Valery Bryusov in S.M. Soloviev’s Memoirs

For the first time, the article presents a memoir essay about V.Ya. Bryusov, written shortly after the poet’s death by his friend, the symbolist of the younger generation S.M. Solovyov. Their literary and human relations were not simple, which is directly reflected in the essay. In his memoir, Solovyov stops at the mid-1900s, the time of the closest communication between the two poets and Bryusov’s acquisition of wide literary recognition. Telling a number of interesting life stories, the memoirist at the same time tries to show the formation of Bryusov as the head of a new school of Russian poetry and literature, assigning him approximately the same role that A.S. Pushkin had to play a century earlier. Remembering Bryusov in the hustle and bustle of editorial affairs at the journal Libra, the publishing house “Scorpio,” in literary and personal skirmishes and polemics, in the family circle and in tense love collisions, Solovyov does not forget the main thing — that the hero of his essay was, first of all, a poet. The memoirs are published entirely according to the author’s manuscript of S.M. Solovyov, the publication is accompanied by an academic commentary.