SOURCE: Drage, C. L. “The Introduction of Russian Syllabo-Tonic Prosody.” The Slavonic and East European Review 54, No. 4 (October 1976): 481-503.

[In following essay, Drage discusses the early history of Russian syllabo-tonic verse, including Trediakovsky's theories, and assesses Trediakovsky's indebtedness to his predecessors.]

Unlike the prosody of Russian folk poetry, which appears to have changed little since early times,¹ the prosody of Russian cultivated poetry has undergone profound changes. This article is concerned chiefly with the replacement of the syllabic prosody of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries by syllabo-tonic prosody in the 1730s, but some knowledge of the earlier prosodies is needed to appreciate the significance of this change. Four periods are covered: from the beginnings to 1664, the year in which Simeon Polotsky, Russia's leading syllabic poet, settled in Moscow; from 1664 to 1735, when V. K. Trediakovsky proposed a syllabo-tonic system in his Novyy i kratkiy sposob k slozheniyu rossiyskikh stikhov (New and Short Aid to the Composition of Russian Verses); from 1735 to 1752, when he produced the second edition of his Sposob (Aid); and from 1752 to the end of the century.

I

Little cultivated poetry is found in Russian literature before the middle of the seventeenth century. The earliest poetry probably consists of a few compositions in Old Church Slavonic of the ninth and tenth centuries.² But the facts that some of these poems appear in the manuscripts as prose, indicating that the copyists did not recognize them as poetry, and that no cultivated poetry appeared in the next five hundred years, suggest that V. N. Peretts was right in saying that ‘these poems were completely forgotten, i.e. their verse form was forgotten’.³ They therefore could have had no influence on the development of cultivated poetry in Russia.

When cultivated poetry began to be written again in Russia towards the end of the sixteenth century, it appeared simultaneously in two forms: one was simply rhymed prose, which is sometimes called pre-syllabic verse; the other was syllabic verse.⁴ An example of pre-syllabic verse is the following, taken from the earliest grammar of Church Slavonic published in L'vov in 1591 and entitled' Aδελφότης (Brotherhood).⁵ It consists of eight lines, written in Church Slavonic, on the arms of the city of L'vov. Its first four lines read:

Znaminii tizоiminitagо кnyzy Lva grad sij mait.
          Igоzi imy pо vsij Ivrоlij rоssijsкij rоd znait.
V mitrоpоlii кiivоgaliцкоj slavnо pribyvait.
          Igоzi vsy окristnay strana оbоgasait.(6)

Even as late as 1672 pre-syllabic prosody predominates in J. G. Gregory's Esfir', ili Artakserksovo deystvo (Esther, or the Play of Artaxerxes), which he first composed in German and then translated into Russian. It also includes some syllabo-tonic verse.⁷

II

Syllabic verse entered Russian from Polish not in general directly but through Ruthenian, the common written language of White Russian and Ukrainian. The fact that Ruthenian syllabic verse appeared first in territories adjoining Poland, namely White Russia and the Ukraine, suggests that it originated in Poland;⁸ and the fact that the prosodic features of the Ruthenian thirteen-syllable syllabic line, its feminine ending, its caesura after the seventh syllable, and its paired rhyme, are identical with those of the Polish thirteen-syllable line, confirms that Ruthenian syllabic prosody was taken from the Polish. From Ruthenian, syllabic prosody passed into Russian, where the thirteen-syllable line, with the same prosodic features as in Polish and Ruthenian, became the commonest syllabic line. That Russian syllabic verse was descended from Polish syllabic verse was the view of Russian poets and scholars in the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century,⁹ although it has been disputed.¹⁰ The pre-syllabic verse which made its appearance simultaneously was probably similarly derived from Ruthenian (and Polish) pre-syllabic verse.¹¹ Alternatively, it might be an imitation of the Ruthenian (and Polish) syllabic line, which went no further than its most obvious feature, its paired rhyme.¹² These lines, written in 1585 by Andrey Rymsha on the arms of Ostafey Volovich, are an example of Ruthenian syllabic prosody:

Stо dvh strhly, stо vruby, stо lilii znacat,
          tо vsi lydi mudryi vilsmi gоrazd bacats.
Kоtоryks, zaцnyj tоt dоm, za girb uzivait.
          vhrs mnh, iz tam gоspоdu, цnоta svоy maits.(13)

The dominance of syllabic prosody in Russian cultivated poetry dates from Simeon Polotsky's coming to Moscow in 1664. Educated first in a monastery at Polotsk and later at the Kievan Religious Academy, Polotsky was an expert versifier and teacher. Syllabic verse was the vehicle he favoured for his religious and educational teachings, and he rapidly created two large collections of syllabic poems written in Church Slavonic with occasional Ruthenianisms. By his early death in 1680 he had trained pupils, among them Sil'vestr Medvedev, to carry on his work. The growing popularity of correct syllabic verse gradually drove pre-syllabic verse out of use, and it was soon to be found only among the lower, less educated classes.¹⁴

Though up to 1735 almost all Russian poets based themselves in varying degrees on the Polish syllabic prosody, the grammars of the time persisted in propounding a different prosody, which was hardly ever used, and which was based on the quantitative prosody of classical Greek poetry.¹⁵ This was the prosody proposed in the Slavonic grammar of Lavrenty Zizany published in Wilno in 1596¹⁶ and in the Grammatiki slavenskiya pravilnoye sintagma (Accurate Treatise of Slavonic Grammar) by Melety Smotritsky (first publication commenced in Wilno in 1618 and completed in Jewie in 1619, republished in Moscow in 1648, and re-edited and republished by Fyodor Polikarpov in Moscow in 1721).¹⁷ By the time of this last edition the futility of proposing the system for Russian verse had been recognized, and so Polikarpov added the following conclusion (zaklyucheniye) to the section ‘O prosodii stikhotvornoy’ (‘On Verse Prosody’), in which it was proposed: ‘What is here set forth in brief on the art of poetry is not so much for use as for knowledge; for even though (on the testimony of many historians) it was highly esteemed by the ancient Greeks and Latins, none the less now, because of its difficulty, it has been almost entirely abandoned by many who have devoted the golden time of their life to the richer fruits of the other more necessary arts. But let him who wishes to learn further of this read the Greeks, Homer and Hesiod, the Latins, Ovid, Virgil, and others, and he can enjoy himself with them to his heart's content.’¹⁸

III

In 1730 Trediakovsky, a former student of the Moscow Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy, returned from a three-years' visit to western Europe, and in 1735 he brought out the first edition of his Novyy i kratkiy sposob k slozheniyu rossiyskikh stikhov. This little book, of only eighty-nine pages, proposed that Russian verse should be based not on the quantity, i.e. length, of syllables, as in Greek and Latin quantitative prosody, nor on the number of syllables, as in Polish syllabic prosody, but on word stress, or in fact on a combination of this with the number of syllables, that is, on syllabo-tonic prosody. The proposal was successful, because at last it gave Russian with its strong word stress a prosodic system which suited it: previous systems had left word stress entirely or mostly out of account. This system has been used by almost all Russian poets since then.

Though Trediakovsky was far from the first to write syllabo-tonic verse in Russian,¹⁹ he was certainly the first to promulgate its basis, word stress, in print, and Russian syllabo-tonic verse began to appear in quantity only after 1735, though it is true that this quantity remained small till the early 1740s. But granted Trediakovsky's priority as the deviser and propagandist of the syllabo-tonic system, how far can it be regarded as his independent work and, in particular, how far is the Sposob original?

In the introduction to the Sposob Trediakovsky refers mockingly to Smotritsky's quantitative system under the name of the Maksimovskaya prosodiya (Maksim's prosody),²⁰ rightly rejecting it as unsuitable for Russian. On the other hand, the structure and content of the Sposob have much in common with those of the section ‘O prosodii stikhotvornoy’ in Polikarpov's edition of Smotritsky's grammar. Both Trediakovsky and the grammar start with definitions of the line (stikh), the syllable (slog), and the foot (stopa in Trediakovsky, noga in the grammar). Both gloss technical terms of versification by terms from other languages, Trediakovsky by terms from Latin and French, and the grammar by terms from Greek and once also by a term from Latin. Trediakovsky gives the same four disyllabic feet as the grammar, viz. the spondee (– –), the pyrrhic (˘ ˘), the trochee (– ˘), and the iamb (˘ –), and gives them in the same order, though he passes over the eight ternary feet given by the grammar. Trediakovsky applies his new rules only to two lines, the ‘Russian heroic line’, a ‘hexameter’ of thirteen syllables (actually a heptameter), and a ‘pentameter’ of eleven syllables (actually a hexameter), which are the first two lines of the seven described in the grammar, where they are termed ‘hexameter’ or the ‘heroic line’ (iroyskiy stikh) and ‘pentameter’ or the ‘elegiac line’ (elegiyskiy stikh).²¹ Of the first of these lines Trediakovsky writes: ‘That line is perfect (sovershen) in all its numbers and better, which consists only of trochees or in the greater part of them; whereas that is very bad, which is entirely composed of iambs or in the greater part of them’.²² This passage has a marked resemblance to the description in the grammar of the iambic hexameter: ‘It consists of six feet … Being pure (chist) and perfect (sovershen), it takes the very iamb in all its feet (vo vsekh stepenekh) … but being imperfect and impure, in every foot it takes an iamb or a spondee, except the sixth foot which takes only an iamb’.²³ Of all the lines of from nine to four syllables inclusive Trediakovsky says that they have ‘nothing poetic (stikhovnogo) in them except syllables and rhyme’:²⁴ in particular, they do not need feet because owing to their shortness they have no caesura, and feet are only needed to make a caesura clearer.²⁵ The grammar in fact also describes no lines shorter than ten syllables or thereabouts.²⁶

Beside these resemblances of structure and content there are others which suggest that Trediakovsky was under the influence of quantitative concepts, although he is not known to have composed any quantitative verse in Russian. Thus, though he recommends the trochee in the Sposob of 1735, he does not decisively exclude any of the other three binary feet, which are permitted to replace it, though with lesser or greater harm to the line.²⁷ This tolerance of substitutions of one foot for another is based on the idea of their equivalence, a concept fundamental to quantitative prosodic systems but foreign to syllabo-tonic ones. Another example of Trediakovsky's adherence to a quantitative concept (and also to a syllabic one correctly carried over into the new syllabo-tonic prosody) is his rejection of ternary metres, in particular of the dactyl, on the ground that if spondees are substituted for dactyls the lines will vary in syllabic length.²⁸

Trediakovsky's indebtedness to a contemporary school textbook, such as was Polikarpov's edition of Smotritsky's grammar, would have been so obvious to his readers as to require no admission by him, nor any comment from his critics;²⁹ but his frequent use of French terms was remarked on, and the Sposob was attacked for being largely based on French prosody.³⁰ It is worth considering how far this criticism was justified.

Firstly, as already noticed, French equivalents are given for almost all the technical terms used in the Sposob, and several technical terms have French equivalents but no Latin ones, e.g. perenos ‘enjambement’;³¹rifma nepreryunaya and rifma smeshennaya ‘rime suivie’ and ‘rime mêlée’,³² which suggests that they were taken from French prosody alone. Some of the rules also appear to be of French origin. For example, Trediakovsky's rejection of enjambement, that is the failure to complete the sense of a couplet with its last word, is apparently based on Boileau's rejection of it in his Art poétique:

Les stances avec grâce apprirent à tomber,
Et le vers sur le vers n'osa plus enjamber.(33)

Similarly, Trediakovsky's elaborate rules for the correct observance of the caesura,³⁴ not simply as a word-division but as a pause in which to take a breath, recall Boileau's lines:

Que toujours dans vos vers le sens coupant les mots
Suspende l'hémistiche, en marque le repos.(35)

The concept of cadence³⁶ in the sense of a rough adherence to one particular metrical foot, entirely foreign to both classical Greek and Latin versification, is also taken from Boileau, who wrote:

Ayez pour la cadence une oreille sévère:(37)

and:

Enfin Malherbe vint, et, le premier en France,
Fit sentir dans les vers une juste cadence,(38)

Secondly, the long concluding section of the Sposob, in which Trediakovsky characterizes the various poetic genres and illustrates them with his own compositions or translations, is also largely based on Boileau. It is true that he takes only the shorter genres and excludes, for example, the verse drama and the epic, which are dealt with in the Art poétique, III, but in this way his section comes to correspond closely in content to the Art poétique, II, although the correspondence is not complete. Trediakovsky deals with the sonnet, the rondeau, the verse epistle, the elegy, the ode, the song, the madrigal, and the epigram, in that order; Boileau in the Art poétique, II, takes the genres in the order: the idyll, the elegy, the ode, the sonnet, the epigram, the rondeau, the ballade, the madrigal, the satire, and the vaudeville (understood in the sense of a short lively song usually in couplets and with a refrain). If Trediakovsky's song is regarded as corresponding to Boileau's vaudeville, then Trediakovsky contains only one genre not in Boileau, namely the verse epistle, whose inclusion might have been suggested to him by the genre which follows it, the elegy, with which it has associations. On the other hand, Boileau contains three genres not treated by Trediakovsky: the idyll, the ballade, and the satire. The fable and didactic poetry are absent from both lists. In both lists the ode follows the elegy; otherwise the order of the genres is different.³⁹ In his description of the sonnet Trediakovsky actually refers to Boileau's treatment of it in the Art poétique, and alludes to the phrase ‘heureux phénix’ (II, line 96) and borrows much material from it.⁴⁰ His description of the madrigal⁴¹ is also close to Boileau's.⁴²

Thirdly, French poetry and French poets are continually referred to throughout the Sposob, for example: ‘The French are very skilful at reading verses, but people say that the Persians, Arabs, and Turks are not inferior to them in this. O that this could become a habit of ours! Then indeed would we learn the true sweetness of verse’.⁴³ In Definition (Opredeleniye) VI, which deals with rhyme, Trediakovsky describes French poetry as being ‘completely the same as ours, except for certain substantial deviations’,⁴⁴ a statement which seems to conflict with his later denial that French versification has any resemblance to his except in caesura and rhyme.⁴⁵

Trediakovsky's indebtedness both to Polikarpov's edition of Smotritsky's grammar and to Boileau seems plain, but this does not explain where the kernel of his reform, the syllabo-tonic principle, came from.

Trediakovsky himself asserts that he took the ‘very substance’ (samoye delo) of his new versification from ‘our native, most ancient poetry of the ordinary people’,⁴⁶ but if by that he meant that he took the syllabo-tonic principle from the prosodic systems of the old Russian byliny or the Russian folk songs, this can hardly be true, because, whatever these systems are and they have still not been fully determined, they are not syllabo-tonic.⁴⁷ However, if by this statement he meant that he took from them the tonic principle, i.e. the idea that word stress should be an element in the new prosodic system, he would still have had to originate or take from elsewhere the idea that word stresses should recur at regular intervals in the line.⁴⁸ An argument in favour of Trediakovsky's assertion is that individual lines in the old Russian byliny and the Russian folk songs often sound roughly trochaic, and this might be an explanation of his preference for the trochee.⁴⁹

According to a second explanation syllabic lines over the years of their use were tending to become trochaic; Trediakovsky apprehended this process, sometimes called tonicization, and took it to completion.⁵⁰ Tonicization, probably an inevitable development in a syllabic prosody introduced into a language with a strong dynamic stress, is likely to have taken place in Russian syllabic verse.⁵¹ In favour of this view is the fact that the metre which spontaneously developed was the very one which Trediakovsky put forward, namely the trochee. The constant citing in the Sposob of Prince A. D. Kantemir, the foremost contemporary Russian syllabic poet, Trediakovsky's criticism of syllabic lines as a kind of prose as the starting-point of his reform, and his rewriting of the first line of Kantemir's Satira I as his often repeated example of the new prosody, lend strength to it. Against it is the fact that it does not explain why Trediakovsky found it necessary to speak of the other three binary feet at all, even if only to disparage them, nor why he felt that he had to deal with the ‘pentameter’ beside the ‘hexameter’, nor why he felt that he could omit all the shorter lines as having ‘nothing poetic in them’.

According to a third explanation Trediakovsky may have become acquainted with Russian verse written according to syllabo-tonic prosody by J. G. Gregory, who wrote Esfir', ili Artakserksovo deystvo, J. E. Glück (1652-1705) and J. W. Paus (1670-1735), both Lutherans who had immigrated to Russia, W. Mons (1688-1724), a German born in Russia, or the Swede J. G. Sparwenfeld (1655-1727), and decided to imitate it.⁵² Paus in fact worked as a translator at the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences, where Trediakovsky went to work, also as a translator, after his return from France in 1730. On Paus's death, probably early in 1735, all his papers, including his manuscripts of original syllabo-tonic poems in Russian, passed into the possession of the Academy, of which in 1733 Trediakovsky had been made a secretary.⁵³ It is highly probable that Trediakovsky saw these poems, and it may be significant that the Sposob was published in the same year as they came into the Academy's possession. Against this explanation are the following facts: firstly, there seems to be no actual proof that Trediakovsky saw any Russian syllabo-tonic poems by any of these five writers; and secondly, since these poems, especially those of Glück and Paus, are exceptionally diverse in metre and line-length, it is hard to understand why, if Trediakovsky was following their example, he should have restricted himself to one metre, at least preferentially, and to two line-lengths.⁵⁴

A fourth possibility is that Trediakovsky may have known and been influenced by the neo-Latin rhythmic poetry which was then being composed in Kievan and Muscovite schools.⁵⁵ In favour of this is the fact that these poems demonstrate the tonic interpretation of classical metres which is a cardinal element in the Sposob. Against it is the fact that there again appears to be no evidence that Trediakovsky saw these poems; the examples are only of alcaics and sapphics, whereas Trediakovsky's first lines were ‘hexameters’ and ‘pentameters’. Further, the poems in the Sposob show little influence of Latin verse: none of them, for example, is written in elegiac couplets. Trediakovsky does not appear to have realized that the pentameter which Polikarpov's edition of Smotritsky's grammar gives directly after the hexameter was not intended to stand as an independent line but to be combined with the hexameter to form an elegiac couplet.

A fifth explanation was implied by Trediakovsky himself in 1755 in his article ‘O drevnem, srednem i novom stikhotvorenii rossiyskom’ (‘On the Ancient, Middle, and New Russian Versification’).⁵⁶ According to it a Dalmatian book, then in his possession but since destroyed in a fire, gave him the idea of composing in trochees (rather than in other metres) and by implication therefore in syllabo-tonic prosody. The metre which Trediakovsky says was used in this book was the trochaic tetrameter, and again the fact that his first syllabo-tonic lines were not tetrameters but ‘hexameters’ and ‘pentameters’ suggests that this book could not have been the sole cause of the reform, although it might possibly have been a contributory one.

According to a sixth explanation Trediakovsky learnt the principles of German syllabo-tonic prosody from his German colleagues at the Academy of Sciences. Throughout Anne's reign the prose and verse writings of the staff of the Academy were often published in Russian and German, the two versions facing each other. Sometimes the Russian was the original, at other times the German. Thus Trediakovsky's Oda torzhestvennaya o sdache goroda Gdanska (Solemn Ode on the Surrender of the City of Danzig), which he composed in nine-syllable syllabics after the news of Danzig's capture by Russian troops had reached St Petersburg on 3 July 1734, was provided with a translation into German verse by G. F. Junker, a German academician at the Academy of Sciences. The friendliness with which Trediakovsky refers to Junker in the ‘Rassuzhdeniye ob ode voobshche’ (‘Discourse on the Ode in general’), which accompanied the ode, is marked: ‘The most highly skilled of the lyric poets of the German people, that is, Mr Junker, public professor at the St Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences, was kind enough to translate the ode which I have composed into German … I do not doubt that the German translation is in every way more beautiful and imposing than my original composition, knowing as I do Mr Junker's skill from five or six of his odes.’⁵⁷ Again, the sixteen lines which Trediakovsky wrote to congratulate Baron J. A. von Korff on his appointment as President of the Academy of Sciences, of which the Academy was informed on 28 September 1734, were published with a translation into German trochaic octameters en face and were themselves in syllabo-tonic trochaic heptameters, the metre which he was to recommend in his Sposob in the following year.⁵⁸ Conversely, probably at the close of 1734, Trediakovsky translated four lines of German trochaic octameters written for the New Year celebrations of 1735 into Russian trochaic heptameters; and probably a few weeks later he rendered eight lines of German iambic hexameters into eight lines of Russian trochaic heptameters to mark the birthday of the Empress on 28 January 1735.⁵⁹

Trediakovsky's knowledge of German poetry at this time extended to more than Junker's odes. In Epistola ot rossiyskiya poezii k Apollinu (Epistle from Russian Poetry to Apollo) in the Sposob he gave no fewer than twenty-two lines to German poetry, including brief characterizations of ten leading German poets besides Junker. The reference to Junker with which the section opens is noticeably warm: no doubt it was he who had guided Trediakovsky in this new field and in particular had pointed out to him the ‘correctness’ of German syllabo-tonic poetry.

Pravilsnо girmansкa uz tоls sluk uslazdait,
Ctо оstr Ynкir slavnu mzdu iy pоlucait:
Ynкir, коtоrоgо v cists y zdiss nazyvay,
Ynкir, коtоrоmu, ij, vsyкik dоbr zilay.(60)

The section concludes with four lines in praise of M. Opitz (1597-1639), the founder of German syllabo-tonic prosody in the early seventeenth century. It is even possible that Trediakovsky saw himself as the Russian Optiz. If he did, it might explain why in the Sposob he should have proposed binary metres only: Opitz had recommended only iambic and trochaic syllabo-tonic metres and rejected ternary metres.⁶¹

Nоvu v Ópiцi mоy vsi sistru priznali,
Obnоvitilim tоy nazyvats vsi stali;
Ópiцu, pridav stikоv imy оtцa, pirvu,
Ctо v nik strоin tоt i kitr vоlsnu criz Minirvu.(62)

In this complex matter certainty is probably not attainable, but the following might be considered as a hypothesis. The tonic concept was almost certainly taken from German syllabo-tonic poetry, with which Trediakovsky had become familiar in the Academy of Sciences: this is more likely than that he took it from Russian folk poetry, with which he shows few signs of acquaintance.⁶³ His decision to conceal his indebtedness to German prosody is easy to understand in view of the resentment against German domination at court, in the Academy of Sciences, and in the national life generally at this time. The tonic concept was then applied to the binary metres of classical quantitative prosody, whose long and short syllables were re-interpreted in terms of the presence and absence of stress. Had the German syllabo-tonic concept been taken over directly, there would have been no call to mention the possibility of substitutions of one foot for another, for these are no regular part of a syllabo-tonic prosody (except in the sense of omissions of stress) and if they occur at all do so exceedingly rarely. Ternary metres, which are described in Polikarpov's edition of Smotritsky's grammar and in such a contemporary piitika as the Liber de Arte Poetica,⁶⁴ were excluded for the reason already given, or possibly because they were not accepted by the French versifiers, or because they had not been recognized by the founder of German syllabo-tonic prosody, Opitz. The thirteen-syllable syllabic line was chosen in preference to the shorter lines used by the contemporary German poets firstly because it corresponded closely to the ‘hexameter’ or the ‘heroic line’ put in first place as the line of the classical epics by the grammar;⁶⁵ secondly, because it was the commonest Russian syllabic line used most, for example, by Simeon Polotsky and Kantemir;⁶⁶ and thirdly, because it was close in length and structure to the French alexandrine, the line of the French verse epistles, satires, and epics.

Trediakovsky's reason for preferring the trochee was probably that the dactyl, of which the heroic line was composed, had to be rejected because, through the substitution of one long for two shorts, it allowed the possibility of a reduction in the line's syllabic length, unacceptable both in syllabic and syllabo-tonic prosody; it had therefore to be replaced by the metre closest to it which should not be susceptible to alteration in length through substitution; and this metre (in Latin, but not in classical Greek, prosody) was the trochee. This would explain Trediakovsky's advocacy of the trochee as the nobler of the binary feet, its nobility not being inherent but based on its relationship to the dactyl, whose nobility in turn rested on its having been the metre of the classical epics.

Is Trediakovsky correctly described as the founder of Russian syllabo-tonic prosody? The curious mixture of quantitative, tonic, syllabic, and syllabo-tonic elements which makes up the Sposob suggests that he is not, and in fact he does not actually claim this. What he does claim, and rightly, is that he was the discoverer of Russian tonic prosody,⁶⁷ but because he applied the principle to quantitative feet identified in syllabic lines, the lines which resulted were syllabo-tonic. The Sposob is therefore a highly confused document in which, however, syllabo-tonic prosody is implicit.

Though tentative and syncretistic almost to the point of self-contradiction, the Sposob of 1735 had more far-reaching results in the history of Russian prosody than any other such Russian work but, because of its defects, these results were slow to come, and for the next few years Russian poets, among them Trediakovsky himself, continued to write syllabic verse.⁶⁸ However, some did follow the prescriptions of the Sposob: thus A. P. Sumarokov's first ode (1739) used Trediakovsky's syllabo-tonic ‘pentameter’ (actually a trochaic hexameter) and his second ode (1739) Trediakovsky's ‘hexameter’ (actually a trochaic heptameter).⁶⁹

M. V. Lomonosov, like Trediakovsky a former pupil of the Moscow Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy, had taken a copy of the Sposob with him when in 1736 he was sent to Germany to study by the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences;⁷⁰ and in 1739, from Freiberg, he sent back to St Petersburg, as part of the evidence he was required to render of his academic progress, an ode in Russian on the recent capture of Khotin from the Turks and the ‘Pis'mo o pravilakh rossiyskogo stikhotvorstva’ (‘Letter on the Rules of Russian Versification’).⁷¹ This letter, which was addressed to the grandly named ‘Russian Assembly’, actually a bi-weekly seminar of a few translators working at the Academy of Sciences, proposed that feet (stopy) should be used not only in thirteen- and eleven-syllable lines but in all the shorter lines; that the iamb, the anapaest, and the dactyl, mixed iambs and anapaests, and mixed trochees and dactyls, should be accepted as metres in Russian prosody beside the trochee; that lines should be able to have masculine and dactylic, beside feminine, endings; and that lines with different endings could be combined in a single poem, and made to rhyme alternately as well as in pairs. With certain corrections these are the principles on which Russian syllabo-tonic prosody has been based to this day.

Unlike the Sposob, patently, as Trediakovsky himself claimed, the product of deep study and reflection, and substantially original, Lomonosov's ‘Pis'mo’ is slight and derivative. Apart from replies to points made in the Sposob, it is little more than a summary of certain themes from some contemporary German works on prosody: J. C. Gottsched's Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst für die Deutschen (1st ed., 1730; 2nd ed., 1737), articles by Gottsched in his Beyträge zur critischen Historie der deutschen Sprache, Poesie und Beredsamkeit, in particular a critique (1733) of J. L. Prasch's Gründliche Anzeige von Fürtrefflichkeit und Verbesserung deutscher Poesie, and J. Hübner's Poetisches Handbuch (1st ed., 1731; new ed., 1734).⁷² Lomonosov purchased the last book (in the 1734 edition) in Marburg in 1738.⁷³ In places his ‘Pis'mo’ is a word for word translation from these works.

The first two principles (osnovaniya) which he put forward, namely that Russian verse should be composed according to the inherent nature of the language and that the elements in which Russian is rich should be the basis of its prosody, could have been suggested by remarks in Gottsched's articles in the Beyträge and by a tenet of Prasch quoted by Gottsched, respectively.⁷⁴

The third principle says significantly that ‘as our versification is only beginning … we have to take care whom it is better to follow and in what’: the possibility that the system should be original is not raised. The terms of the ‘first rule’, that stressed syllables are long whereas others are short, are close to the first rule in Hübner's Handbuch and some sentences in Gottsched's Dichtkunst.⁷⁵ His ‘second rule’ is almost translated from Gottsched's Dichtkunst. Urging the use of the feet employed by the Ancients, Gottsched wrote: ‘Since our language, thanks to the length and shortness of its syllables, is capable, through this so varied harmony, of drawing ever closer to the charm of the learned languages, I do not see why we should restrict our poets to the types of verse which have been familiar up till now and why we should not rather urge them to innovations’.⁷⁶ Following his German guides and apparently unaware of the fundamental difference between the classical Greek and Latin prosodies on the one hand and German prosody on the other, Lomonosov wrote: ‘In the treasury of our language we have an inexhaustible wealth of long and short words, so that we can freely introduce disyllabic and trisyllabic feet into our verses and in this follow the Greeks, the Romans, the Germans, and other peoples, whose practice in versification is correct. I do not know what other reason there might be for so limiting our hexameters and all the other verses … so that they should have neither more nor less than a certain number of syllables.’⁷⁷ Gottsched (Dichtkunst) criticizes the French poets for not realizing that they used feet in their verse and for insisting therefore on the presence of rhyme, and he cites the first line of Boileau's Ode sur la prise de Namur, which he regards as a trochaic tetrameter. Lomonosov, in rejecting the possibility of following French versification, asks how one can follow a versification which even those who use it do not properly understand, and he then makes the same erroneous point made by Gottsched and quotes from the same stanza by Boileau.⁷⁸ Lomonosov's characterization of pure iambic lines as ‘rising quietly upwards’ is based on Hübner's sentence: ‘The iambic lines accordingly as it were mount on high.’⁷⁹ His description of lines composed of trochees and dactyls mixed as being ‘very suitable for the depiction of strong and weak emotions (affektov)’ derives from the remark of Gottsched (Dichtkunst) on dactyls that ‘they sound in themselves very cheerful and jumping and are therefore very suitable for variety in cantatas and other musical pieces, particularly if one has to express certain strong emotions (Affecten)’.⁸⁰ The concept that trochees and dactyls fall is also found in Hübner: ‘The trochaic lines, as it were, fall downwards … The dactylic lines, as it were, run hopping along and are very suitable for music.’⁸¹ Lomonosov's defence of masculine rhymes in the ‘third rule’ is close to that of Prasch as quoted by Gottsched.⁸² In the ‘fourth rule’, which allows the alternation of masculine, feminine, and dactylic rhymes in the same poem, Lomonosov as good as translates Gottsched (Dichtkunst), who writes: ‘Rhymes of two kinds are in fashion with us Germans just as with the French, namely the monosyllabic or masculine rhymes, and the disyllabic feminine ones. We mix these with one another in manifold ways … And such an alternation again provides a sort of delight for the ears.’ Lomonosov writes: ‘Russian lines can be combined as appropriately, beautifully, and naturally as German lines. Since we can have masculine, feminine, and dactylic rhymes, so the alternation which always delights the senses of man bids us mix them suitably one with the other, as I have done in almost all my lines’.⁸³ He was to make a rather similar use of foreign sources five years later in composing his Kratkoye rukovodstvo k ritorike (Short Guide to Rhetoric)⁸⁴ and nineteen years later when writing his essay ‘O pol'ze knig tserkovnykh v rossiyskom yazyke’ (‘On the Use of the Church Books in the Russian Language’).⁸⁵

Lomonosov's indebtedness to German prosodists was frequently commented on and criticized in his own time and into the nineteenth century; and it has been repeatedly remarked upon in recent times.⁸⁶ Some Soviet scholars have tried to minimize it by stressing the degree to which Lomonosov adapted German syllabo-tonic prosody to the nature of Russian;⁸⁷ but in fact he did not make the alterations, both additions and omissions, which would have been necessary to adapt the German prosody to Russian successfully.

Firstly, since the average length of Russian words is rather greater than that of German and since, unlike German, Russian words with rare exceptions can have only one stress per word, it is more difficult to compose pure iambic or pure trochaic lines in Russian than in German. The result is that in Russian it is necessary to omit some of the stresses required by the metrical schemes of the binary metres; such omissions of stresses were described by Russian poets at this time in the terminology of quantitative prosody as replacements of iambs and trochees by pyrrhics. But Gottsched (Beyträge, II) had written: ‘Innumerable verses can be found among the Ancients in which all six feet are pure iambs, and this makes them only the more flowing.’⁸⁸ Hence, failing to appreciate the difference between the two languages, Lomonosov recommended ‘pure iambic lines, although they are rather difficult to compose’ and termed lines in which a pyrrhic could replace an iamb or a trochee as ‘incorrect and free’.⁸⁹

Secondly, Lomonosov omitted to introduce the amphibrach, which, though infrequently used, is one of the five regular metres of Russian syllabo-tonic prosody. The metre is mentioned in Alvarus's Prosodia⁹⁰ and in Polikarpov's edition of Smotritsky's grammar.⁹¹ Though confused with another term, it is clearly referred to in the Liber de Arte Poetica.⁹² But it is not referred to in Trediakovsky's Sposob of 1735,⁹³ nor is it recommended in all Lomonosov's German sources: hence probably Lomonosov's failure to mention it. Trediakovsky did not introduce it even in his Sposob of 1752, but Sumarokov included it in his article ‘O stoposlozhenii’ (On Versification) and also gave examples of it.⁹⁴ The oldest Russian syllabo-tonic poem in amphibrachs may be the one composed by Paus on the betrothal of the tsarevich Aleksey.⁹⁵ Derzhavin is said to have composed nine poems in amphibrachs,⁹⁶ and Vostokov mentions the amphibrach as having been used by Merzlyakov.⁹⁷

Thirdly, again following his German sources uncritically, Lomonosov advocated the mixed metres of dactyls and trochees and of anapaests and iambs. Dactyls had been re-introduced into German prosody by A. Buchner (1591-1661) first in his own poetry, for example in his opera Orpheus (1638), and then in his theoretical work Anleitung zur deutschen Poeterey,⁹⁸ which also recommended anapaests; and soon dactylo-trochees and anapaesto-iambs appeared. With the exception of the dactylo-trochees⁹⁹ in Trediakovsky's Tilemakhida these metres were barely used in eighteenth-century Russian poetry, and their introduction by Lomonosov was hardly a success.

Lomonosov's ‘Pis'mo’, disregarding the quantitative, syllabic, and embryonically tonic concepts present in the Sposob of 1735, based Russian verse prosody firmly on contemporary German syllabo-tonic prosody as it was known to him from German manuals. The adaptations which Lomonosov omitted to make in 1739 were brought about over the next decade partly as a result of theoretical discussion between himself, Trediakovsky, and Sumarokov, but more through increasing familiarity with the new German metres in practice.

IV

In the 1752 edition of his collected works Sochineniya i perevody kak stikhami tak i prozoyu (Compositions and Translations both in Verse and Prose) Trediakovsky included a completely revised version of the Sposob entitled Sposob k slozheniyu rossiyskikh stikhov protiv uydannogo v 1735 gode ispravlennyy i dopolnennyy (Aid to the Composition of Russian Verses Corrected and Supplemented Compared to that Issued in 1735).¹⁰⁰ The changes were numerous and great. The definition of the line of verse in the Sposob of 1735, which Lomonosov had criticized as tautologous,¹⁰¹ was revised. The iamb and two ternary feet, the dactyl and the anapaest, were given full acceptance beside the trochee. All lines from hexameter to monometer and not only the ‘hexameter’ and the ‘pentameter’ were to be metrical. The iambic hexameter was in fact a true hexameter: the ‘trochaic hexameter’, however, remained a trochaic heptameter, as in the Sposob of 1735. Lines were allowed to have masculine endings as well as feminine ones, and in the middle of stanzas trochaic tetrameters, trimeters, and dimeters could have dactylic endings. Lines with different endings could be combined in one poem, rhyming either in successive pairs (continuous rhyme), or alternately, or with enclosing rhymes (two forms of mixed rhyme). Enjambement, condemned in 1735, was now sanctioned, provided the sense extended either to the caesura or to the very end of the following line. The supplementation included new material on the structure of stanzas, rhyme, and the poetic genres, and a translation into Russian verse of Ausonius's poem Nomina Musarum. The result was much the completest and most competent guide to Russian versification till Vostokov's.

The most significant of the subsequent works on versification was Sumarokov's essay ‘O stoposlozhenii’.¹⁰² He was the first to state specifically that Russian syllabo-tonic prosody had five feet, the trochee, the iamb, the dactyl, the amphibrach, and the anapaest: ‘Russian versification is founded only on the natural tonic length, and in the tonic stress according to the nature of every language there are five kinds of foot; although among the Greeks and Romans there was a sixth foot, called the spondee, which in the tonic natural stress turns either into a trochee or an iamb’. He claimed to have been the first to discover the principle by which this transformation took place. He went on: ‘The length of our words excuses a writer for using pyrrhics, for without this licence lines of verse could not be written, although one can play the pedant for rarity's sake.’ Of the anapaest he wrote: ‘The anapaest is a proud and lively foot, which could be used in odes, had not our stanzas appropriated to themselves from Mr Lomonosov the iamb, following the example of the German odes; I too during my youth, following those same Germans, took a hand in this’; and of the trochee: ‘Although Mr Lomonosov never actually used the trochee, I, in imitation of both nature and the French, composed trochaic odes, although the French lyric versification does not actually have harmony in precise terms, but only has echoes of trochaic rhythms (tonami).’

Few alterations were made in the theory of Russian verse as given in the Sposob of 1752 in the second half of the eighteenth century, but great changes took place in poetic practice. The most significant of these changes, since it affected Russian poetry throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, was in the length of the verse line. Russian syllabic prosody, under the influence of Polish prosody and probably ultimately of the Greek and Latin dactylic hexameters, favoured long lines, mostly of thirteen and eleven syllables with caesurae. It was these line-lengths which Trediakovsky had put forward in their syllabo-tonic forms in the Sposob of 1735, and he himself composed extensively in both these metres, actually trochaic heptameters and trochaic hexameters with caesurae. In the latter half of the eighteenth century lines long enough to require caesurae, whether iambic or trochaic, became much less frequent, and except in verse plays, in which the iambic hexameter with caesura remained in use until the end of the eighteenth century, the iambic tetrameter was the commonest line.

In so far as the ode was the dominant poetic genre in eighteenth-century Russian literature the preference for the tetrameter can be attributed to imitations of the line-lengths of French and more particularly German odes. The reason for favouring the tetrameter in binary metres, whether French, German, or Russian, is that it is the longest line which can be uttered without taking a breath, and hence without the need for a caesura. The introduction of a caesura splits a line in effect into two smaller lines, and these smaller lines have generally been avoided in Russian poetry as being restrictive to the poet and tending to be monotonous. Hence a poet will find greater scope and freedom in tetrameters than in heptameters with caesura—in effect tetrameters and trimeters or vice versa, and still more than in hexameters with caesura—in effect two trimeters, or in pentameters with caesura—in effect dimeters and trimeters or vice versa. On the other hand, the reason for the preference of tetrameters to hexameters and pentameters without caesurae—there appear to be no heptameters without caesurae—seems to lie in the tendency of these latter lines to disintegrate as each one had to be broken somewhere by a breath. It is therefore not accidental that the two commonest lines in eighteenth-century Russian poetry were the thirteen-syllable line with caesura after the seventh syllable in syllabic poetry and the tetrameter in syllabo-tonic poetry.

There is a further reason for the supremacy of the tetrameter in Russian syllabo-tonic poetry. Because stresses occur rather less frequently in Russian prose than in a binary metre—actually on average once every 2.8 syllables—some stresses required by the metrical scheme of a binary metre have to be omitted.¹⁰³ The omission of these stresses at different places in the line creates eight rhythmic varieties of the binary tetrameter. Trimeters have four rhythmic varieties and dimeters two. Pentameters theoretically have sixteen, but if they have no caesura, and normally pentameters do not, the line suffers from a tendency to disintegrate. Hence the tetrameter with its eight rhythmic varieties has the largest number for an integral line.

Rhythm, that is the modification of the theoretical metrical scheme by the omission of stresses, was a major field of prosodic change in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Pure iambic or pure trochaic lines, that is lines in which the metrical scheme is adhered to accurately, exclude all Russian words more than three syllables long, except at the ends of lines. In view of the average length of Russian words Lomonosov's remark that pure lines are rather hard to compose is an understatement. The reverse problem presents itself in ternary metres, whose periodicity of stress, one in every three syllables, is slightly less than in normal Russian prose; hence stresses on some words have to be suppressed. Moreover, since stresses required by the metrical scheme are practically never omitted, because if they were omitted too many syllables would pass without a stress, no rhythmic variations come into being, and the consequent monotony of the lines may be one of the reasons for their relatively little use. In binary metres, on the other hand, stresses have often to be omitted, in tetrameters, in practice, usually at least one or two stresses per line. This was a wholly new problem. Trediakovsky, Lomonosov, and Sumarokov, at any rate in tetrameters, did not have strong preferences for the syllables on which to omit stresses, but later in the century preferences became much more pronounced. In the trochaic tetrameter poets most often omitted stresses on the fifth syllable, next most often on the first syllable, and least on the third, and in the iambic tetrameter the corresponding syllables were the sixth, the fourth, and the second. There were analogous developments in the other syllabo-tonic lines.

Stanzas are rarely mentioned by eighteenth-century Russian prosodists. Cultivated syllabic poetry, which typically consisted of pairs of rhyming feminine lines, rarely used them. Short stanzas of simple structure with a rhyming pattern a b a b are found in songs in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but for the most part it was not till after the syllabo-tonic reform that stanzas became large and complex. There is a brief reference to stanzas in the Sposob of 1735.¹⁰⁴ The stanzas used by both Trediakovsky and Lomonosov in their early odes were taken unchanged from the French and German odes which they were imitating. In the Sposob of 1752 Trediakovsky included an extensive chapter on stanzas, exemplifying nineteen different structures from four to ten lines long;¹⁰⁵ but with few exceptions they were not used by his successors.¹⁰⁶ Sumarokov invented and demonstrated in use a large number of highly complex stanzas, but they shared the fate of Trediakovsky's.¹⁰⁷ In the latter half of the eighteenth century poets mainly used the stanzas taken by Lomonosov from his German models. Just as that of line-lengths, so the repertoire of stanzas diminished as the century wore on. This was partly due to a decline in the writing of odes, which typically used the longer and more complex stanzas, and the growing prominence of the lighter poetic genres such as the song, which mainly used short stanzas, but it was also a result of a general turning away from the grand and pretentious.

These changes in line length, in the use of rhythmic variations and in stanza structure, have one characteristic in common, a reduction in variety. In each case the prosodic resources of the first three Russian syllabo-tonic poets, Trediakovsky, Lomonosov and Sumarokov, were greater than those of their immediate successors. This can be partially explained as a discarding of innovations which had not proved themselves in favour of others which had. But a more fundamental reason lay in a decline of interest in prosodic theory and poetic experimentation—an interest which was to revive, although not to the level of the 1740s, only towards the end of the century.

Notes

1. V. N. Peretts, Zametki i materialy dlya istorii pesni v Rossii, i-viii, St Petersburg, 1901 (hereafter called Peretts, Zametki), p. 45, and Iz istorii razvitiya russkoy poezii XVIII v. (Istoriko-literaturnyye issledovaniya i materialy, vol. III), St Petersburg, 1902 (hereafter called Peretts, I-LIM, III), p. 3.

2. A. I. Sobolevsky, ‘Drevniye tserkovno-slavyanskiye stikhotvoreniya IX-X vekov’, in ‘Materialy i issledovaniya v oblasti slavyanskoy filologii i arkheologii’ (Sbornik Otdeleniya russkogo yazyka i slovesnosti Imperatorskoy Akademii nauk, vol. 88, no. 3, St Petersburg, 1910, pp. 1-35); B. O. Unbegaun, Russian Versification, Oxford, 1st ed., 1956, reprinted 1966 (with corrections) (hereafter called Unbegaun, Versification), p. 1.

3. V. N. Peretts, Iz istorii russkoy pesni (Istoriko-literaturnyye issledovaniya i materialy, vol. I, St Petersburg, 1900 (hereafter called Peretts, I-LIM, I), p. 2).

4. Cf. Peretts, I-LIM, I, p. 78. For the term ‘rhymed prose’ see A. Kh. Vostokov, Opyt o russkom stikhoslozhenii, 2nd ed., St Petersburg, 1817, p. 79, and for ‘pre-syllabic verse’ see Unbegaun, Versification, pp. 1-3. In the eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth century syllabic versification was often called the middle (sredneye) versification (see V. K. Trediakovsky, Izbrannyye proizvedeniya, Moscow-Leningrad, 1963 (hereafter called Trediakovsky, Proizvedeniya), pp. 432, 438, 441, 450, and Vostokov, op. cit., p. 27).

5. Peretts, I-LIM, I, p. 5, and R. Burgi, A History of the Russian Hexameter, Hamden, Connecticut, 1954, p. 17.

6. Peretts, I-LIM, I, p. 6.

7. B. O. Unbegaun, ‘Les Débuts de la versification russe et “La Comédie d'Artaxerxès”’ (Revue des études slaves, 32, Paris, 1955, pp. 32-41) (hereafter called Unbegaun, ‘Les Débuts’).

8. See, for example, Peretts, I-LIM, I, pp. 82-4. For Polish elements in Russian poetry in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries see pp. 201, 226, 232.

9. V. K. Trediakovsky, Sochineniya i perevody kak stikhami tak i prozoyu, 2 vols., St Petersburg, 1752 (hereafter called Trediakovsky, Sochineniya i perevody), I, p. 96, and M. V. Lomonosov, Izbrannyye proizvedeniya, ed. A. A. Morozov, Moscow-Leningrad, 1965 (hereafter called Lomonosov, Proizvedeniya), pp. 489 and 492; Vostokov, op. cit., p. 75. Among contemporary Soviet scholars it is the view also of Gasparov (M. L. Gasparov, ‘Russkiy sillabicheskiy trinadtsatislozhnik’, in Z. Kopczyńska and L. Pszczołowska, eds., Metryka słowiańska, Wrocław-Warsaw-Cracow-Danzig, 1971, p. 62).

10. Timofeyev tries to minimize the extent of Polish influence on Russian syllabic verse, but if Polish verse were not responsible for the Russian it is hard to understand why the commonest Russian syllabic line should have the same number of syllables as the Polish one and the same feminine ending. He maintains, on the contrary, that Russian syllabic verse emerged out of Russian pre-syllabic verse, and adduces Peretts's view that Polish syllabic verse emerged out of Polish pre-syllabic verse (L. I. Timofeyev, Ocherki teorii i istorii russkogo stikha, Moscow, 1958, pp. 241-2); but Polish syllabic verse is more likely to have taken its thirteen-syllable line from mediaeval Latin models (R. Silbajoris, Russian Versification, New York and London, 1968, p. 4; Gasparov, op. cit., p. 40).

11. Timofeyev holds that Russian pre-syllabic verse arose out of Russian prose (op. cit., pp. 226-33). The matter is complicated by the occurrence of rhyming passages of irregular line lengths in prose works. Timofeyev describes these as passages of heightened emotional intensity and regards them as the precursor of pre-syllabic verse. On the other hand, the fact that these rhyming passages, unlike pre-syllabic verse, are also often roughly rhythmical, points to an origin in folk poetry, from which they could have been incorporated into prose (cf. Peretts, I-LIM, III, pp. 5-6, and Zametki, pp. 49-50); pre-syllabic verse, on the other hand, is rarely rhythmical.

12. Vostokov, op. cit., p. 83.

13. Peretts, I-LIM, I, p. 72.

14. Cf. V. N. Peretts, ‘K istorii drevne-russkoy liriki’ (Slavia, vol. XI, Prague, 1932, pp. 474-9).

15. For poems composed according to this prosody see Peretts, Zametki, pp. 3-7.

16. Peretts, I-LIM, I, p. 7; and Burgi, op. cit., p. 18.

17. Peretts, I-LIM, I, p. 12; Vostokov, op. cit., p. 30; Burgi, op. cit., p. 20; and O. Horbatsch, Die vier Ausgaben der kirchenslavischen Grammatik von M. Smotryćkyj, Frankfurter Abhandlungen zur Slavistik, Band 7, Wiesbaden, 1964, p. 2. For the stock example of this prosody cited from Smotritsky's grammar see Trediakovsky, Proizvedeniya, p. 433, and Burgi, op. cit., p. 24.

18. Fyodor Polikarpov, Grammatika, Moscow, 1721, f. 252^v. The whole section occupies ff. 239-52^v. The addition of this conclusion is the only substantial change made by Polikarpov to Smotritsky's text of the section as published in 1648. Other changes affect for the most part spellings and layout.

19. P. N. Berkov, ‘Iz istorii russkoy poezii pervoy treti XVIII veka’, in XVIII vek, 1, Moscow-Leningrad, 1935, pp. 61-81; I. N. Zhdanov, ‘K istorii russkogo stikhoslozheniya’ (Izvestiya Otdeleniya russkogo yazyka i slovesnosti Imperatorskoy Akademii nauk, vol. V, book 4, St Petersburg, 1900, pp. 1308-25); and Unbegaun, ‘Les Débuts’.

20. Burgi, op. cit., p. 13. The text of Smotritsky's grammar published in 1648 has a chapter (ff. 347-60) whose running head is ‘Maksima Greka otvet k voprosivshemu’ (Maksim Grek's Answer to a Questioner).

21. Trediakovsky, Proizvedeniya, p. 376, and Polikarpov, op. cit., ff. 247-8. The carmen hexametrum sive heroicum and the carmen pentametrum are also the first two lines dealt with by E. Alvarus (Prosodia sive Institutionum Linguae Latinae Liber Quartus, Antwerp, 1628, pp. 57-60). For an explanation why Trediakovsky's ‘hexameter’ and ‘pentameter’ are in fact a heptameter and a hexameter respectively see C. L. Drage, ‘Trochaic Metres in Early Russian Syllabo-Tonic Poetry’ (The Slavonic and East European Review, XXXVIII, no. 91, London, 1960, p. 364).

22. Trediakovsky, Proizvedeniya, p. 370.

23. Polikarpov, op. cit., f. 248^v.

24. Trediakovsky, Proizvedeniya, p. 377.

25. ibid., pp. 406-8. Lines of twelve and ten syllables are rejected because of an unresolvable contradiction in their nature: owing to their length they must have a caesura, but because they consist of an even number of syllables, there is no syllable outside their disyllabic feet to mark it; so they cannot have one (ibid., p. 410). According to the Liber de Arte Poetica (MS. I. 114. 260/Q. 344-11, Pushkinsky Dom, Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., Leningrad), which is a manuscript poetics written for the students of the Kievan Religious Academy and dated 1733, a caesura is not necessary in lines of from three to nine ‘and perhaps ten’ syllables (f. 10).

26. The remaining verse lines which it describes are the iambic, the sapphic, the faleic or hendecasyllabic, the glyconic, and the choriambic or asclepiadic (Polikarpov, op. cit., ff. 248-9^v), which are all longish. The uncertainty about their precise syllabic length is due to the possibility of substitutions.

27. Trediakovsky, Proizvedeniya, p. 370.

28. ibid., p. 371. According to Stählin Trediakovsky once tried to apply Latin (quantitative) prosody to Russian verse: ‘In 1731 Trediakovsky wrote a small essay on Russian versification (de la Versification Russienne), in which he proves that in their versification Russian verses should be made consonant with Latin prosody. But to order the lines in this way is contrary to the spirit of the Russian language, and it found little approval’ (P. A. Yefremov, Materialy dlya istorii russkoy literatury, St Petersburg, 1867, p. 161).

29. For evidence of the dependence of the Sposob on the shkol'nyye piitiki (school textbooks of poetics) of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries see Peretts, I-LIM, III, pp. 53-67.

30. Trediakovsky, Proizvedeniya, p. 383.

31. ibid., p. 369.

32. ibid., p. 370.

33. Art poétique, I, lines 137-8.

34. Trediakovsky, Proizvedeniya, pp. 371-4. On p. 368 Trediakovsky translates presecheniye as césure or repos, thereby confusing two terms which Boileau, by implication, distinguishes (cf. M. Hervier, L'Art poétique de Boileau, Paris, 1938, p. 81).

35. Art poétique, I, lines 105-6.

36. Trediakovsky, Proizvedeniya, p. 369.

37. Art poétique, I, line 104.

38. Art poétique, I, lines 131-2.

39. Sumarokov in his Nastavleniye khotyashchim byti pisatelyami (Instruction to those Wishing to Become Writers) followed Boileau's treatment of the genres more closely than did Trediakovsky.

40. Trediakovsky, Proizvedeniya, pp. 386-7.

41. ibid., p. 415.

42. Art poétique, II, lines 143-4.

43. Trediakovsky, Proizvedeniya, p. 372.

44. ibid., p. 369.

45. ibid., p. 383.

46. ibid., p. 384.

47. M. P. Shtokmar, Issledovaniya v oblasti russkogo narodnogo stikhoslozheniya, Moscow, 1952, pp. 133-5. See also Peretts, I-LIM, III, p. 69. Goncharov claims that the Russian folk song ‘was a … decisive factor, which played a primary role’ in the formation of the new versification (B. P. Goncharov, ‘O reforme russkogo stikhotvoreniya v XVIII veke’ (Russkaya literatura, 2, Leningrad, 1975, p. 55)), but in fact the Russian folk song could not have served as a model of syllabo-tonic versification because it was not syllabo-tonic. Silbajoris's surmise that by ‘very substance’ Trediakovsky ‘referred to the organizing role of stress as the main principle of the new versification, the stress being, in his opinion, the distinguishing feature of Russian folk verse’ (op. cit., p. 10), i.e. that Trediakovsky was referring to the tonic principle and not the syllabo-tonic principle, seems to be the correct interpretation of this passage.

48. In his article ‘O drevnem, srednem i novom stikhotvorenii rossiyskom’ (‘On the Ancient, Middle, and New Russian Versification’) which was published in the periodical Yezhemesyachnyye sochineniya (Monthly Compositions) in June 1755, Trediakovsky wrote: ‘At once I came upon the raising and the lowering of the voice in the syllables through stress, that is, on the tonic quantity of syllables. Then I came directly also upon feet; for he who comes upon the first cannot fail at that very time to come upon the second’ (Proizvedeniya, p. 442). This account, published twenty years after the first edition of the Sposob, cannot be reconciled with it: it does not, for example, explain why in 1735 Trediakovsky thought it necessary to mention the spondee and the pyrrhic at all. In fact, in 1735 he wrote: ‘Our foot is a combination of two syllables (either of one tonically long, and the other short, and that foot is the very best; or of one short and the other long, and that foot is the very worst; or, finally, of two long syllables or two short ones, and those feet are of medium quality in our verse), invented and placed in our hexameter and pentameter in order to mark more clearly the caesura which consists of one syllable, and by taking a rest upon it to separate the first hemistich from the second’ (Proizvedeniya, p. 408).

49. Silbajoris, op. cit., p. 10.

50. For an example see Peretts, Zametki, pp. 53-4.

51. ibid., pp. 51-4; Timofeyev, op. cit., pp. 302-8; V. Ye. Kholshevnikov, ‘Russkaya i pol'skaya sillabika i sillabo-tonika’, Teoriya stikha, ed. V. Ye. Kholshevnikov, Leningrad, 1968, p. 55; A. V. Pozdneyev, ‘Die tonischen Elemente im russischen syllabischen Vers’ (Zeitschrift für slavische Philologie, Band XXVIII, 2, Heidelberg, 1960, pp. 405-12). For a contrary view see Gasparov, op. cit., pp. 58-9, and for a summary of the question Goncharov, op. cit., pp. 54-5.

52. Burgi, op. cit., pp. 33-4; and Unbegaun, Versification, pp. 10-11. For some of Glück's syllabo-tonic verse see Peretts, I-LIM, III, p. 87, and Prilozheniye II.

53. Peretts, I-LIM, III, p. 243, and Prilozheniye IV. Paus's papers included a manuscript in which, under the heading ‘De Prosodia Russica’, there were some remarks on how to adapt German prosody to Russian verse (Silbajoris, op. cit., p. 12).

54. For a discussion of the possible influence of Glück and Paus's Russian verse on Trediakovsky see K. D. Vishnevsky, ‘Russkaya metrika XVIII veka’, in Voprosy literatury XVIII veka, Penzenskiy gosudarstvennyy pedagogicheskiy institut im. V. G. Belinskogo, Uchonyye zapiski, Seriya filologicheskaya, tom 123, Penza, 1972, pp. 134-9, and G. S. Smith's review in Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia: Newsletter, no. 2, Norwich, 1974, pp. 86-7. For evidence that the stanza forms and rhyme schemes of Glück and Paus's syllabo-tonic verse in Russian are unlikely to have influenced those of the early native Russian syllabo-tonicists see G. S. Smith, ‘The Contribution of Glück and Paus to the Development of Russian Versification: the Evidence of Rhyme and Stanza Forms’ (The Slavonic and East European Review, LI, no. 122, London, 1973, pp. 22-35).

55. Zhdanov, op. cit.

56. Trediakovsky, Proizvedeniya, p. 442. See also M. P. Petrovsky, Bibliograficheskiye zametki o nekotorykh trudakh V. K. Trediakovskogo, Kazan', 1890, pp. 28-9; Peretts, I-LIM, III, pp. 51-2; and Silbajoris, op. cit., p. 17.

57. Trediakovsky, Proizvedeniya, p. 532. He removed these remarks when the ‘Rassuzhdeniye’ was reprinted for the edition of his collected works published in 1752 (Sochineniya i perevody, 2, pp. 30-4). See also P. P. Pekarsky, Istoriya Imperatorskoy Akademii nauk v Peterburge, 2 vols., St Petersburg, 1870-3, 2, pp. 45-8. Boileau's Ode sur la prise de Namur, on which Trediakovsky's O da o sdache goroda Gdanska was based, was also printed in two languages, in Latin on the left-hand page and in French on the right-hand.

58. A. A. Kunik, Sbornik materialov dlya istorii Imperatorskoy Akademii nauk v XVIII veke, 2 parts, St Petersburg, 1865, I, pp. 2-6; Pekarsky, op. cit., 2, p. 48.

59. Kunik, op. cit., I, pp. 77-8; Pekarsky, op. cit., 2, p. 50. Novikov wrote that Trediakovsky ‘translated all the odes of Professor Junker and Court Councillor Stählin during her [Anne's] reign’ (N. I. Novikov, Izbrannyye sochineniya, ed. G. P. Makogonenko, Moscow-Leningrad, 1951, p. 357), e.g. Svodnyy katalog russkoy knigi grazhdanskoy pechati XVIII veka, 1725-1800, 5 vols., Moscow, 1963-7, III, no. 8475. See also Pekarsky, op. cit., 2, p. 67.

60. Trediakovsky, Proizvedeniya, p. 392.

61. See M. Opitz, Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey, Brieg, 1624, and H. G. Atkins, A History of German Versification, London, 1923, pp. 161-3.

62. Trediakovsky, Proizvedeniya, pp. 392-3.

63. P. N. Berkov, Lomonosov i literaturnaya polemika yego vremeni, 1750-1765, Moscow-Leningrad, 1936, pp. 26, 27 and 47; Silbajoris, op. cit., pp. 13-14. The evidence given by Goncharov for Trediakovsky's acquaintance with Russian folk poetry is scanty and unconvincing (op. cit., p. 57).

64. Polikarpov (op. cit., f. 247) describes the dactyl, the anapaest, the amphibrach, the cretic, the bacchius, the anti-bacchius, the tribrach, and the molossus; Liber de Arte Poetica (see note 25), f. 91.

65. Polikarpov, op. cit., f. 247^v.

66. Unbegaun, Versification, p. 5, and Timofeyev, op. cit., p. 308.

67. Peretts, I-LIM, III, p. 51.

68. Stählin wrote: ‘1736 to 1741. Mr Trediakovsky translated a large part of my poems for court festivals. They were distributed at court and were written in his old versification’ (Yefremov, op. cit., p. 161). See also Kunik, op. cit., I, p. xix, and Peretts, I-LIM, III, p. 49.

69. A. P. Sumarokov, Izbrannyye proizvedeniya, ed. P. N. Berkov, Leningrad, 1957 (hereafter called Sumarokov, Proizvedeniya), pp. 49-53.

70. Kantemir, who was sent a copy of the Sposob from St Petersburg, gave his views on it in his ‘Pis'mo Kharitona Makentina k priyatelyu o slozhenii stikhov russkikh’ (‘Letter of Khariton Makentin to a Friend on the Composition of Russian Verses’), in which he set out his own modified syllabic system. The ‘Pis'mo’, which was probably composed early in 1743, was published in 1744. See A. D. Kantemir, Sobraniye stikhotvoreniy, ed. Z. I. Gershkovich, Leningrad, 1956, pp. 407-28, 521-5.

71. Lomonosov, Proizvedeniya, pp. 486-94. The letter was not published till 1778. On 11 February 1740 Trediakovsky composed a polemical reply to it, but Taubert and Adodurov decided against its being sent so as to ‘curtail long, useless, and vain arguments … and to avoid wasting money on postage’ (Pekarsky, op. cit., 2, p. 83). But Trediakovsky succeeded in preventing the publication of Lomonosov's ode: instead a syllabic one on the same subject by Vitynsky was printed (M. V. Lomonosov, Sochineniya, 8 vols., St Petersburg/Moscow-Leningrad, 1891-1948 (hereafter called Lomonosov, Sochineniya), I (1891), Primechaniya, p. 36).

72. Ye. Ya. Dan'ko, ‘Iz neizdannykh materialov o Lomonosove. 2. O literaturnykh istochnikakh “Pis'ma o pravilakh rossiyskogo stikhotvorstva”’, in XVIII vek, 2, Moscow-Leningrad, 1940, p. 265. Gottsched's article ‘Joh. Ludwig Praschens gründliche Anzeige von Fürtrefflichkeit und Verbesserung deutscher Poesie’ is found in Beyträge zur critischen Historie der deutschen Sprache, Poesie und Beredsamkeit, part 5, Leipzig, 1733, pp. 130-51.

73. G. M. Korovin, Biblioteka Lomonosova, Moscow-Leningrad, 1961, p. 308.

74. Dan'ko, op. cit., pp. 265-6.

75. ibid., pp. 266-7.

76. ibid., p. 268.

77. Lomonosov, Proizvedeniya, p. 489.

78. Dan'ko, op. cit., pp. 268-9.

79. ibid., p. 272.

80. loc. cit.

81. ibid., pp. 272-3.

82. ibid., p. 274.

83. loc. cit.

84. Lomonosov, Sochineniya, 3 (1895), pp. 13-77, and Primechaniya, pp. 26-118. This work, which Lomonosov composed in 1744 but which was not published in his lifetime, was the basis of his Kratkoye rukovodstvo k krasnorechiyu, kniga pervaya, v kotoroy soderzhitsya ritorika pokazuyushchaya obshchiye pravila oboyego krasnorechiya, to yest' oratorii i poezii …, St Petersburg, 1748.

85. Written in August 1758, and first printed as the preface to his Sobraniye raznykh sochineniy v stikhakh i v proze, 2nd ed., two vols., Moscow, 1757-9.

86. Stählin wrote: ‘About this same time [1736-41] Mr Lomonosov sent several odes to the then President [of the Academy of Sciences] Baron Korff from Marburg … These odes were written in a new and completely different metre [from the old syllabic system] on the model of the German metre, which till then had not been known in Russia. While in Germany he had taken a fancy to German poetry, in particular the poems of Günther, of which he knew whole pieces (p'yesy) by heart. On their basis he wrote his own Russian verses with a German metre in iambs, trochees, and dactyls' (Yefremov, op. cit., pp. 161-2). See also Sumarokov, Proizvedeniya, p. 112; Korovin, op. cit., p. 326; V. V. Kapnist, Sobraniye sochineniy, ed. D. S. Babkin, 2 vols., Moscow-Leningrad, 1960, II, p. 165; Peretts, I-LIM, III, p. 35 (citing Ye. Bolkhovitinov); Vostokov, op. cit., p. 24; P. A. Vyazemsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, 9 vols., St Petersburg, 1878-84, I, pp. 168-9; Unbegaun, Versification, p. 21; Silbajoris, op. cit., pp. 21-3; Gasparov, op. cit., pp. 62-3.

87. V. M. Zhirmunsky, ‘O natsional'nykh formakh yambicheskogo stikha’, in Teoriya stikha, ed. V. Ye. Kholshevnikov, Leningrad, 1968, pp. 7-23.

88. Dan'ko, op. cit., p. 272.

89. Lomonosov, Proizvedeniya, p. 491.

90. Alvarus, op. cit., p. 55.

91. Polikarpov, op. cit., f. 247.

92. Liber de Arte Poetica (see note 25), f. 91.

93. Trediakovsky, however, uses amphibrachic dimeters in one of his two examples of the use together of lines with different endings (Proizvedeniya, pp. 384-5).

94. A. P. Sumarokov, Polnoye sobraniye vsekh sochineniy, v stikhakh i proze, ed. N. I. Novikov, 10 parts, 2nd ed., Moscow, 1787 (hereafter called Sumarokov, Polnoye sobraniye), 10, pp. 54, 64. For other examples of the use of the amphibrach by Sumarokov see ibid., 1, pp. 57-8, 123, 304, and 4, pp. 229, 233-4, 272, 279.

95. Unbegaun, Versification, p. 49.

96. ibid., p. 46.

97. Vostokov, op. cit., p. 38.

98. First published in 1642, reprinted with errors and without authorization as Kurzer Weg-Weiser zur deutschen Tichtkunst in Jena in 1663, and republished, revised by the author shortly before his death, by his son-in-law Otto Prätorius in 1665 (W. Buchner, August Buchner, sein Leben und Wirken, Hanover, 1863, pp. 63-73). See Atkins, op. cit., pp. 164-5. For the mixed metres see M. Opitz, Prosodia Germanica, oder Buch von der teutschen Poeterey, von E. Hannman vermehrt und verbessert, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1645, pp. 181-6.

99. Burgi, op. cit., pp. 38-68.

100. Trediakovsky, Sochineniya i perevody, I, pp. 93-155.

101. Lomonosov, Sochineniya, 3 (1895), Primechaniya, p. 8.

102. Sumarokov, Polnoye sobraniye, 10, pp. 50-77. Among other works on versification in the second half of the century were: S. G. Domashnev, ‘O stikhotvorstve’ (Poleznoye uveseleniye, Moscow, 1762) (Yefremov, op. cit., pp. 168-95); A. Baybakov, Pravila piiticheskiye, 1st ed., 1774, described in A. Kadlubovsky, ‘“Pravila piiticheskiye” Apollosa Baybakova’ (Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniya, St Petersburg, 1899, part 324 (July), pp. 189-240); anon., ‘Rassuzhdeniye o stikhotvorstve rossiyskom’ (Novyye yezhemesyachnyye sochineniya, X, St Petersburg, April 1787, pp. 37-92); and V. S. Podshivalov, Kratkaya russkaya prosodiya, ili pravila, kak pisat' russkiye stikhi, Moscow, 1798.

103. C. L. Drage, ‘The Rhythmic Development of the Trochaic Tetrameter in Early Russian Syllabo-Tonic Poetry’ (The Slavonic and East European Review, XXXIX, no. 93, London, 1961, pp. 350-1).

104. Trediakovsky, Proizvedeniya, p. 384.

105. Trediakovsky, Sochineniya i perevody, I, pp. 127-38. There are nine stanzas of trochaic lines, eight of iambic lines, and the sapphic and alcaic stanzas.

106. C. L. Drage, Trochaic Metres in Russian Syllabo-Tonic Poetry from Trediakovsky to Krylov, unpublished M.A. thesis, University of London, 1959, p. 226. The data are based on a study of stanzas composed of trochaic lines only.

107. ibid., pp. 243-4.