SOURCE: "Preliminary Remarks," in The First Encounter by Andrey Bely, translated by Gerald Janaček, Princeton University Press, 1979, pp. xxiii-xxx.

[Berberova is a Russian-born American educator, author, and critic. In the following excerpt, she discusses the metrical pattern and oral interpretation of Bely's narrative poem The First Encounter.]

Andrey Bely's poem The First Encounter (Pervoe svidanie) is written in iambic tetrameter, the meter used overwhelmingly and successfully, by every Russian poet from Lomonosov through Pushkin, Tyutchev and Blok to Brodsky. The syllabo-tonic line based on the number of syllables and the number of stresses (or accents, beats, ictuses) produced stupendous results probably never expected from a binary meter. This fact has impeded and hampered the advent in Russian of blank verse and vers libre. (I am speaking here and elsewhere of blank verse not in the narrow English sense—unrhymed iambic pentameter—but in the broad sense of unrhymed verse of any meter, as it is understood in Russian and French prosody.) These forms remained underdeveloped. And although since Derzhavin's days (1743-1816) there has been a faint tradition of a more loose, less meter-oriented line (which in Russian is called páuznik), this "license" if used had to be motivated, at least in the first fifty years of its existence (see Derzhavin's "Ode to the Memory of General Bìbikov" and Semyón Bobróv's Preface to his Khersonída where the motivations are so touching and naive as to surpass anything written in the theory of verse). The tradition of vers libre and blank verse started its conscious development only during the great era of Symbolism (1890-1930), and Russian modernist poetry (1910-35).

I do not intend to speak here about the intricacies of the Russian prosody, the possibilities of blank verse and vers libre, about what could have been done, what has not been done, and what should be done. I will not go into discussions about different approaches to the characteristics of binary and ternary meters and the idiosyncrasies of those who argued about them from 1910 to 1926. Pervoe svidanie is written in four-foot iambic, and I will comment on this meter insofar as it pertains to the poem.

With all its built-in problems, the four-foot iambic served Russian poetry for two hundred years. From 1739 (Lomonosov's "Óda na vzyátie Khotiná") to 1930 or perhaps 1939, the iamb was the glory of Russia and the symbol of its vitality. As a sample of an early and brilliant discussion of Russian meter, I will only quote a short paragraph by Viktor Zhirmunsky, and then go on to Bely's poem. Zhirmunsky wrote:

In poetry the rules of rhythm are realized in a uniform alternation of strong and weak syllables united in phonic series which repeat themselves. These rules of alternation are expressed by a definite metric scheme. The actual rhythm of the line deviates from the scheme—here as in all arts conformity never reaches the rigidity of a mathematical law. The basic plan that the metric scheme expresses, the basic movement, or the "impulse" (as O. Brik calls it) is felt in the verse as a whole, no matter how often we encounter the "deviations." First we see in the metrical pattern only the forming of the sound system, the "phonetic" structure which is felt by the rhythmic alternations of the strong and weak syllables. To this however are immediately added other elements in their structural order, elements of language-material. The basic metric impulse grasps all other elements of creative speech by its energy, and gives to the formless chaotic mass its structural unity and essential harmony…. (V. Zhirmunsky, The Structure of Lyrical Poetry, 1921.)

The Russian language requires that each word, no matter how short, have a stress, and only one stress—no matter how long the word. The short Russian words are like other short words in any Indo-European language, and there is not much that should be said about them (at this stage). But the long words are unusually long, and are not, as in English, stigmatized as "unnecessary" or "sophisticated," but are very much "in." They deserve to be given some attention here:

Vývernutye (turned inside out)—stress on first syllable

Dovól'stvovat'sya (to be satisfied)—stress on second

Sootéchestvennik (countryman)—stress on third

Velikolépie (magnificence)—stress on fourth

Slovosochetánie (set expression)—stress on fifth

Kolenopreklonyónny (on one's knees)—stress on sixth

How does one use these words in a binary meter that is obviously intended to accommodate in its line (– ′ – ′ – ′ – ′) four words of two syllables each?

The answer to this is at the core of Russian prosody. The ratio of words of three and more syllables to words of two syllables and less is three to two in the Russian language. Thus, the tremendous part that the pyrrhic (the unstressed binary foot, the "scud" in Nabokov's terminology), i.e. – –, plays in Russian verse. This means that the iambic line (– ′ – ′ – ′ – ′) with its hard ta-túm, reminding one of the marching drill of a military unit, becomes a fiction, and that Russian poems are infested with upbeats (unstressed syllables), which destroy the "regular" iambic line. This "destruction" becomes, indeed, the main rhythmic effect in Bely's poem where the pyrrhic plays the most prominent and striking role, although occasionally a spondee or a trochee comes along. Bely himself (in his "Ópyt análiza chetyryokhstópnogo yámba") wrote extensively and in detail about the impact of the up-beats in Russian poetry. It is one of his major contributions to poetics, a landmark in Russian poetic theory, and was published in his collection of essays Sìmyolizm (1910).

What then would be a reasonable amount of these pyrrhics in a four-foot iambic line? There is no reasonable amount, answered Bely; the principle is: the more the better. The word-stress is the only thing that leads the poet through the tetrametric line, and this is paramount for the rhythm created by him in the frame of the meter. And therefore it becomes obvious that polysyllabic words give the Russian iambic verse not the figure

(and—as an ironic surprise—the line of Selvínsky: – – – – – – – ′, and a joke in Bely's The First Encounter:– ′ – – – ′ – – in line 785). These are the many combinations of up-beats and down-beats in Russian tetrameter.

The results of such a discovery were brutal and came sooner than expected (and in an unanticipated way): Bely started to rewrite his early poems (1902-9) replacing two or three monosyllables with one polysyllable, thus glorifying the binary unstressed foot. Devoted friends begged him not to destroy what was already beautiful. But to no avail.

Although we still cannot accept his later versions, we certainly can sympathize with his anguish: the minor poets that came in the steps of Nekrásov (1821-77), and whom one is tempted to call poetasters, learned the rule of Písarev (the radical critic, 1840-68), whose conviction it was that the less poetry is poetry, and the more easy it can be scanned for practical purposes (marching along or sawing timber), the more useful it becomes for mankind. "Simple" prose should be the aim of all verse. The guru of the sixties and seventies ruined Russian poetry with his demand to write "with a social purpose," "to sing the misery of the people," "to wage war against the government," and get rid of all "superfluous embellishments." The poets of the seventies and eighties became the precursors of those who ninety years later were praised by Khrushchev because "their poems were fit to be sung by the Red Army Chorus."

The word monotony was not used by Bely, but it was implied in his analysis of the Russian tetrameter in the period between 1850-90: the four-foot iambic had possibilities, and Bely saw them clearly and was eager to exploit them. Pushkin, Tyutchev, Fet (the last two extremely unpopular among their contemporaries) and the Symbolists, and others before and after them, tried to create—perhaps unconsciously, so he said—their own patterns of rhythm beyond the rigid rules of the meter. It is time, said Bely, to make deliberate changes in the rhythmic structure of the binary line.

The very beginning lines of The First Encounter have been given the following rhythmic pattern in its tetrametric straitjacket:

where only one line (the second) is a "regular iambic" (25, Bely would have said), and all the others are "deviations."

Very soon a problem arose: what to do with the one- (or sometimes two-) syllable words such as particles, prepositions, negative particles, conjunctions, that did not need any emphasis or stress (except in some special cases)? Could they be read as pyrrhics, i.e. without undue stress to make the line sound even less monotonous? The Russian language is strongly inflected and the endings of declined nouns already give the ear the required meaning. Could such "trifles" as giving here (the English equivalents of Russian words) on, of, and, in, by, re-, up-, etc. be permitted to be "swallowed"? Did not the words that came immediately after indicate their own semantic stand by their grammatical endings?

Yes, they could, said Bely. Slur them in pronouncing them. Give them an up-beat. And what about the possessive pronouns? In Russian they are generally slurred anyway if there are no semantics involved: "I took (my) hat" but "I took my hat (not yours)." The possessive pronoun could become a pyrrhic, too, was the answer. (Nobody objected.) But then it dawned on him that even the personal pronoun was not that important: the Russian language has genders and numbers in verb conjugation, and the endings in the verb forms "I learn, we learn," or "he learns, she learns" are all different. They give the important information of masculine, feminine, singular, and plural. Why push the voice into a downbeat when a slur would be more appropriate, creating a beautiful pyrrhic?

And this was how an ambitious "semi-scud" (Nabokov's later term) joined the crowd of the pyrrhics.

But how was all this poetry really read? How did the Symbolists and the great poets of the nineteenth century read their verse? What was the tradition, if there ever was one? What were the deviations allowed? What were the departures within the limits of law? What role was played by inversions for the sake of an additional up-beat; and how was the syntax strained to make a line sound more exquisite? I will try to answer these questions: I had the privilege of hearing every eminent Russian poet (between 1915 and 1930) read his poetry, everyone with two exceptions: Annensky, who died before my time, and Mandelstam, whom I never met. I heard Blok, Kuzmin, Sologub, Akhmatova in 1915 (I was 13), Bryusov in 1916, Gumilyov in 1921, Bely, Pasternak, Mayakovsky and Tsvetaeva in 1922-24, V. Ivanov in Rome in 1924, Balmont, Zinaida Gippius and Merezhkovsky in Paris in 1926, and of course Khodasevich. Tsvetaeva and the last four poets I heard until 1939….

So what, then, was the tradition, or was there more than one?

There were four traditions for reading poetry in Russian. The first was the nursery-rhyme tradition, a childish scanning in reciting not only children's verse, but any verse, that would sound like a ditty. The half-literate would read with gusto ta-túm, da-dí, da-dá, ta-tám, putting stresses on every iambic foot, including not only particles and prepositions, but also giving long words additional accents, and making every poem sound like eena meena mina mo. This tradition still exists. Every poem read that way produces a comic and offensive effect.

The second is the Stanislavsky Theater tradition. The poetry sounds like prose when pronounced as in a casual monologue about having petty money problems, or an occasional bellyache. Some gestures are added. There is pathos in the voice, a sigh now and then arises if the subject matter is melancholy. It produces a destructive and offensive effect.

The third tradition is the declamatory one. A lament is murmured (or yelled in the manner of Madame Poshlyópkina in Act IV of Gogol's Inspector General). For a solemn statement, the thunderous voice of the Very Important Person from Gogol's "Overcoat" is used. Mayakovsky in 1915 when reading (declaiming) his poems to Maxim Gorky made such a show that the famous writer was frightened, and was preparing himself if not for witnessing hysterics at least for hearing sobs. From the third row in Madison Square Garden one could hear the sound of Mr. Evtushenko's breast-beating during his recital. This produces a bathetic and offensive effect.

The fourth tradition is what Polónsky (1819-98) and Pleshchéev (1825-93) heard from Turgenev about Pushkin's reading. This is unequivocally based not on the sentence, but on the line. The unit is the line, no matter what the punctuation says, and regardless of the enjambement, which would be only slightly hinted at by the voice. And this is where the false pyrrhics start to play their part.

These "omitted" or "slurred" words that gave the Russian tetrameter a license to live on borrowed time and kept the old prosody from dying, vastly enriched the sound texture of the iambic in the first quarter of our century. Gradually, stealthily, an evolution started where even some regular adjectives became neglected by restrained and rhythmic voices. (These adjectives in our contemporary usage are called redundant, and so should they be called here.) If there was a "blue sea" or a "dark night" in a not-too-felicitous line, one would not make it over-conspicuous, one would "swallow" it to give more sound-space to the next word. These are "modest adjectives" in the terminology of O. Brik—but there are never modest participles! If in line 8 it was said that there was a snowstorm raging, why put an accent in line 18 on the white blizzard in the street? Did we all cheat ourselves and our audiences? I do not think so, and what is art without lofty cheating anyway? We tried to create more diversity, feeling unconsciously that the – ′ – ′ – ′ – ′ pattern was coming to an end. And Bely in Pervoe svidanie has amazingly few "regular" lines. As a matter of fact, in reading his verse he used his own vague idiosyncratic melody, as did Gumilyov, Kuzmin, Balmont, and apparently Mandelstam. This melody was used by them only in reading their own poems; other poets were read in another, smoother, more even way. Gippius, Blok, Sologub and Khodasevich did not use any melody. They read in a sober, gentle (and beautiful) tone and never made distinction in reading their own or another poet's verse. Nevertheless, both groups (as with my own generation) belong to one "school" of reciting verse, whose initiator was heard by the young Turgenev, and the tradition of which is barely alive today.

One basic law is clearly perceptible: no phrasal stress ever! Minimum punctuation transmitted by the voice! Use all the deviations that are "allowed," and also all those that are only "tolerated"! Some day a trend will start from this that Russian poetry needs badly: a new prosody where unrhymed lines will flow into the air "like down from the lips of Aeolus," and nonrestricted (free) verse will arise. They both are long overdue.