Valery Bryusov and "The Fiery Angel"

Valery Bryusov was born on 13 December 1873 (1 December according to the old Julian calendar) in Moscow. He lived on Tsvetnoy Boulevard in his own apartment with his wife Ioanna Matveevna and her sister Bronislava Runt. In this apartment famous events were held, where the fate of Moscow modernism, if not all-Russian, was decided. At these meetings was not customary to analyse Brusov’s own poems, it should be considered as commandments. The sense of equality was completely alien to Bryusov, he didn’t like people because had no respect for them. Zinaida Gippius was the only woman he was nice to. 

In the early 1900s, Bryusov was interested in the occultism, spiritualism and black magic. At this period of time he met Nina Petrovskaya. 

In his book "Necropolis", Vladislav Khodasevich accurately defined the atmosphere of the epoch of that time: "Symbolist or decadent, love opened up the most efficient and direct line of access to an inexhaustible warehouse of emotions. All one had to do was be in love and he or she would be furnished with all the objects of primary lyrical importance: Passion, Desperation, Exultation, Madness, Vice, Sin, Hatred... And so everyone was always in love, they at least convinced themselves that they were; if they discovered the tiniest spark of something resembling love, they would fan it with all their might". 

Perhaps Brusov’s love for Petrovskaya was caused precisely by the necessity to «begin to experience». When all the emotions from this passion had been extracted, Bryusov began to write «The Fiery Angel», a book in which he tentatively described their entire history. 

"The Fiery Angel" was the first Brusov’s novel to be published in 1907 in the «Vesi» journal. It is based on the grotesque transformed story of Brusov’s relationship with Nina Petrovskaya and Andrei Bely. The novel served as the basis for Sergei Prokofiev’s opera of the same name. 

Speaker 

Nina Shcherbak is Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology and Cultural Linguistics at St Petersburg University, Master of Arts (the United Kingdom), a writer and screenwriter. She is also a scriptwriter for science television shows, author of fifteen monographs, and books on linguistics, literature, language philosophy, and English literature. 

The lecture will be held as part of the events to mark the 300th anniversary of St Petersburg University, the oldest university in Russia. The meeting will be held online in Russian with simultaneous translation into Spanish.

Registration