Nelly by V.Ya. Bryusov as a Collective Subject of Women’s Lyric Poetry of the Early Twentieth Century

<jats:p>The purpose of the study is to analyze the collection of V.Ya. Bryusov’s Nelly’s Poems (1913) in the context of women’s poetry of the early twentieth century. Bryusov’s literary mystification has already attracted the attention of researchers, but mainly in terms of the circumstances of its creation, critical reception and biographical facts of his life, reflected in this book. The relevance of this article lies in the fact that the emphasis is placed on the literary context of the era of the 1900s and early 1910s, which seems to be no less important for the emergence of the poems that made up this collection. In particular, the work of Nadezhda Lvova is examined in detail, the dialogue with which in this book seems to be more extensive than previously thought. The novelty of the study lies in the identification of Bryusov’s imitations of actual female lyrics in Nelly’s Poems, as well as significant references to the texts of Natalia Grushko, Cherubina de Gabriak (E. Dmitrieva) and Anna Akhmatova. The poems of the collection are written in different stylistic manners (philosophical, erotic, hedonistic, urban lyrics, classical and ultramodern poetry) and represent a polyphony of lyrical voices. Bryusov created several female heroines within the framework of one book at once: a dreamer, a sexually liberated emancipation, a cheerful townswoman or a woman-child. As a result, it is concluded that author embodied a collective portrait of a female poet at the turn of the 1910s, and Nelly can be considered a collective subject of female lyrics.</jats:p>