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-Love). The philosophy of art and literary criticism of Vladimir Solovyov, Merezhkovsky, Bryusov, and