prolific of the Russian symbolists, the poet Valerii Briusov (1873-1924) became the acknowledged leader of the new movement shortly after the turn of the century. From 1904 to 1909 he edited the major symbolist review, The Scales (Vesy), while at the same time demonstrating his mastery of almost every poetic form and literary genre. By 1906, with the acceptance of symbolism as the dominant voice in Russian artistic circles, Bruisov emerged as an important influence, not only on the development of Russian prosody, but also on the rapidly evolving poetics of the new Russian drama and theatre. As chief theoretician of Russian symbolism, Briusov-following his French models, Verlaine, Mallarme, and Rimbaud--insisted that the author's task is to evoke moods through hints and suggestions rather than to present a total picture by means of precise statement. In his view, symbolism reveals essences, not appearances , and the goal of art is to express the creative personality of the artist, which is inevitably unique, mysterious, and subjective . ."The whole world within me" was one of Briusov's mottoes. Yet at the same time-and unlike the French symbolists, who most often looked backwards nostalgically to a vague medieval past-Briusov believed that art should be contemporary in spirit and that the artist should stand in the vanguard. As an apostle of the new, Briusov urged his fellow writers to live in the future.' 85 "We live in the world of the telegraph, the telephone, the stockexchanges , the theatre, the scientific congress, the world of ocean liners and express trains, but poets continue to use images, which are completely alien to us," he wrote in 1909, rejecting the obsolete poetic conventions of the past and welcoming the futurists because of their commitment to modernity and the machine age.2 Briusov himself was a pioneer in the field of Russian science fiction, writing of interplanetary travel and of the collapse of industrial civilization , stifled by its own technology,' and he also was the first Russian poet of the city, his urban cycle, "The Spirits of Fire," "The Glory of the Crowd," and "The White Horse" (1903-5), opening the way for Mayakovsky. An omnivorous reader, immensely curious about all fields of knowledge, Briusov threw himself into the most diverse projects with characteristic energy. For example, when in 1915 he was asked to edit a selection of Armenian poetry in Russian translation, Briusov-a brilliant linguist who knew most of the European languages as well as Sanskrit-set out to study Armenian, mastered it within a year, and did most of the translations himself. In the light of this constant espousal of new interests and innovations, it is not surprising that the relatively apolitical symbolist poet enthusiastically welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 as opening up unexplored poetic possibilities, wrote admiringly about Lenin, and even promoted proletarian art as the appropriate reflection of contemporary Soviet society. In his attitude towards theatre, Briusov was also a proponent of innovation. He became the theoretician behind the theatrical revolution against naturalism that began around 1900, and he played a crucial role in shaping the new directions taken by the Russian stage in the early twentieth century. Stanislavskii, Meyerhold, and Komissarzhevskaya--the three most influential figures in the Russian theatre of that time-all looked to Briusov for support, guidance, and criticism. A frequent spectator at the Moscow Art Theatre, Briusov felt that Stanislavskii's productions of Hauptmann's Sunken Bell and Lonely Lives (in 1898 and 1900) and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (in 1899), despite their originality and perfection, were misguided in their excessive attention to external realism. The creativity of the actor became submerged at the Moscow Art Theatre, Briusov maintained , in detailed reconstructions of everyday life and painstaking stage effects. Imitation of reality was being substituted for artistic imagination, according to Briusov, who liked to cite Grillparzer's saying that art bears the same relationship to reality as wine to the vineyard. 86 Then, on January 1, 1900, while visiting friends outside Moscow, the poet saw a production of the traditional folk play, Tsar Maximilian , presented by...