CAESURA IN THE RUSSIAN THEORY OF VERSE FROM MELETIUS SMOTRYTSKY TO ANDREY BELY

The paper regards a reflection on the concept “caesura” in 18th — early 20th centuries’ Russian theory of verse. The author traces how this concept borrowed from ancient Greek and Latin metrics was been changed by different metrics’ theorists to be applied to the poetry of their epoch when the major metrical systems were syllabics and syllabo-tonics rather than quantitative (as ancient Greek and Latin) metrics. In this paper, the theories of Miletius Smotrytsky, Vasiliy Trediakovsky, Antiokh Kantemir, Nikolai Ostolopov, Alexandr Vostokov, Petr Perevlesky, Fedor Korsch et al. scholars are analyzing. Although no one of these theorists supposed that caesura is a core element of versification system, it was a “weak point” of many these theories that sometimes had crushed these theories entirely. Nevertheless a number of these “pre-scientific” works on verse and caesura exposes a wide comprehension of the concept “caesura” that could be extended by contemporary investigations into the Russian metrics (guided by both quantitative and typological approach). The author lists a number of fragments from the 18th-20th centuries’ works on versification and analyzes them from the point of view of contemporary theories of metrics.