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Teoriya stikha
REVIEWS
V. Ye. Kholshevnikov (ed.), Teoriya stikha. Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1968. 316 pp. 1 rub., 42 kop.
The phonetic, morphological and syntactic peculiarities of the Russian language are such that they provide an almost inexhaustible fount of rhythmic and rhyming possibilities. For this reason, even at the height of the Modernist movement (which in Russia went to lengths as extreme as any experimental poetry in the world before or since) the vast mass of Russian poetry has remained faithful to the five traditional metres or recognizable modifications of them. This metrical regularity has enabled analysts to study the principles of metre and rhythm in poetry by statistical methods. The origins of this approach are usually credited to Andrey Bely in his pioneering but not wholly reliable articles in Simvolizm (1910). Bely's work was carried on by the Formalists and in the next two decades a vast amount of information was amassed on the peculiarities of Russian verse, the metrical characteristics of the major poets, and their predilections for certain rhythmic patterns within their chosen metres. With the outlawing of Formalism at the end of the 1920s these techniques also fell into disfavour. Since about 1958, however, there has been a clearly marked revival of interest in this kind of analysis. The present volume is a good example of the variety of methods within the same overall approach. Despite the title (Theory of Verse) the problems discussed revolve round two central questions of Russian metrics: first, the emergence of the syllabo-tonic (or metrical) system from the older Polish-influenced purely syllabic versification at the end of the seventeenth century; and second, the nature of the Russian dol'nik, a type of line that seems to hover between the duple and the triple metres. This kind of line is common in English poetry:
114
REVIEWS The owl and the pussy-cat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat. They took some honey and plenty of money wrapped up in a five-pound note.
In these lines the anacrusis is irregular as also tlle intervals (either one or two syllables) between the metrical accents. To an English ear the irregularity is hardly perceptible; but such variation was, until comparatively recently, virtually inadmissible in Russian versification. If in English poetry the lines tend to alternate three and four stresses, the Russian dol'nik usually (but by no means invariably) has three; it is this line that has been most studied. Tile dol'nik entered Russian poetry via translations from English and German, and its first appearance in original verse dates effectively from the 1890s; since then, however, it has revealed unsuspected possibilities. Many of the 'modern' poets of Russia to-day, Brodsky, Voznesensky, Akhmadulina, as well as many more conventional ones, have continued to develop its potential. In this volume the dol'nik is treated from a variety of angles. Gasparov in "Russkiy trekhudarnyy dol'nik XX veka" provides a magisterial account based on an analysis of over 50,000 lines taken from 64 poets from Gippius to Voznesensky. He examines the different metrical possibilities and the varieties of word-divisions within the line to test the claim that the doI'nik is closer to prose rhythms than conventionally metric poetry. His researches, backed by some complex statistical analyses, convincingly refute this theory; the arrangement of the accents and (less predictably) the length of the anacrusis prove to be as important in the dol'nik as in traditional syllabo-tonic poetry. Gasparov then goes on to show the emergence throughout the twentieth century of the dol'nik into a syllabo-tonic metre in its own right, with a predominantly disyllabic anacrusis. On the way he has some masterly comments on the tendencies of different poets to favour different varieties of dol'nik line within the same overall pattern. If this is not quite the last word on the dol'nik, it is certainly a massive foundation for further research. Kolmogorov fills in some of the detail in an examination of two types of dol'nik with disyllabic anacrusis in Tsvetayeva's poems "Stol" and "Poema kontsa'. In a patient analysis of the rhythmical variants and the word-divisions, and, in particular, of the enjambements, he is able to bring out the different characteristics of each variety. V. V. Ivanov tries to demonstrate the rhythmical unity behind the various metres and dol'niki in "Poema kontsa", but this is not so successful, and, unfortunately, the article is weakened by an excessive number of arithmetical errors.
REVIEWS
| 15
V. I. Pavlova gives the results of an experiment designed to test Kvyatkovsky's hypothesis that poetic rhythm is based on musical rhythm. According to this theory there should be a syncopation or a pause in the reading of a dol'nik (hence the term pauznik favoured by some critics) in order to allow for the missing syllable or syllables. The experimental results obtained from a panel of readers disproved the theory, at least in its crudest form, with surprising unanimity. The theory, however, is not quite dead yet; it could still be argued that since the meaning of words is far less dependent on the rhythm than that of musical notes, poetry permits of a far greater range of rubato than would be tolerable in musical performance. The other body of articles is concerned with the origins of classical Russian versification. The late B. I. Yarkho in "Rifmovannaya proza russkikh intermediy i interlyudiy" treats some very unrewarding material from the early eighteenth century, in some of which he tentatively discerns the remote 'ancestors' of the syllabo-tonic system. The remaining articles deal with the vexed question of early Russian syllabic verse. In the late seventeenth century Russian poets imitated the Polish syllabic metres, including the characteristic Polish feminine rhymes. Many of these rhymes, however, would be impossible with normal stressing, e.g. prib~zhishche/pristdnishche. The attempts to account for such anomalies have led to passionate controversies. Berkov has argued that Russian poets and readers deformed their pronunciation in order to conform with Polish practice; the use of accents might seem to indicate that the poets were conscious of departing from the usual pronunciation, but the inconsistency of the accenting system, sometimes on stressed, sometimes on unstressed syllables, is a serious weakness in the argument. Tomashevsky, on the other hand, has posited the existence of a special declamatory style, which ironed out the distinctions between stressed and unstressed syllables, and so would make examples such as the above true rhymes. Kholshevnikov again has suggested that Russian stress was not yet strong enough to provide a basis for accentual metre; he detects the beginning of this differentiation in Feofan Prokopovich and its full emergence in Kantemir and Trediyakovsky. This might seem the most plausible theory, but a recent article by Gasparov has seriously weakened it. This is an important collection of articles, well organized round two crucial points in the history of Russian versification. The essays are scholarly, the statistical techniques often sophisticated and the arguments usually cogent. There is a healthy spirit of controversy, both over accepted
116
REVIEWS
ideas and among the various contributors, which augurs well for the future of such studies in the Soviet Union.
University of Toronto
R.D.a. THOMSON
Geoffrey N. Leech, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry. London, Longman, 1969. xvi + 240 pp. This is an elementary textbook on stylistics intended for use by beginning undergraduates. Published four years ago, it remains, I believe, the only book of its kind. More advanced students are well served by several anthologies (Chatman and Levin, Essays on the Language of Literature [1967]; Freeman, Linguistics and Literary Style [1970]) and symposia (Sebeok, Style in Language [1960]; Chatman, Literary Style: A Symposium [1971]), but Dr Leech's book is the only full-length exposition of the linguistic conventions of English poetry addressed t o a relatively uninitiated audience. This book reflects the pragmatic, texture-conscious, mode of linguistic stylistics typical of England and America in the early and mid-1960s rather than the now more widely known theoretical and structural poetics of continental Europe. Its antecedents, the sources of its framework, are the time-honoured tradition of rhetoric, the New Criticism in its international, less polemic style, and neo-Firthian linguistics. The reader is shielded from technical and theoretical complications associated with these schools: some will feel that this protection has resulted in a lack of sophistication, superficiality in the way certain ideas are treated, but it must be remembered that the book is addressed to elementary students. In my opinion Leech was wise to skirt the theoretical difficulties of modern poetics: his book avoids being intimidating, and should forestall some of the familiar prejudices of literary critics against the alleged jargonizing and theoretical barrenness of 'linguistic stylistics'. Following up his earlier paper ("Linguistics and the Figures of Rhetoric", in: Fowler, Essays on Style and Language [1966]), Leech aims to encourage students to construct 'a descriptive rhetoric' (3-5). He seeks to provide linguistic explanations for the traditional terms and concepts of rhetoric and thereby to make them accessible to, and analytically useful to, the modern reader of poetry. Chapters 1-4 are essentially preliminary to this enterprise, comprising brief general discussions of various relationships between poetic language and other uses of language
V. Ye. Kholshevnikov (ed.), Teoriya stikha. Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1968. 316 pp. 1 rub., 42 kop.
The phonetic, morphological and syntactic peculiarities of the Russian language are such that they provide an almost inexhaustible fount of rhythmic and rhyming possibilities. For this reason, even at the height of the Modernist movement (which in Russia went to lengths as extreme as any experimental poetry in the world before or since) the vast mass of Russian poetry has remained faithful to the five traditional metres or recognizable modifications of them. This metrical regularity has enabled analysts to study the principles of metre and rhythm in poetry by statistical methods. The origins of this approach are usually credited to Andrey Bely in his pioneering but not wholly reliable articles in Simvolizm (1910). Bely's work was carried on by the Formalists and in the next two decades a vast amount of information was amassed on the peculiarities of Russian verse, the metrical characteristics of the major poets, and their predilections for certain rhythmic patterns within their chosen metres. With the outlawing of Formalism at the end of the 1920s these techniques also fell into disfavour. Since about 1958, however, there has been a clearly marked revival of interest in this kind of analysis. The present volume is a good example of the variety of methods within the same overall approach. Despite the title (Theory of Verse) the problems discussed revolve round two central questions of Russian metrics: first, the emergence of the syllabo-tonic (or metrical) system from the older Polish-influenced purely syllabic versification at the end of the seventeenth century; and second, the nature of the Russian dol'nik, a type of line that seems to hover between the duple and the triple metres. This kind of line is common in English poetry:
114
REVIEWS The owl and the pussy-cat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat. They took some honey and plenty of money wrapped up in a five-pound note.
In these lines the anacrusis is irregular as also tlle intervals (either one or two syllables) between the metrical accents. To an English ear the irregularity is hardly perceptible; but such variation was, until comparatively recently, virtually inadmissible in Russian versification. If in English poetry the lines tend to alternate three and four stresses, the Russian dol'nik usually (but by no means invariably) has three; it is this line that has been most studied. Tile dol'nik entered Russian poetry via translations from English and German, and its first appearance in original verse dates effectively from the 1890s; since then, however, it has revealed unsuspected possibilities. Many of the 'modern' poets of Russia to-day, Brodsky, Voznesensky, Akhmadulina, as well as many more conventional ones, have continued to develop its potential. In this volume the dol'nik is treated from a variety of angles. Gasparov in "Russkiy trekhudarnyy dol'nik XX veka" provides a magisterial account based on an analysis of over 50,000 lines taken from 64 poets from Gippius to Voznesensky. He examines the different metrical possibilities and the varieties of word-divisions within the line to test the claim that the doI'nik is closer to prose rhythms than conventionally metric poetry. His researches, backed by some complex statistical analyses, convincingly refute this theory; the arrangement of the accents and (less predictably) the length of the anacrusis prove to be as important in the dol'nik as in traditional syllabo-tonic poetry. Gasparov then goes on to show the emergence throughout the twentieth century of the dol'nik into a syllabo-tonic metre in its own right, with a predominantly disyllabic anacrusis. On the way he has some masterly comments on the tendencies of different poets to favour different varieties of dol'nik line within the same overall pattern. If this is not quite the last word on the dol'nik, it is certainly a massive foundation for further research. Kolmogorov fills in some of the detail in an examination of two types of dol'nik with disyllabic anacrusis in Tsvetayeva's poems "Stol" and "Poema kontsa'. In a patient analysis of the rhythmical variants and the word-divisions, and, in particular, of the enjambements, he is able to bring out the different characteristics of each variety. V. V. Ivanov tries to demonstrate the rhythmical unity behind the various metres and dol'niki in "Poema kontsa", but this is not so successful, and, unfortunately, the article is weakened by an excessive number of arithmetical errors.
REVIEWS
| 15
V. I. Pavlova gives the results of an experiment designed to test Kvyatkovsky's hypothesis that poetic rhythm is based on musical rhythm. According to this theory there should be a syncopation or a pause in the reading of a dol'nik (hence the term pauznik favoured by some critics) in order to allow for the missing syllable or syllables. The experimental results obtained from a panel of readers disproved the theory, at least in its crudest form, with surprising unanimity. The theory, however, is not quite dead yet; it could still be argued that since the meaning of words is far less dependent on the rhythm than that of musical notes, poetry permits of a far greater range of rubato than would be tolerable in musical performance. The other body of articles is concerned with the origins of classical Russian versification. The late B. I. Yarkho in "Rifmovannaya proza russkikh intermediy i interlyudiy" treats some very unrewarding material from the early eighteenth century, in some of which he tentatively discerns the remote 'ancestors' of the syllabo-tonic system. The remaining articles deal with the vexed question of early Russian syllabic verse. In the late seventeenth century Russian poets imitated the Polish syllabic metres, including the characteristic Polish feminine rhymes. Many of these rhymes, however, would be impossible with normal stressing, e.g. prib~zhishche/pristdnishche. The attempts to account for such anomalies have led to passionate controversies. Berkov has argued that Russian poets and readers deformed their pronunciation in order to conform with Polish practice; the use of accents might seem to indicate that the poets were conscious of departing from the usual pronunciation, but the inconsistency of the accenting system, sometimes on stressed, sometimes on unstressed syllables, is a serious weakness in the argument. Tomashevsky, on the other hand, has posited the existence of a special declamatory style, which ironed out the distinctions between stressed and unstressed syllables, and so would make examples such as the above true rhymes. Kholshevnikov again has suggested that Russian stress was not yet strong enough to provide a basis for accentual metre; he detects the beginning of this differentiation in Feofan Prokopovich and its full emergence in Kantemir and Trediyakovsky. This might seem the most plausible theory, but a recent article by Gasparov has seriously weakened it. This is an important collection of articles, well organized round two crucial points in the history of Russian versification. The essays are scholarly, the statistical techniques often sophisticated and the arguments usually cogent. There is a healthy spirit of controversy, both over accepted
116
REVIEWS
ideas and among the various contributors, which augurs well for the future of such studies in the Soviet Union.
University of Toronto
R.D.a. THOMSON
Geoffrey N. Leech, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry. London, Longman, 1969. xvi + 240 pp. This is an elementary textbook on stylistics intended for use by beginning undergraduates. Published four years ago, it remains, I believe, the only book of its kind. More advanced students are well served by several anthologies (Chatman and Levin, Essays on the Language of Literature [1967]; Freeman, Linguistics and Literary Style [1970]) and symposia (Sebeok, Style in Language [1960]; Chatman, Literary Style: A Symposium [1971]), but Dr Leech's book is the only full-length exposition of the linguistic conventions of English poetry addressed t o a relatively uninitiated audience. This book reflects the pragmatic, texture-conscious, mode of linguistic stylistics typical of England and America in the early and mid-1960s rather than the now more widely known theoretical and structural poetics of continental Europe. Its antecedents, the sources of its framework, are the time-honoured tradition of rhetoric, the New Criticism in its international, less polemic style, and neo-Firthian linguistics. The reader is shielded from technical and theoretical complications associated with these schools: some will feel that this protection has resulted in a lack of sophistication, superficiality in the way certain ideas are treated, but it must be remembered that the book is addressed to elementary students. In my opinion Leech was wise to skirt the theoretical difficulties of modern poetics: his book avoids being intimidating, and should forestall some of the familiar prejudices of literary critics against the alleged jargonizing and theoretical barrenness of 'linguistic stylistics'. Following up his earlier paper ("Linguistics and the Figures of Rhetoric", in: Fowler, Essays on Style and Language [1966]), Leech aims to encourage students to construct 'a descriptive rhetoric' (3-5). He seeks to provide linguistic explanations for the traditional terms and concepts of rhetoric and thereby to make them accessible to, and analytically useful to, the modern reader of poetry. Chapters 1-4 are essentially preliminary to this enterprise, comprising brief general discussions of various relationships between poetic language and other uses of language