Following up on Pushkin: Valery Briusov and the Egyptian nights

This is an attempt to compile, as completely as possible, the corpus of Briusov’s reactions to Pushkin’s unfinished works published under the title Egyptian Nights. The corpus includes the writer’s extramarital romance with Nina Petrovskaia as a life-as-art imitation of Cleopatra’s relationship with Mark Antony (and their double suicide); Briusov’s poetry and prose, featuring, in one form or another, Pushkin’s Cleopatra; and, finally, his improvisations at the poetry readings on a number of themes, including Cleopatra. Briusov’s cult of Pushkin is interpreted in terms of «the anxiety of influence», «mimetic desire», and «literary field».