The article aims to study intertextuality as a metalanguage in Russian Symbolists’ poetry of the 1880s and early 1890s. The novelty
of the topic is in the system analysis of the early works of the Symbolist poets and in the attempt to understand the nature of pre-
Symbolism as a process of semiosis observed in the interpretation and transformation of the language of Russian classical literature.
The object of the study is the early poetry of Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Nikolai Minsky, Valery Bryusov, and Konstantin Balmont. The
principles of сultural-historical, comparative-typological, aesthetic, mythopoetic, intertextualand motif analyses are used. The debatable
points of view established in the study of the early Symbolism history are analyzed. The analysis is based on the idea that pre-
Symbolism is a type of a transitional artistic system and an early stage of the Russian modernism evolution (Z.G. Mintz, A. Hansen-
Löve). The philosophy of art and literary criticism of Vladimir Solovyov, Merezhkovsky, Bryusov, and other poets are studied in the
aspect of new interpretations and new unusual Symbolist meanings of words. Solovyov’s articles show that the system of the philosophical
and aesthetic universals of the 19th-century Russian poetry organically fits into the mythopoetics of Symbolism. The analysis
of the early poems of the Symbolist poets shows that, for pre-Symbolism, it is typical to search for equivalent texts, which are
important for a modernist consciousness. The intertext is various kinds and ways of quotations, allusions, reminiscence, parody, and
also plagiarism and stylisation. The “intertextual field” forms as a metatext for further transformation of the “alien word”. Motifs and
images of classical literature play a major role as elements that form the meaning. They interact with each other, and they new unusual
types of intertextuality The conclusion is made that the Symbolists consider the Russian poetry of the 19th century in aesthetic
and poetological aspects because of the development of the modernism strategies and individual poetic practices. The 19th-century
Russian poetry starts to be perceived as a text-generating mechanism in the 1880s–1890s. The intertextual message of understanding
the “alien” word as “one’s own” is formed. The motifs and images of the Russian classical poetry play an important role; elements of
poetics of the past transform; the principles of the wordplay develop; the principle of multiple interpretations of a word as a symbolic
unit of the text forms: that is why intertextuality in Symbolists’ early works has a metatextual and combinatorial character.