Abstract

Sergei Mikhailovich Soloviev belonged to the younger generation of Russian Symbolists and along with Andrei Bely and Leo Ellis-Kobylinsky created the core of what was to become known as the "Argonaut" group--an informal circle of Moscow visionary poets and mystics. He later became a member of the so-called triumvirate of the Younger Symbolists , which did not last long, but played an important part in Russian cultural history. S. Soloviev emerged for posterity as a rather enigmatic poet--an odd shadow accompanying his "brilliant" contemporaries Bely and Blok. At the same time, his biography often revealed unrealized possibilities in the biographies of other Russian Symbolists: S. Soloviev did what his elder friends were only dreaming or speaking of doing. He attempted suicide and became an Orthodox priest ; he also converted to Catholicism ; and he died in a mental asylum . Within the scope of the present study, his biography and poetry are seen as a set of refractions of various literary "motifs," cultural themes and personal influences , to those which arose in the midst of his fellow Symbolists). Therefore, the suggested approach is essentially subtextual and/or intertextual. This study attempts to add to the concept of intertextuality the necessary historical dimension, while allowing for the ability of a certain intertext to evolve within the confines of a certain period. ;Such intertext is only partially reconstructed here--since it functions within the entire complex of Russian Symbolism , and must be seen as an integral part of the more general and archetypal poetic mythology operational in European modernism of the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries