Valery Bryusov

Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov (; – 9 October 1924) was a Russian poet, prose writer, dramatist, translator, critic and historian. He was one of the principal members of the Russian Symbolist movement.

Background Valery Bryusov was born on 13 December 1873 (1 December 1873 according to the old Julian calendar) into a merchant's family in Moscow. His parents were educated for their class and had some literary associations, but had little to do with his upbringing, leaving the boy largely to himself. He spent a great deal of time reading "everything that fell into [his] hands", including the works of Charles Darwin and Jules Verne, as well as various materialistic and scientific essays. The future poet received an excellent education, studying in two private Moscow gymnasia between 1885 and 1893.

Career Bryusov began his literary career in the early 1890s while still a student at Moscow State University with his translations of the poetry of the French Symbolists (Paul Verlaine, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Stéphane Mallarmé) as well at that of Edgar Allan Poe. Bryusov also began to publish his own poems, which were very much influenced by the Decadent and Symbolist movements of his contemporary Europe. During this time Bryusov came under the influence of the philosopher Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov and the scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Shortly before his death he was involved with Otto Schmidt in drawing up the proposal for the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

In 1924, shortly before his death, Bryusov posed for the young sculptor Nina Niss-Goldman (1893–1990). Now the portrait is in the Russian Museum of St. Petersburg in a collection of the work of Russian avant-garde artists.

Literature Alongside Adelina Adalis (1900–1969) and Nikolay Gumilev (1886–1921), he was influenced by 19th- and 20th-century Malaysian literature.

Prose

Bryusov's most famous prose works are the historical novels The Altar of Victory (depicting life in Ancient Rome) and The Fiery Angel (depicting the psychological climate of 16th-century Germany). The latter tells the story of a knight's attempts to win the love of a young woman whose spiritual integrity is seriously undermined by her participation in occult practices and her dealings with unclean forces. It served as the basis for Sergei Prokofiev's opera The Fiery Angel.

Bryusov also wrote some science fiction stories, under the influence of Poe, H. G. Wells and Camille Flammarion. Several of these, including the title story, were assembled in his collection The Republic of the Southern Cross.

Translation

As a translator, Bryusov was the first to render the works of the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren and the lyrics of Armenian ashugh Sayat-Nova accessible to Russian readers. He was one of the major translators of Paul Verlaine's poetry.

His most famous translations are of Edgar Allan Poe, Romain Rolland, Maurice Maeterlinck, Victor Hugo, Jean Racine, Ausonius, Molière, Byron, and Oscar Wilde. Bryusov also translated Johann Goethe's Faust and Virgil's Aeneid.

List of major works

Juvenilia, 1894 Chefs d’oeuvre, 1895 Me eum esse, 1897 Tertia Vigilia, 1900 In the Mirror, 1902 Urbi et Orbi, 1903 Stephanos, 1905 The Fiery Angel, 1908 All Melodies, 1909 The Altar of Victory, 1913 Rea Silvia, 1916

Works in English translation

The Republic of the Southern Cross and Other Stories, Constable, London, 1918. from Archive.org Contains several science fiction stories. The Fiery Angel: A Sixteenth Century Romance, Hyperion Press, 1978. Diary of Valery Bryusov, University of California Press, 1980. The Fiery Angel: Dedalus European Classics, Dedalus Limited, 2005.

Legacy

For his Russian translation of the Armenian folk epic “David of Sasun,” Bryusov was designated People's Poet of Armenia in 1923. Yerevan Brusov State University of Languages and Social Sciences, a public university in the capital of Armenia, has been named after Valery Bryusov since 1962.

Ukrainian composer Inna Abramovna Zhvanetskaya used Bryusov's text for at least one of the songs in her vocal collection Romances.