RUSSIAN PRE-SYLLABIC VERSE: THE PROBLEMS OF CLASSIFICATION

The verse of the Russian written poetry in the first part of the XVIIth century did not have a distinct structure. It was an intermediary between rhymed prose and strict syllabism. Literature dedicated to pre-syllabic verse problems traditionally considers it to be homogeneous and discusses mainly the origin of this verse and its borders. The article suggests a classification of Russian pre-syllabic verse forms based on the analysis of the line length. There are at least two types of such verse which have significant structural distinctions. The hypothesis is that the “long” verse has its roots in the quantitative rules of Slavic grammars of the XVIth — XVIIth centuries, while the “short” one relates to Polish and Ukranian syllabism. This classification does not depend on a concrete author. The second type is more constrained, its loosening goes together with lengthening, and vice versa, in the first type shortening accompanies loosening. The diachronic analysis shows that the second type which must have been displaced during the process of the reform preparation actually kept on existing during the entire first part of the XVII century. This proves that the appearance of syllabic prosody did not have any natural metric prerequisites.