YOUR MISTRESS OR MINE? BRIUSOV, BLOK AND THE BOUNDARIES OF POETIC "PROPRIETY"

Goldberg uses Valerii Briusov's poem, "La belle dame sans merci" (1907, hereafter LBDSM) as one particularly rich test case to begin to examine how Russian Symbolist poets delineated poetic propriety--the bounds between the "shared" and the "owned," between collective and individual creativity--in their verse. LBDSM presents a particularly complex and dynamic negotiation of these boundaries, with Aleksandr Blok functioning as the poet's foil and implicit rival. Detailed analysis of the poem's diction and imagery in the context of Briusov's and Blok's oeuvres and the poets' intersections allows us ultimately to register the subtle argument which is conducted in the poem, the discomfort that Briusov experiences in connection with the increasing attachment of common Symbolist topoi to the poetry of his younger contemporary, and Briusov's strategies for challenging this tendency.