Idyllic images and motifs in the lyrics of Valery Bryusov

Abstract

This article examines the idyllic images and motifs in Valery Bryusov’s poetry, the appear ance of which is due to the poet’s creative quest, and the era of the Silver Age itself, which re vived mythological cultural models. The genres of the idyll and bucolic are almost never found in their pure form in Bryusov’s poetry, but various modifications of idyllic-pastoral themes and poetics are consonant in the creative searches of the poet, who revived mythological cultural models. The features of the idyllic genre are found in many of Bryusov’s poems in the image of a shepherd poet (“The Chaldean Shepherd” (1898) and “The Escape of the Shepherd” (1908)), the image of a statue (the goddess Diana in the poem “She hid her face in the thick grass...” (1894)), the description of paintings and the impressions they produced and in the use of elements characteristic of the poetics of idyll: ekphrasis (“Evening Pan” (1914)), the motif of the secret ob server, and the elements of an idyllic landscape. An important milestone in the transformation of the idyllic genre in Bryusov’s work is the cycle “Elegies and Bucolics” (1907), harking back to the tradition of the poet Virgil. The leitmotivs of loneliness, destruction, and death permeating Bryusov’s poems lead to the appearance in his artistic world of the opposition between the an cient world (idyll) – the modern world (anti-idyll), which reflects the crisis attitude of the era. The idyllic tradition in the 20th century becomes a means of highlighting the hopelessness and tragedy of human existence in the new century.