Briusov and the Healing Art: Northern Nature in “Na granitakh”

Abstract

ST he Northern already freighted with significance in Russian culture, took on new meanings at dawn of Russian modernism. Beginning with Vladimir Solov'ev's Saima poems, which invested lovely Finnish lake with profound metaphysical meaning, modernist poets took further and in new directions themes that had figured in literary tradition for over two centuries and that, in some instances, reached back to beginnings of Russian history. Eighteenth-century poets like Lomonosov and Derzhavin employed Northern imagery to define specificity of Russia.' In early nineteenth century northern landscape, severe and melancholy, became masterfully fixed in Russian poetic imagination in work of Evgeny Baratynsky, while Pushkin's Bronze Horseman rose on mossy, marshy banks from which hitherto only Finnish fisherman, nature's sad stepson, had cast his nets. However, beginning in 1890s new vistas opened, as that setting became place for explorations of heroic myth, history, and personal visions by Symbolists, Acmeists, and others drawn by a sense of the 'otherness' and mystery of North. A notable echo of Solov'ev's Northern poems, though in another key, occurs in Valery Briusov's poetic cycle Na Saime Saima) (Stephanos, 1906), which celebrated his sojourn in Finland with his mistress Nina Petrovskaia in summer of 1905.2 This interlude produced a memorable cycle of love poems against background of Lake Saima.3 Less noticed, but also a significant marker in Briusov's life and career, is another northern cycle, Na granitakh (On Granite Shores). These poems date from a stay in Sweden