SOURCE: Silbajoris, Rimvydas. Introduction to Russian Versification: The Theories of Trediakovskij, Lomonosov, and Kantemir, pp. 1-35. New York: Columbia University Press, 1968.

[In excerpt below, Silbajoris explains the syllabo-tonic system and its history, focusing on Trediakovsky's role in the system's development and his related theories.]

In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, a system of versification was introduced in Russia which was based on regular alternations of stressed and unstressed syllables. That system is traditionally referred to by Russian scholars as the “syllabo-tonic” system.¹ Its name is rather inadequate, however, because by themselves its two component parts describe two different kinds of versification: the “tonic” (or accentual) pattern of Russian folk poetry comprising a more or less constant number of accents per line, but a variable number of unstressed intervals; and the “syllabic” system of the “learned” poetry of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries which required a fixed number of syllables in a line of verse, but no regular alternation of accented and unaccented syllables. It might therefore appear that the syllabo-tonic system was a synthesis of these two kinds of versification. Actually, the two basic measuring units—the number of stresses and the number of syllables—were used in working out Russian equivalents of an entirely different system, namely, of Greek and Latin metrics.²

The syllabo-tonic system, evolved by 1740, remained practically unchallenged in its basic principles until the early years of this century. It is still very much alive in Russian poetic practice despite the important departures, innovations, and experiments of the last fifty or sixty years.

There has been considerable discussion among Russian scholars as to who among the poets and theoreticians in Russia deserves the honor of having introduced the syllabo-tonic system. Certain scholars even tend to minimize the role of the individual reformers and to present the transition from syllabic to syllabo-tonic versification as a gradual, spontaneous, “natural” process. There can be no doubt, however, that a major part in the development of the new system was played by the treatises written by Vasilij Trediakovskij (1703-69) and by Mixailo Lomonosov (1711-65). The first of these treatises was Trediakovskij's New and Brief Method for Composing Russian Verse, written in 1735. This work provided the initial stimulus to which Lomonosov and Antiox Kantemir (1708-44) responded with their own theoretical discussions of Russian versification: Lomonosov with his “Letter on the Rules of Russian Versification” (1739), and Kantemir with the “Letter of Xariton Makentin to a Friend on the Composition of Russian Verse” (1743). A detailed summing-up of the new syllabo-tonic versification theory was made by Trediakovskij in 1752, when he published a substantially revised version of his Method.

Trediakovskij introduced the concept of verse feet, based on a systematic arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables. He applied this concept to the eleven- and thirteen-syllable lines of the earlier syllabic versification. Lomonosov's statement of 1739 was in part a critical reaction to Trediakovskij, since he advocated a broadening of the reform to include lines of any length and to move away altogether from the syllabic system. The treatise by Antiox Kantemir was also formulated in reaction to Trediakovskij's work: not only did he oppose the reform; he also introduced certain refinements into the theory and practice of syllabic verse. Thus, the new theory was elaborated in the course of a three-cornered dialogue, as it were, which Trediakovskij initiated in 1735. The concluding statement was made by Trediakovskij in 1752, with the publication of his revised treatise; the revisions tended in general toward the acceptance of Lomonosov's views.

Syllabic versification developed in Russia in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Some attempts were made to formulate a theory of versification before the syllabic system had established itself; these must be discussed briefly, since both Lomonosov and Trediakovskij were concerned with them in their own treatises on versification. The main feature of these early theories was the attempt to work out an exact imitation of Greek and Latin versification patterns. In 1596 L. Zizanij's Slavonic grammar was published; according to the custom of the time, it included a section on prosody. His system was based on an arbitrary classification of certain Russian vowels as long and others as short.³ The old Cyrillic alphabet contained various symbols for vowel sounds modeled on letters of the Greek alphabet. In Russian usage, groups of two or even three symbols took on identical sound values. They were differentiated only by their orthography, which, in Zizanij's days, was not too strictly normalized. Zizanij quite arbitrarily attributed quantitative values to symbols representing the same sound. He then used these distinctions to describe the heroic meter as a six-unit verse consisting of dactyls and spondees, and the elegiac meter (a variation of the heroic) and the iambic meter—also as a six-unit line, but consisting of iambs and spondees; the foot consisted in each case of syllables arbitrarily regarded as long or short.

The second attempt to devise a purely quantitative versification system was made by Meletij Smotrickij, a poet writing in southwestern Russia in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Smotrickij's Slavonic grammar, which first appeared in 1619, contained an elaborate system of quantitative metrics. It became known as “Maksimovskaja prosodija” (Maximian prosody), due to a mistaken attribution of the prosodic sections of Smotrickij's grammar to Maxim the Greek, a monk famous for his learning who wrote and taught in Russia early in the sixteenth century.⁴ Smotrickij elaborated on Zizanij's classification of Russian vowels into long, short, and common, and extended it to include what he considered Russian diphthongs.⁵ He also postulated the lengthening of vowels in certain positions according to an intricate system which followed the Greek patterns, and mentioned all of 124 possible verse feet based on various combinations of long and short syllables. Finally, he presented definitions with examples of various types of verse. Smotrickij's system, like Zizanij's, was almost wholly theoretical; hence, there are not many traces of attempts to put these theories into practice.⁶

In addition to the “quantitative episode,” mention should be made of the so-called presyllabic verse,⁷ an adaptation of Russian spoken verse. Rhyme was the only functional element of versification found in these imparisyllabic lines, and it usually formed rhymed couplets. Similar poetic endeavours were appearing at that time in the Ukraine and had also been found in earlier, presyllabic, Polish poetry. No attempt was made to observe any regularity in the syllabic length or in the number of stresses common to these verses. Below is an example from the “Povest' ot” prežnix” let”” (Story of former years), commonly attributed to Prince I. M. Katyrev-Rostovskij, written in 1626:

Nacalо virsims,
mytiznyms visims
ikszi raeumnо prоcitaims
i slagatily кnigi sii pоtоms uraeumhvaims.
IelоZinna bysts lhtоpisnay кniga
о pоkоzinii Cydоvsкоgо mnika,
pоnizi bо оns bysts ubоgii cirniцs
i vоelоzils na sy цarsкii vhniцs,
цarstvо viliкii Rоsii vоemutils
I diydimu цarsкuy na plisaks svоiks nоsils.(8)

A syllabic type of verse was destined to play a more important role in the history of Russian prosody. Syllabic verse arrived in Russia from Poland about the middle of the seventeenth century, having first been adopted in the Ukraine and Belorussia—countries which had previously been a part of Poland.⁹ The Polish heroic line, the most important element in the development of Russian syllabic verse, was a line of thirteen syllables, divided at the seventh syllable by a feminine caesura and having a feminine clausule. This form was achieved after Polish word stress became stabilized on the penultimate syllable, in the sixteenth century; before this Polish verse had been based on imparisyllabic intonational groups.¹⁰ …

Vasilij Kirilovič Trediakovskij was born on February 22, 1703, to a clergyman's family in Astraxan, in southeast Russia, on the Volga near the Caspian Sea. He received his primary education from Roman Catholic monks, mostly of Polish origin, who had established residence and a school in this remote province in the wake of a large Armenian immigration to the city.¹¹ In 1723 Trediakovskij left his home town and family to study at the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy in Moscow. Although originally a theological academy, this school later expanded its curriculum to include more general subjects and changed its language of instruction from Greek to Latin. Trediakovskij soon realized that a better education could be acquired in Western Europe, particularly in Paris, and he went abroad at the beginning of 1726. At the end of 1727, after a short stay in Holland, he proceeded on foot to Paris to take up studies in mathematics, philosophy, and linguistics at the University of Paris, and in theology at the Sorbonne.¹²

On his return to Russia in 1730, Trediakovskij learned that during his sojourn abroad his parents had died in an epidemic and the family home in Astraxan had been destroyed by robbers, He went to St. Petersburg and found a position there as translator in the Academy of Sciences. While doing various translations for the Academy, Trediakovskij published a prose version of Paul Tallemant's erotic pastoral allegory, Voyage à l'ile d'amour, which caused a sensation among the Russian reading public. It was the first important attempt to approximate spoken Russian as a vehicle of secular literature to replace the more or less Russified Church Slavonic in use at that time.

In 1733 Trediakovskij became a member of the Academy and was given the title of secretary. While his main task still centered on translations from French and German, the duty which Trediakovskij himself considered most important was his work in the “Russian Assembly,” established in 1734 by order of the new president of the Academy, Baron Korff. The main function of this organization, to which all the translators of the Academy belonged, was to purify and develop the Russian literary language. Trediakovskij apparently hoped that this group might eventually grow in importance to become the Russian equivalent of the Académie Française.¹³ It was under the auspices of this Assembly that Trediakovskij wrote, in 1735, his New and Brief Method for Composing Russian Verses, which established his reputation as a linguist and theoretician of Russian versification.

A series of misfortunes began to plague Trediakovskij about 1740. The first setback was literary. Lomonosov's “Ode on the Taking of Xotin” together with his “Letter on the Rules of Russian Versification,” which had been sent to the Academy, eclipsed everthing that Trediakovskij had done as a poet and expert in versification.¹⁴ Even worse, he was soon to suffer personal indignities. In February, 1740, Trediakovskij was cruelly beaten and mistreated by Artemij Volynskij, a minister in the cabinet of Empress Anna Ioanovna.¹⁵ Soon afterwards Trediakovskij became involved in sharp controversies with Lomonosov and Sumarokov over literary questions, disputes that were to ruin his reputation completely.

These debates began calmly enough in 1743, with a discussion on the meter best suited for exalted poetry in Russian, the iamb and the trochee being considered. Trediakovskij maintained that trochees and iambs per se were neutral as vehicles for emotional expression, while his two opponents insisted that iambs portrayed nobler feelings, while trochees were better suited for light verse.¹⁶ Gradually, the pride and vanity of all three disputants, added to their divergent views on literature and their different social backgrounds, exacerbated literary differences into furious personal quarrels which reached their peak about 1755. Satirical epigrams of a highly personal character were exchanged among the three writers in rapid-fire succession. Trediakovskij even went so far as to accuse his enemies of atheism and political unreliability. Lomonosov, then a very powerful figure in the Academy, persecuted Trediakovskij relentlessly until the Academy stopped printing the latter's works without even deigning to explain its position.¹⁷ This forced Trediakovskij to express his opinions either under pseudonyms, in the lengthy prefaces he wrote to his various translations from the French, such as Barclay's Argenis (1751), or in prefaces to his collected (previously published) works, as in 1752. The persecution, the extreme poverty he had suffered all his life, the failure of his publishing ventures, and such additional misfortunes as the several fires in his home in which many of his manuscripts perished¹⁸ finally broke Trediakovskij's spirit. He became more and more depressed and withdrawn, ceasing even to attend the meetings of the Academy. His mood at that time can be judged by the conclusion of his letter to Sumarokov, written in 1755, in answer to the latter's attack on Trediakovskij's views concerning the Sapphic stanza: “Please forget about me; leave alone a man who has fallen in love with solitude, silence and the peace of his soul.”¹⁹ When Razumovskij, then president of the Academy, addressed an official inquiry to Trediakovskij asking why he had stopped coming to meetings and threatening him with suspension of his salary, the latter's answer included the following remarks: “… hated in person, despised in words, thwarted in affairs, gored by satirical horns, represented as a monster, even in my morals (what could be more shameless than that?) … I have lost my strength and this is why it has become necessary for me to seek solitude.”²⁰ In 1758 Trediakovskij asked to be retired from the Academy; his request was granted in March, 1759.

The last years of his life were spent in continued labor over the translations of Rollin's Histoire ancienne and Histoire romaine (1761). In 1766 Trediakovskij published his magnum opus—a verse adaptation of Fénelon's Les Aventures de Télémaque (in his adaptation, Tilemaxida); he had to print it at his own expense. The meter he chose, dactylic hexameter, was an important innovation. However, the immediate reaction to this work again served as the basis for ridicule. There is a story that Empress Catherine II punished her courtiers by making them memorize sections from the Tilemaxida. Nevertheless, later scholars have found considerable merit in the work, not the least of which lies in the skillful handling of the Russian hexameter.²¹ On April 6, 1769, not long after the completion of the Tilemaxida, Trediakovskij at last succumbed to his prolonged illness.

While he admitted that his terminology had been borrowed from the French, an interesting feature of Trediakovskij's New and Brief Method for Composing Russian Verses is his insistence that the “substance” of the new system derives from Russian folk poetry; employing a Russian proverb, he says, “I owe French versification the purse and ancient Russian poetry the whole thousand rubles”. … Trediakovskij does not explain exactly what he meant by the “substance” or the “thousand rubles,” but from the context of his treatise one may surmise that the “thousand rubles” 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. Later in his life Trediakovskij maintained the same opinion, and even went so far as to ascribe to Russian folk verse all the features of the syllabo-tonic system. In an essay entitled “An Opinion on the Beginning of Poetry and Verse in General,” published in 1752, he said, concerning the metrics of Russian folk verse, that “Its feet were mostly trochees, or trochees and dactyls, or else dactyls alone; also the iamb, or iamb with anapest, or again the anapest alone, and, as a poetic license, the pyrrhic foot was used instead of the iamb and the trochee.”²²

In 1755, in his essay “On the Ancient, Middle, and New Russian Versification,” Trediakovskij repeated the same assertion and went on to say that he based his opinion on the testimony of “living witnesses who are above suspicion.”²³ In 1735, however, Trediakovskij could not have had in mind such a wide range of metric patterns in the folk verse, for, even though he named folk versification as his model, he refused to admit trisyllabic meters into his new system, and was reluctant to admit the iamb.

There is no evidence that Trediakovskij ever made a serious study of Russian folk versification beyond citing a few samples of Russian folk songs in which he claimed to have found specimens of various syllabo-tonic meters (see below, p. 158). Nevertheless, the studies of Russian folk verse made in the nineteenth century by such scholars as A. F. Hilferding,²⁴ A. X. Vostokov,²⁵ and P. D. Goloxvastov,²⁶ and in our day by Kiril Taranovski,²⁷ Roman Jakobson,²⁸ and others indicate that word stress plays an important organizing role in Russian folk versification and that, moreover, the distribution of stress is often quite regular and, on the whole, manifests a pronounced trochaic tendency. Nevertheless, it is difficult to relate Trediakovskij's formal organization of the 13-syllable line, with its trochaic feet, masculine caesura after the seventh syllable, and feminine rhyme, to any particular model from folk verse.

In seeking other sources of Trediakovskij's new system, attention has been drawn to the fact that a metric structure resembling the syllabo-tonic can be found in some seventeenth- and eighteenth-century verse written in Ukraine, especially in the so-called leonine verse. This verse had internal rhymes, often feminine, and a rather regular distribution of stresses. Here is an excerpt from the eighteenth-century Ukrainian poet G. Konisskij:

Čísta ptíca / Golubíca / Tákov nráv iměet
Búde město / Gdě nečísto, / Támo ne počíet,
Nó gdě trávy / Í dubrávy / Í sěn ést' ot znója
Tó prilíčno, / Tó obíčno / Město éj pokója.(29)

In Ukrainian the symbol transcribed here as ě stands for i, and therefore in the above excerpt město rhymes with nečisto, and iměet with počiet.

It is true that Trediakovskij was familiar with the Ukranian and Russian poetry of his time and could have borrowed ideas from it for his new system. However, Trediakovskij's heroic line and the leonine verse have only two elements in common: feminine rhyme at the end of the line, which also existed in classical syllabic poetry, and a regular distribution of stress. The differences, on the other hand, are more significant. First of all, Trediakovskij, in his Method of 1735, strongly opposed internal rhymes because of their tendency to split the line (see Rule VII, p. 45), whereas this was the principal device of the leonine verse, obvious from the above example. Second, instead of having a caesura in the middle of the line, a leonine verse line breaks into three metrical fragments of two plus two plus three trochaic feet. The word beginning each fragment is capitalized, and the rhyme pattern is as follows:

– – – – / – – – – / – – – – – –

a a b

– – – – / – – – – / – – – – – –

c c b

Nevertheless, the example of leonine verse may have contributed to Trediakovskij's conviction that Russian verse rhythm can be organized on the basis of stress distribution.

Another possible source of Trediakovskij's ideas which has been frequently cited is the poetry written in Russian according to the rules of German versification by Germans and other foreigners living in Russia. Perhaps the earliest examples of such poetry were written by the German pastor Johann Gottfried Gregori (1631-75), who lived in “Nemeckaja sloboda”—the district of Moscow assigned to foreign residents. In 1672 Gregori wrote in German, and then translated into Russian, a Biblical drama, The Play of Artaxerxes (Artakserksovo dejstvo).³⁰ The first act was translated with the obvious intention of reproducing the iambics of the German original. Another foreigner, a Swede, Johan Gabriel Sparwenfeld (1655-1727), wrote in 1704 a dedication in Russian dactylic tetrameters to a doctoral dissertation on the Russian Church.³¹ Lyrical poetry in Russian, imitating German meters, was written by Johann Ernst Glück (1652-1705) and Johann Werner Paus (1670-1735), Lutheran churchmen who came to Russia at the beginning of the eighteenth century to spread learning and the Evangelical faith, and by Wilhelm Mons (1688-1742), a Russian-born adventurer and soldier of fortune.

Since in some cases this poetry was either older than Trediakovskij's or at least contemporary with it, it has been suggested (especially by V. N. Peretc) that these foreigners should be considered the real reformers of Russian versification. However, our primary concern here is not with chronological priority in the use of syllabo-tonic verse in Russian, but rather with the elaboration of those theoretical foundations upon which Russian poetry actually developed. It is therefore important to see whether there was any continuity between the efforts of Trediakovskij and those of his foreign predecessors.

Potentially the most important of these was Paus, since he appears to have been the only one to leave a written record of theoretical considerations on Russian verse structure. In an unpublished manuscript,³² composed when Paus was working at the Academy as a translator and containing translations of several psalms from German to Russian, he included, under the heading “De Prosodia Russica,” a few remarks on how to adapt German metrics to Russian verse. His two most important ideas were that live pronunciation, and not Greek and Latin quantity, must be the guide in devising Russian prosody, and that monosyllabic Russian words could be considered long or short, as the occasion demanded. Trediakovskij could certainly have seen these notes as well as Paus's poetry, for he worked at the Academy at the time of Paus's death and, according to Peretc, could have had access to Paus's papers which the Academy took over after the latter's death in 1735.³³ But be that as it may, the verses written by Paus as well as by the other Germans were, in their main metrical features, entirely unrelated to the versification proposed by Trediakovskij in his Method. First of all, Paus wrote mostly in iambics, while Trediakovskij in his treatise objected to the iambic meter as altogether inferior (see Rule I, p. 42). This opposition to the iamb might indicate that Trediakovskij knew Paus's work but, far from desiring to imitate him, was strongly opposed to Paus's principles. Second, Paus and the other Germans wrote only in short lines, and it is precisely these lines that Trediakovskij excluded from his reform.³⁴ Thus, in developing his theoretical formulations Trediakovskij by-passed Paus's verses, and the syllabo-tonic verses written by the Germans are even less relevant to the elaboration of Trediakovskij's theory than is the Ukrainian leonine verse.

On the other hand, there is a real possibility that the syllabo-tonic principle was suggested to Trediakovskij not by the verses of Paus (and others), but by the German scholars with whom he worked at the Academy. One of Trediakovskij's tasks was to translate into Russian the various odes written by the German academicians on festive occasions, and it is very likely that these translations were discussed with the authors of the originals, leading to deliberations of a general nature concerning the possibility of syllabo-tonic poetry in Russian. Direct documentary proof of this is not available, but some scholars have made this surmise. To quote one of them, Pumpjanskij:

In academic St. Petersburg, Trediakovskij got into a German atmosphere. This and the political role of Germans (Bühren), and the forced participation in the academic writing of poetry (translations of German odes, especially those of Junker) led Trediakovskij to the thought of seriously learning the German language and versification. For a linguist like Trediakovskij this was not a difficult matter. The talks with Junker led him into the literary background of German classicism (Schule der Vernunft); it turned out that the German school was a colony of Boileau's French classicism. Thus the study of German poetry was the first example for Trediakovskij of syllabo-tonic poetry. Just at this time he also wrote his first syllabo-tonic poem—congratulations to Baron Korff.³⁵

A more direct piece of evidence is Trediakovskij's letter to academician Stählin concerning the new Russian versification. A. Kunik reports this circumstance as follows:

In 1735 he [Trediakovskij] actually reverted to the former syllabic meter. This evoked disapproval on the part of the “experts” on the Russian language and gave occasion for the letter (Letter d'un Russien à un de ses amis, écrite au sujet de la nouvelle versification Russienne) to Stählin, on Oct. 11, 1736, concerning the new Russian versification. (M. Trediakoffski la [the reference is to an ode by Stählin] traduisant en Vers Russien sans scansion entendit de plusieurs connoisseurs que dans l'original allemand reignait infinitement plus d'harmonie que dans la Traduction Russe. Il s'en entretenoit sur les raisons avec Mr. Stehlin et fut convaicu que la Langue Russe étoit assez propre pour cette harmonie.)³⁶

To be sure, this particular letter was written after the Method had been published, but a conversation similar to that between Trediakovskij and Stählin, during which he “became convinced” that syllabo-tonic “scansion” was suitable for Russian verse, could have easily taken place on more than one occasion before 1735.

Finally, there is the opinion advanced by L. I. Timofeev that Trediakovskij's reform was really only a written codification of partial results of a natural process of “tonization” of the long lines in Russian syllabic verse. In his article “Syllabic Verse,”³⁷ Timofeev presents a statistical analysis of stress distribution in Russian syllabic verse, concluding that this verse clearly manifested: a) an increasing tendency to distribute stresses in a trochaic pattern); b) an opposite tendency to distribute them in an iambic pattern; and c) a tendency to combine the above two meters. Consequently, according to Timofeev, when Trediakovskij in his Method sanctioned the trochaic meter, he was in effect taking note of the “trochaic tendency” and giving it a theoretical formulation.³⁸

Timofeev's concept of the “evolutionary development” of syllabic verse toward metrical regularity may have some validity. In a very general sense it is probably true that Trediakovskij was working with, rather than against, “natural” trends, and his treatise would probably have passed unnoticed had it been in disagreement with “the nature of things.” Nevertheless, the fact remains that, whatever the “trends,” syllabic poetry assumed a metrically definable regularity only as an exception.³⁹ And it was most certainly an important innovation to make the regularity in the distribution of accents the central principle of versification. Trediakovskij, it may be added, strongly insisted that the old syllabic verse, because of its lack of regular stress distribution, did not differ essentially from prose (see p. 38).

Trediakovskij's Method of 1735 was essentially a reform of the old syllabic 13-syllable (and, by extension, the ll-syllable) line. There was never any question in Trediakovskij's mind that the heroic line should preserve the traditional number of syllables: “Our hexameter can have neither more nor less than thirteen syllables” (see p. 51). This is perhaps the best explanation for his essential indifference to such “trifles” as short verse lines, and for his lack of interest in the leonine verse which was, after all, a tour de force of formal virtuosity. According to Trediakovskij, serious poetry was written in the syllabic heroic line; consequently that line had to be improved because the old syllabic system, which neglected word stress, failed to describe adequately the properties of verse.

The main features of Trediakovkij's reformed 13-syllable line were: 1) verse measurement by feet, and not, as previously, by syllables; 2) a trochaic cadence as best suited for Russian verse; and 3) a masculine caesura on the seventh syllable (not a feminine one, as in Polish verse). The feminine rhyme adopted in Trediakovskij's new Method already existed in the old syllabic verse. The fact that Trediakovskij proceeded from the old syllabic line can perhaps best be demonstrated by the changes made by Trediakovskij in a line from Kantemir's first satire which he quoted many times in his own, emended version in the treatise. Kantemir's original line read as follows:

Umi slabyj, plоdtrudоv // ni dоlgоj nauкi

The stress pattern was:

[UNK] [UNK] [UNK] [UNK] [UNK] [UNK] [UNK] // [UNK] [UNK] [UNK] [UNK] [UNK] [UNK]

This is a 13-syllable line with a more or less accidental trochaic pattern in the first hemistich, but no pattern in the second. Trediakovskij changed the line to read:

Um tоls slabyj plоd tru /dоv // кratкiy nauкi

The resulting metric pattern

[UNK] [UNK] / [UNK] [UNK] / [UNK] [UNK] / [UNK] // [UNK] [UNK] / [UNK] [UNK] / [UNK] [UNK]

fulfills all the requirements of Trediakovskij's new heroic line: trochaic feet (except for the pyrrhic in the fifth), a stressed seventh “caesura syllable” not counted in the total number of feet, and a feminine rhyme. This demonstrated the whole substance of the reform, by moving two accents. The example, it is true, was chosen deliberately to show that he was not breaking with earlier practice, but merely improving on it.

In his treatise Trediakovskij emphasized that only a few small changes were needed in order to obtain his new line from the old syllabic one. However, in the context of the history of Russian versification up to that time these “small changes” actually involved new theoretical concepts which had not previously been formulated in Russia. The most important changes concerned the notion of word stress, and it may be useful to discuss them briefly here.

First of all, Trediakovskij adapted the terminology of ancient Greek and Latin versification to his new system in a manner consistent with the realities of the Russian language. In order to explain the meaning of the classical Greek and Latin terms, “length” and “brevity” of syllables, as used in his own system of versification, he substituted opposition based on stress for the classical one based on length. This he asserts in Corollary 2, stating that the length and brevity of syllables understood in this new Russian versification is not the same as what the Greeks and Latins used in their versification; but only tonic, that is, consisting of voice stress alone (see p. 40). His solution was the same as that adopted by other Western languages having a strong word stress. All European theories of verse adapted the classical terminology to a completely new tonic verse system which had developed from various sources in medieval Latin, English, and German poetry.⁴⁰

Second, Trediakovskij introduced the concept of rhythm or cadence in verse, adding it to the requirement of a constant number of syllables in syllabic verse. B. Tomaševskij describes this innovation in the following manner:

The basic thought of Trediakovskij is that together with meter—the canonized system of sound elements of verse—there exists rhythm—the cadence, that is, the trend toward organization of other, noncanonized, forms of sound (for the syllabic versification of a system of stresses in a verse line). In borrowing his terminology from France, Trediakovskij gave this term—the cadence—an expanded interpretation apparently because the question of the role of stress in Russian versification had matured by that time and a system of stresses was naturally advanced as a new artistic format, supplementing the canonized principle of syllabic verse—the count of syllables.⁴¹

Most of Trediakovskij's technical terms, as he himself acknowledges, were borrowed directly from the French. He was generally quite successful in finding Russian equivalents for them, although his description of the caesura is not so precise as to leave no room for confusion. Trediakovskij apparently considered the caesura a complex phenomenon—primarily a break of the anticadence type with its pitch on the seventh syllable, which is realized in recitation both by the rising intonation and by a pause; in this he was clearly following the French.⁴² However, the difficulty in Trediakovskij's formulation is that the caesura seems to be both syllable and a pause at the same time (see Rule III, p. 42, n. 23; p. 153, n. 37; p. 162; and p. 187, n. 11).

Another problem arises from the fact that Trediakovskij did not explain why he chose the trochee rather than the iamb as the most suitable foot. Some explanation of this was provided by Trediakovskij much later in his essay, “On the Ancient, Middle, and New Russian Versification,” in which he wrote: “I was led to trochees by the qualities of our language, because our periods end more frequently and more evenly with a trochee; also our rhyme, in the middle versification, as well as that which is now called feminine, is precisely a trochee.”⁴³ Later in the same essay Trediakovskij admitted that another stimulus to his use of the trochee was an example of trochaic verse that he had seen in a “Dalmatian booklet.”⁴⁴ This made him feel that trochees are well suited to poetry in the Slavic languages.

It is not clear what Trediakovskij meant by “our periods”; and, in general, his references to the “qualities of our language,” like those of folk versification, are not specific enough to be of much use in elucidating his theories. The significant part of the above statement is the connection Trediakovskij makes between the feminine rhyme and the trochaic cadence. Considering that the caesura stress fell on an odd (seventh) syllable, the final stress in each hemistich had to fall on an odd syllable. If an even syllable were to be stressed anywhere inside the two hemistichs, the rhythmic cadence of the line would inevitably suffer. As B. Tomaševskij says:

If one is to make the syllable before the caesura stressed, according to the French habit, then it will turn out that two fixed stresses (on the caesura and on the rhyme) will fall on the first positions of feet or on the odd positions of the hemistichs. In order to maintain regularity of rhythm it is necessary to hold to trochaic feet.⁴⁵

It is important to point out, however, that Trediakovskij allowed the possibility of pyrrhic and iambic substitutions in his trochaic lines, although iambs, in his opinion, detracted considerably from the beauty of the lines.

Finally, it should be mentioned that Trediakovskij did not regard his treatise as a discourse on metrics alone, for in the second part of his treatise he provided a detailed discussion of various genres and types of poetry and even added a list of those ancient and contemporary poets whom he considered most important. The study of versification in Trediakovskij's time had not developed to the point where it could be regarded as a separate discipline, and Trediakovskij did not differentiate between matters of meter, rhyme, stanzaic structure, genre, poetic language, etc. What he aimed at was a general ars poetica to guide the aspiring and practicing Russian poets of his day. …

Seventeen years after the appearance of his treatise of 1735, Trediakovskij found it necessary to issue a revised version, which he included in the 1752 edition of his collected works. The new version has every appearance of a definitive, final statement of Trediakovskij's views on versification, and in many ways it is quite different from its predecessor. Trediakovskij claimed that there was no substantial change in his views and that the second treatise merely furnished what was lacking in the first: “True, this whole Method is composed in different words (except for the technical terms) and in different order, but the foundation and basis are still the same, and therefore it itself is the same, only, I repeat, amended and supplemented” (p. 127). However, even a superficial glance at the two treatises reveals differences that clearly go beyond mere supplementation and emendation.

The most obvious change appears in his attitude toward verse feet. In 1735 Trediakovskij completely rejected trisyllabic feet and was most unfavorably disposed toward iambics. This time he not only included iambics among the “feet used most often in our present versification” (p. 103), but even stated that the dactyl and anapest, “far from being antagonistic to our verse, even appear pleasant to those who know their strength” (p. 104). If Trediakovskij's preference for the trochee in his first treatise was primarily a matter of choosing that type of foot which would fit most easily into the old syllabic framework, then the admittance of all the other meters shows that Trediakovskij had thoroughly revised his earlier conceptions of the verse line. What the 1752 treatise actually represents is a formal acceptance of all the basic features of syllabo-tonic versification as it existed in German, and as Lomonosov had adapted it to Russian verse. Mere reform was no longer necessary; Trediakovskij's chief aim now was to provide Russian poetry with a formal code of regulations governing all aspects of Russian versification as it had developed since 1735.

It must be remembered that in his first treatise, despite its essentially deductive, quasi-mathematical method, Trediakovskij also insisted on tradition and experience, and on the example of good poets, Kantemir in particular. It is not altogether surprising, then, that in 1752 he accepted newly acquired experience and sought to integrate it into his original scheme.

Trediakovskij's acceptance of iambic feet may have been caused at least partially by a discussion which he, Sumarokov, and Lomonosov had in 1744 about the comparative merits of iambic and trochaic meters. This resulted in a kind of “public competition,” for which the 143rd Psalm was translated by Lomonosov and Sumarokov in iambics, and by Trediakovskij in trochees. At that time Trediakovskij took the position that neither the iamb nor the trochee as such had any special “emotional” value which would make one of them exalted and the other lyrical in mood. He also developed the idea that iambs and trochees are essentially only variations of one and the same rhythmic alternation; the two meters have a “secret affinity,” because “a verse consisting of pure iambics, if one were to pronounce its first syllable in a quieter voice than usual, will at the same time be a pure trochee; also, if a verse were constructed of pure trochees, then by a very quiet pronunciation of only its first syllable, it will at the same time consist of pure iambics.”⁴⁶ Formally speaking, Trediakovskij was right. One may describe a trochaic line as an iambic line with a one-syllable anacrusis.⁴⁷ In actuality, however, the characteristic movement of a poem written in iambics is entirely different from that of one written in trochees. Nevertheless, his discovery of an affinity between the two meters may have paved the way for Trediakovskij's acceptance of iambic as a legitimate meter.

Trediakovskij's adoption of trisyllabic meters provided the basis for what was perhaps his greatest achievement in versification—the development of the Russian hexameter. His best examples of this verse form are found in Argenida and Tilemaxida, where his rich hexameters combined dactyls and trochees in a manner that approached the expressiveness and flexibility of the classical hexameter. In Trediakovskij's lifetime these two works were the subject of many jokes and occasional contemptuous references to the author's poetic talent, but this was due largely to Trediakovskij's unwieldy archaic language and syntax. L. V. Pumpjanskij thinks that Trediakovskij deliberately sought to make the reading of “noble” poetry difficult, mostly by means of “Latinized” syntax. Later poets, beginning with Radiščev and afterwards Pushkin, believed that from a metrical point of view Trediakovskij's handling of the Russian hexameter in these epic works had been much underestimated.⁴⁸

Another important difference between Trediakovskij's treatises of 1735 and 1752 was his acceptance in the latter work of the division of short lines into verse feet. Here again it was essentially a matter of recognizing an established fact, for Lomonosov's odes had amply demonstrated how this could be done. However, Trediakovskij preferred to justify his change in attitude by a formal argument. In the preface to the 1752 edition of his works, he explained the matter in the following terms:

After long and deliberate subsequent considerations and thought I was able to assure myself with my own proofs that both long and short lines must necessarily consist of feet because the component parts of a prose syntactic unit cannot be distinguished from verse in any other way except by the fact that the syntactic unit has unsystematic stresses, while the stresses of a verse line are arranged by certain positions every other or every two syllables, which is what constitutes our feet, of which some begin and others end with a stress; that is, the essential difference between verse and prose is precisely the feet, combined in a line in a systematic way.⁴⁹

Another change pertained to rhyme. In 1735 Trediakovskij regarded rhyme in heroic verse as highly desirable if not structurally essential, but in 1752 he condemned it, repeating this condemnation in 1755. In 1735 he stated: “Even though rhyme in our verses is not so essential that without it a verse could not be called verse and be distinguished from prose, it is nevertheless necessary enough so that without it verse loses its best embellishment” (see p. 61). In 1752, on the other hand, rhyme was only a “marginal embellishment” “thought up in barbaric times,” not used by either Greeks or Romans, who nevertheless had reached the “very pinnacle” in poetry (see p. 120). In his preface to Tilemaxida, Trediakovskij maintained that rhyme disrupted the majestic flow of an epic narrative in verse: “Such [rhymed] verses do not constitute a river flowing from upstream downward, incessantly and uninterruptedly, to its distant goal. They are like tiny rivulets, struggling upward; and when they reach their not too distant summit, they are cut off and rush impetuously downward again, with the result that each verse has its own rapids, so to speak, and sounds forth at that point.”⁵⁰ Finally, in 1755, Trediakovskij denounced rhyme in rather strong language as a downright fault of epic verse: “In these Greek and Roman verses the hexameters, which form integral units by themselves, are not made to agree with rhyme; this clamor would have been insulting to the ancient noble gold at the line endings.”⁵¹

According to Trediakovskij, rhyme was permitted in poetry with short lines or in other verse forms which were written in stanzas. In these rhymed lines he made another departure from his position of 1735. He now allowed not only the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes, but also rhyme schemes other than couplets. Apparently he felt that a continued flow of epic narrative was not called for in such verses and that rhyme would therefore not be a hindrance. There are even indications that Trediakovskij attempted to use rhyme in such verses as a device contributing to the metric structure of the stanza.

Trediakovskij's Method of 1752, like his first treatise, attempts to discuss questions of genres and types of poetry as part of a system of versification. This time Trediakovskij does not describe genres in detail, but enumerates various types of poetry: epithalamic, bucolic, propemptic, etc. In this, as well as in the introductory discussion on what distinguishes prose from verse, his desire to provide a complete treatment of poetics is evident. It is significant that in the 1752 edition of Trediakovskij's works the treatise on versification follows his translations of Horace's Ars Poetica and Boileau's L'Art Poétique.

In conclusion, it may be said that Trediakovskij's work in the treatises of 1735 and 1752 demonstrates a scholastic mind, seeking justification for every rule or definition in logic rather than in the realities of the Russian language. However, he was certainly not unaware of the realities. Indeed, the very impetus for the development of a new versification system arose from his desire to take account of linguistic reality, especially of Russian word stress. B. Tomaševskij sees in Trediakovskij's changing attitudes a reflection of the process by which certain requirements, added as marginal correctives to an accepted canon, were later incorporated into the canon, and even became predominant:

The views of Trediakovskij quickly underwent considerable change in connection with the evolution of versification practice. What he had proposed as a corrective to the canonized meter [i.e., the syllabic] itself became meter. The system of stress distribution in verse became canonized and now constituted the very content of scholastic metrics. Iambs and trochees were no longer the marks of a variation, esthetically better or worse; they became law. Trediakovskij accepted the change that had taken place and in his second treatise himself decisively changed the structure of the metric system.⁵²

It may well be that Trediakovskij, observing the development of Russian syllabo-tonic verse in directions which did not conform to his precepts of 1735, tried to accomplish two things: first, to reformulate the laws of syllabo-tonic versification in such a way that they would encompass the new developments and again establish him as the foremost authority, and, second, to reassert his claim to being the original reformer by establishing a close connection between the two treatises.

Notes

1. According to P. M. Štokmar, Issledovanija v oblasti russkogo narodnogo stixosloženija, p. 45, the term “syllabo-tonic” was invented by a Russian critic, N. Nadeždin, in the nineteenth century. Other Russian authors have sometimes used different terms. For instance, V. N. Peretc, a noted nineteenth-century Russian authority on versification, called it the “metro-tonic” system. In English, too, this system is not always called “syllabo-tonic”; Boris Unbegaun calls it “syllabo-accentual.”

2. For a concise description of the Russian syllabo-tonic system see Boris Unbegaun, Russian Versification, pp. 11-14.

3. See Zizanij's rules of versification in Richard Burgi, A History of the Russian Hexameter, pp. 18-19.

4. For more details on the life and work of Maxim the Greek in Russia, see N. K. Gudzy, History of Early Russian Literature, Susan Wilbur Jones, tr. (New York, 1949), pp. 326 ff., and D. Čizevskij, History of Russian Literature from the Eleventh Century to the Baroque ('S-Gravenhage, 1960), pp. 291-300.

5. Burgi, pp. 20-21.

6. See ibid., chapter 2, for traces of Zizanij's and Smotrickij's systems in Russian poetry of the time. Especially interesting is the discovery by V. N. Peretc, mentioned by Burgi on p. 28, of a number of “religious verses composed entirely in accordance with Smotrickij's rules.”

7. See Unbegaun, pp. 1 ff.

8. Ad. Stender-Peterson, ed., Anthology of Old Russian Literature, p. 339.

9. On Polonization in these countries, see E. Karskij, Geschichte der weissrussischen Volksdichtung und Literatur.

10. Jan Trzykadłowski, “Rytmotwórcza funkcja akcentu w wierszu staropolskim,” introduction to Karol Wiktor Zawodziński, Studja z wersyfikacji polskiej, pp. xxvi-xlvii. …

11. Petr Pekarskij, Istorija Imperatorskoj Akademii Nauk v Peterburge, II, 4.

12. In his short autobiographical sketch, written in 1754, Trediakovskij speaks of his poverty and dependence upon Russian diplomatic representatives abroad for material survival. See A. Kunik, ed., Sbornik materialov dlja istorii Imperatorskoj Akademii Nauk v XVIII, veke, I, xiii-xiv. Trediakovskij's old alma mater, the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy, refused him any help when he turned to it in 1727, accusing him of leaving the school without permission and even of obtaining a false passport for this purpose (Pekarskij, p. 7).

13. This feeling is noticeable in Trediakovskij's Lettre d'un Russien à un de ses amis sur la nouvelle versification Russe, written in 1736. It is available in Russian translation in Trediakovskij, Stixotvorenija, pp. 354-57. The speech Trediakovskij delivered on the opening of the Assembly also reflects such feelings. See Sočinenija Trediakovskogo, I, 266-67.

14. Trediakovskij defended his views fiercely but unsuccessfully, reacting to Lomonosov's letter with a long, involved letter of refutation. This letter was never sent to Lomonosov, and was subsequently lost. See Sočinenija M. V. Lomonosova, ed. A. Suxomlinov, III (St. Petersburg, 1895), Primečanija, pp. 4-5.

15. For Trediakovskij's own account of this incident, see Sočinenija Trediakovskogo, I, 796-801.

16. This particular argument was submitted to the reading public for judgment. Each author wrote his own version, a paraphrase in verse of Psalm 143. Lomonosov and Sumarokov wrote in iambs, and Trediakovskij, in trochees. Sočinenija M. V. Lomonosova, III, Primečanija, pp. 220, 237.

17. Pekarskij, pp. 183, 195-97.

18. A number of Trediakovskij's homes and lodgings burned down; the fires occurred in 1738, 1747, and 1794.

19. Pekarskij, appendix VI, pp. 250-57.

20. Ibid., pp. 208-9.

21. For a discussion of Trediakovskij's skill in using the Russian hexameter, see Burgi, pp. 31-68.

22. V. K. Trediakovskij, “Mnenie o načale poezii i stixov voobšče,” Sočinenija Trediakovskogo, I, 194 note.

23. “O drevnem, srednem i novom stixosloženii rossijskom,” ibid., p. 739.

24. A. F. Hilferding, Onežskie byliny, St. Petersburg, 1873.

25. A. X. Vostokov, Opyt or russkom stixosloženii.

26. P. D. Goloxvastov, Zakony stixa russkogo narodnogo i našego literaturnogo.

27. Kiril Taranovski, Ruski dvodelni ritmovi, See esp. pp. 49-58, 356, and 369.

28. Roman Jakobson, “Studies in Comparative Slavic Metrics,” Oxford Slavonic Papers, III (1952), 21-26, and “The Kernel of Comparative Slavic Literature,” Harvard Slavic Studies, I (1953), 1-71.

29. Quoted by L. I. Timofeev, Očerki teorii istorii russkogo stixa, p. 316.

30. Two copies of the play have recently been found—one in Vologda, Russia, and another in Lyons, France. The title of the French publication is: La Comédie d'Artaxerxès (Artakserksovo dejstvo) présentée en 1672 au Tsar Alexis par Gregorii le Pasteur. Texte allemand et texte russe, publiés par André Mazon et Frédéric Cocron (Paris, 1954); that of the Russian edition: Artakserksovo dejstvo. Pervaja p'esa russkogo teatra XVII v., ed. with an introduction by I. M. Kudrjavcev (Moscow-Leningrad, 1957).

31. Burgi, p. 35.

32. Paus, “Praxis pietatis Melica,” manuscript No. 1.16.7.20, Biblioteka Akademii Nauk, Leningrad.

33. See V. N. Peretc, Iz istorii razvitija russkoj poezii XVIII veka, p. 284.

34. See B. Tomaševskij, Stilistika i stixosloženie, p. 326.

35. L. V. Pumpjanskij, “Trediakovskij,” Istorija russkoj literatury, Vol. III, Literatura XVIII veka, Part One, p. 224.

36. Kunik, p. xix.

37. L. I. Timofeev, “Sillabičeskji stix,” Ars Poetica, II (1928), 37-71.

38. Ibid., pp. 67-68.

39. A. V. Pozdneev in a recent study, “Die tonischen Elemente im russischen syllabischen Vers,” Zeitschrift für slavische Philologie, XXVIII no. 2, (1960), 405-12, indicates that studies of song collections in manuscripts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries show a rather high incidence of regular stress distribution in various types of verse, including the syllabic. However, as Pozdneev himself acknowledges, the theory of syllabo-tonic versification as such was developed in Russia by Trediakovskij and Lomonosov.

40. Cf. this statement by Martin Opitz: “Nachmals ist auch ein jeder verss entweder ein iambicus oder trochaicus; nicht zwar das wir auff art der griechen un lateiner eine gewisse grösse der sylben können inn acht nehmen; sondern das wir aus den accenten onnd dem thone erkennen, welche sylbe hoch onnd welche niedrig gesetzt soll werden,” Buch von der deutschen Poeterey, p. 40.

41. Tomaševskij, “Problem stixotvornogo ritma,” Literaturnaja mysl', II (1923), 5-6.

42. See Taranovski, Ruski dvodelni ritmovi, p. 50.

43. V. Trediakovskij, “O drevnem, srednem i novom stixosloženii rossijskom,” Ežemesjačnye sočinenija k pol'ze i uveseleniju služaščie, June (1755), p. 497.

44. Ibid., p. 498. Some scholars (I. Timofeev, I. Rozanov) think that this booklet was a collection of poems by the Serbian poet Iv. Gundulić (1588-1638). These poems show a clear trochaic tendency, but since they were written in octosyllabic lines they would not be directly relevant to Trediakovskij's choice of regular trochees in his heroic 13-syllable line.

45. Tomaševskij, Teorija literatury, Poetika, 6th ed., p. 99. …

46. Sočinenija Trediakovskogo, I, 329-30.

47. Cf. Tomaševskij, Russkoe stixosloženie. Metrika, p. 48.

48. For a very thorough analysis of Trediakovskij's hexameters see Burgi, chapter III.

49. Trediakovskij, “K čitatelju,” Sočinenija Trediakovskogo, I, xxiii-xxiv.

50. Ibid., II, xlvii-xlviii.

51. Trediakovskij, “O drevnem, srednem i novom stixosloženii rossijskom,” p. 125.

52. Tomaševskij, “Problema stixotvornogo ritma,” Literaturnaja mysl', p. 125.