Poetry is one of the four sections of poetics (along with genology, composition, and stylistics ) that studies the rhythmic structure of literary works. Poetry is most often reduced to the study of poetic phonics , metrics and stanzas .
Tasks of Poetry
According to its tasks, poetry in ancient times and in the Middle Ages was mainly a descriptive discipline, a set of rules that had a significant nomenclature, applied and normative character.
Poetry arose in connection with the applied tasks of poetic practice; it is no accident that the poets themselves were engaged in poetry. In Russia, the greatest theoreticians of the poem were A. D. Kantemir , V. K. Trediakovsky , M. V. Lomonosov , A. P. Sumarokov , A. Kh. Vostokov , A. M. Kubarev [1] , L. I. Polivanov .
In the XX century, poetry is emerging in science. The object of study of this science are "poetic texts", poems. A poem is a text that is felt as a speech of increased importance, designed for memorization and repetition, divided into comparable and comparable segments. The word “verse” in Greek means “row”, the Latin synonym “ versus ” (compare with Russian “verses”) means “turn”, “return to the beginning of the row”.
The Making of Science
As a science, poetry is taking shape in Russia in the first third of the 20th century.
The foundations of future science are laid in the works of Andrei Bely (the collection "Symbolism", 1910), as well as in the Moscow Linguistic Circle , in the OPOYAZ .
In the field of studying a poetic meter, scientific measurement procedures are beginning to be applied, and for the first time the content of the object of study is formulated (“meter” in this case).
A. Bely considers the “deviations” from the ideal four-foot iamba among Russian poets and comes to the conclusion that the statistics of such “deviations” are individual in character for the poet and for historical time. The statistics of deviations from schematic stresses, extra-schematic pyrrhichs, expresses the rhythmic "wealth" or "poverty" of poetry. In particular, according to Bely's calculations, a rhythmic upheaval took place in the poetry of V.A. Zhukovsky in the four-foot Russian iamba: the proportion of pyrrhichia on the first foot increased significantly and the proportion of the pyrrhichia on the second foot decreased approximately the same. The rhythmic structure of the four-foot iamba acquires a two-term character with stronger second and fourth ikts (syllables) and with weaker first and third.
Although the interpretation of the results achieved by A. Bely is currently not generally accepted, the approach in itself is fruitful and fundamental.
In 1941, Cyril Taranovsky defended his doctoral dissertation “Bilingual Russian Dimensions”, in 1953 it was published (the first full publication in Russian in 2010).
The work of K. Taranovsky contains statistical material from hundreds of thousands of poetic lines of two-syllable Russian sizes of the 18th and 19th centuries. Taranovsky formulates two laws of Russian two-fold dimensions of the 18th-19th centuries, summarizing and explaining, in particular, the phenomenon discovered by A. Bely. These two laws are as follows:
- “The law of stabilization of the first ict after the first weak time in the line” (that is, the increased stress frequency in the four-stop iamba on the second syllable, and in the chorea on the first becomes the “norm”);
- “The law of regressive (accent) dissimilation”, which states that “ikta strength” (frequency of stress) falls from the last (strongest) ikta in the line to the beginning of the line.
Poetry in the second half of the XX and at the beginning of the XXI century
The Moscow-Tartu Semiotic School takes shape as heirs of the Russian beginning of the 20th century; R. Jacobson and Kirill Taranovsky are working in the USA.
In the second half of the 20th century, statistical approaches are developed in linguistics in general and in poetry in particular. These works are stimulated by the development of cybernetics and the capabilities of computer technology. Academician A.N. Kolmogorov creates a theory of complexity and applies information theory to a literary text.
At the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries, research turned to the formulation of approaches that would allow a numerical assessment of syncretic poetic “effects”: the connections of metrics with grammar, metrics with phonics, metrics with semantics.
Notes
- ↑ Author of the work “The Theory of Russian Versification” (1837).
Bibliography
- Poetry / M. L. Gasparov // Big Russian Encyclopedia : [in 35 vols.] / Ch. ed. Yu.S. Osipov . - M .: Great Russian Encyclopedia, 2004—2017.
- Andrey Bely Symbolism. Book of articles. M., Publishing House "Cultural Revolution", "Republic", 2010.
- Taranovsky Cyril Russian two-syllable sizes. Articles about the verse. Publishing House "Languages of Slavic Culture", M. , 2010.
- Gasparov M. L. Russian poems of the 1890s - 1925th in the comments . - M.: Higher School, 1993.
- Gasparov M. L. , Skulacheva T. V. Articles on the linguistics of the verse. Publishing House "Languages of Slavic Culture", M. , 2004.
- Moskvin V.P. Theoretical Foundations of Poetry. 2nd ed. M., 2018.
- Kolshevnikov V.V. Basics of poetry. Russian versification. M., 2002.