Tower in the Symbolism of Valery Bryusov's Poetry

Abstract

The article analyzes the semantics and functional significance of the image of a tower in the symbolism of Valery Bryusov's poetry. A group of poems from the late 1890s – early 1920s was selected, where the existential idea of one's life path as climbing a tower is thematized. Connected by a network of auto-reminiscences, this group of poems forms the core of Bryusov's ‘tower text.’ Besides these, the poet’s ‘tower text’ includes numerous poems where architectural, kinetic, and emotionally expressive signatures of a tower are found as details describing the poet's path. Reintroduced in many variations, with increasing intensity, the vision of a tower runs through all Bryusov's oeuvre. A review of the symbolism of a tower in Russian poetry of the Silver Age demonstrates that Bryusov's case of interpretation of the image was unique. This image is organically connected with the other two major categories of his poetic world – memory and culture. In general, the symbolism of Bryusov's tower goes back to the mythopoetics of the Tower of Babel, but Bryusov resolutely shifts the meaning of this symbol, making it an emblem of his own life path. Among the major poets of the Silver Age, it was only Valery Bryusov for whom a tower became not merely one of the expressive means of the poetic system, but a key symbol of personal identity. Climbing a tower is his destiny and vocation, which the poet accepts with a characteristic mixture of feelings of fatality and pride. The peculiarity of Bryusov's interpretation of the idea of a path was that his path is devoid of internal teleology, it is self-sufficient. In Bryusov's poetry, the path is a pure striving of will, denying any goal as a limitation: ‘In this world of things and appearances / Everything was told to me in a single cry, /‘You must go!’ [V etom mire veshchey i oblichiy /Vse mne skazalos' v yedinstvennom kliche: /«Ty dolzhen idti!»] The figurative plasticity and semantics of a tower most fully expressed this vision of the path.