Valery
Bryusov was one of the leading names of Russian poetry at the beginning
of the twentieth century, and he would become especially involved with
Armenia and the Armenians in the 1910s.
The
future poet was born on December 13, 1873, into a merchant’s family in
Moscow. His parents had little to do with his upbringing, and Bryusov
was largely left to himself as a child. He was a voracious reader of
everything that fell into his hands, including the works of Charles
Darwin and Jules Verne, as well as various materialistic and scientific
essays. He received excellent education and studied in two Moscow
gymnasia from 1885-1893. Then he went to Moscow State University from
1893-1899.
Bryusov
was still a university student when he started his literary career in
the early 1890s. He translated poetry by the French Symbolists (Paul
Verlaine, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Stéphane Mallarmé) and Edgar Allan
Poe. He also began publishing his own poems, which were influenced by
the literary movements then in fashion in Europe, Decadentism and
Symbolism.
In
order to give Russian Symbolism a dimension that it still did not have,
Bryusov made recourse to a mystification. Thus, he published three
volumes of his own poetry, entitled
Russian Symbolists: An Anthology
(1894-1895), with different pen names. The trick proved successful and attracted several young poets to the ranks of Symbolism.
Bryusov
became an authority after the appearance of his fourth collection of
poetry (1900). The celebration of sensual pleasures and the mastery of a
wide range of poetic forms characterized his poetry, which he published
in several more collections until 1921. His editorship of
Vesy
(The
Balance), an influential literary magazine, from 1904-1908 consolidated
his position in the Russian literary world. Among his eighty books, he
also had historical novels, short stories, plays, essays, and
translations.
As
a translator, Bryusov was the first to render the works of Belgian poet
Emile Verhaeren into Russian. He also translated works by Victor Hugo,
Jean Racine, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, Johann Goethe, Virgil, and others.
On this basis, in June 1915 the Armenian Committee of Moscow approached
him with a proposal to work on an anthology of Armenian poetry. Bryusov
researched all bibliography available in several European languages,
and fell enamored of Armenian literature. In his superb introduction to
Armenian poetry from the Earliest Times until Our Days
,
published in 1916, he wrote: “While studying Armenia, I found an
inexhaustible source of spiritual and sublime pleasures… As a historian,
as a man of science, I saw in the history of Armenia a whole original
world, whose thousands of interesting, complex questions raised
scholarly interest, and as a poet, as an artist, I saw a similarly
original world in Armenian poetry, a new and yet undiscovered universe,
where high-valued productions of true literary creation glittered and
shone.” He also studied the Armenian language for several months and
wrote a monograph,
The Annals of the Historical Fate of the Armenian People.
In
January 1916, once the preparations for the anthology were basically
finished, Bryusov departed to the Southern Caucasus to get acquainted
with Armenian reality and introduce his work to the public. He sojourned
in Baku, Tiflis, Yerevan, and Etchmiadzin, where he gave very
successful lectures about Armenian history and poetry, and read from
among his more than 170 translations from more than 40 Armenian poets.
Bryusov
would become the first author to introduce Armenian poetry in such a
comprehensive way to the Russian audience. Most of his translations
still keep their freshness a century later. He also wrote a series of
poems dedicated to Armenia, and even planned to prepare an anthology of
Armenian prose from the fifth to the twentieth century. In 1923 he was
named popular artist of Soviet Armenia for his work on the anthology.
In
the 1910s, Bryusov’s reputation gradually declined, as his poetry began
to seem cold and strained to many of his contemporaries. Unlike many
fellow Symbolists, he remained in Russia after the revolution of 1917.
He supported the Soviet government and earned a position in the cultural
ministry of the Soviet Union. He helped draw up the proposal for the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia. He became the head of the Chamber Book of
Moscow, and later of the scientific libraries and the literary section
of the Commissariat (ministry) of Education of Soviet Russia. In 1921 he
founded the Higher Institute of Literature and Art, which was named
after him in 1923, and was its rector. There, he also taught various
subjects: history of Russian and ancient literatures, metrics,
comparative grammar of Indo-European language, and even history of
mathematics. His collections of poetry published after the Soviet
revolution marked him as one of the founders of Soviet literature.
Bryusov
passed away on October 9, 1924, in Moscow. The Yerevan State
Pedagogical Institute of Russian and Foreign Languages (now Linguistic
University), founded in 1935, was named after him in 1962.
