Bryusov invented a crowd of Symbolist poets under pen names to launch a movement
In the mid-1890s Russian Symbolism had theories but almost no poets, so Valery Bryusov wrote three anthologies himself under a string of invented names. The hoax worked: young writers flocked to what looked like a thriving trend, and Bryusov went on to become the movement's recognised authority.
Bryusov was born in Moscow on 13 December 1873 into a merchant family. His parents left him mostly to his own devices, and he read whatever he could find, from Darwin and Jules Verne to materialist essays. After private gymnasium schooling he entered Moscow State University, where in the early 1890s he began translating Verlaine, Mallarmé, Maeterlinck and Poe and publishing verse shaped by European Decadence.
His collection Tertia Vigilia, in 1900, made him an arbiter of taste among fellow Symbolists, and from 1904 he edited the influential magazine Vesy. His mature poems praised sensual pleasure and showed off command of forms as varied as the acrostic and verse shaped into pictures. He also started the modern Russian one-line poem, or monostich, in 1894. By the 1910s, though, many readers found his work cold and forced, and his standing slipped.
In prose he is remembered for historical novels, one set in ancient Rome and The Fiery Angel, about a knight pursuing a woman entangled in the occult in 16th-century Germany, which Prokofiev turned into an opera. He wrote science fiction too, influenced by Poe and H. G. Wells, collected in The Republic of the Southern Cross. As a translator he introduced Russians to Emile Verhaeren and rendered Goethe's Faust and Virgil's Aeneid.
Unlike many Symbolists, he stayed after 1917, joined the Communist Party by 1920 and worked in the Soviet cultural ministry. His translation of the Armenian epic David of Sasun earned him the title People's Poet of Armenia in 1923, and a Yerevan university bears his name. He died on 9 October 1924.
Source: Valery Bryusov
