TRADITIONS OF RUSSIAN VERSE SYNTAX STUDY: B. I. YARKHO AND M. L. GASPAROV

This article examines the approaches to the formal study of Russian poetic syntax that Boris I. Yarkho and then Mikhail L. Gasparov had in common. First, different ways of classifying syntactic units, designed specifically for verse study, are analyzed. Almost all of Gasparovʼs classifications for such units are then presented, thereby allowing us to trace how the ways for distinguishing the types of weak and strong syntactic units in verse evolved—and to demonstrate that the kind of classification depended primarily on the goals of the specific study. In addition, this paper shows that the syntactical analysis of Mayakovskyʼs verse in a famous article by Gasparov draws directly upon the methods put forth by Yarkho in his unpublished dissertation on Hrotsvitʼs rhymed prose. Gasparov’s analysis of the syntax of Pushkinʼs 6-foot iamb goes back to that same work by Yarkho. Thus this study demonstrates that some principles for the syntactic analysis of verse were common to both scholars. The findings here indicate that Gasparov certainly saw Yarkho as his distant teacher and also open the way for further research on this topic.