CAESURA IN THE RUSSIAN IAMBIC PENTAMETER AND ITS IMPACT ON THE RHYTHMIC EVOLUTION OF THIS METER

The present paper regards iambic pentameter which is one the most frequent meters in Russian poetry and one of the best examined. Its rhythmic patterns had been studied by Kirill Taranovsky with Mikhail Gasparov in their notably works on Russian versification. Nevertheless, a number of rhythmic relevant facts had been neglected in these studies, especially an issue of caesura. In popular handbooks, iambic pentameter is still regarded as caesured meter although most of the examples of this meter definitely demonstrate lack of caesura. Despite that, the history of caesura in Russian iambic pentameter can be a subject of certain investigation because of its connection to the history of non-traditional modernist metrics. In the first iambic pentameters, the caesura after the second foot preceded by fixed accent was applied by Vasiliy Trediakovsky and Aleksander Sumarokov. This interpretation of caesura was quite different from such in the iambic hexameter where these poets always implemented caesura without a fixed accent. Quite soon, the iambic pentameter was vanishing from the repertoire of the epoch and returned at the end of the century. In the late 1810s, there was a dispute on caesura in the iambic pentameter between Vasiliy Zhukovskiy and Aleksandr Pushkin: the elder poet in his translation of Johann Jakob Hebel’s Die Vergänglichkeit showed implementation of un-caesured verse in narrative poetry, and then Pushkin wrote a quite malign epigram on this Zhukovsky’s oeuvre in order to return to caesured verse in Boris Godunov several years later and, afterwards, to decline this verse in Domik v Kolomne. After several decades, at the early fin- de-siècle time, Konstatin Balmont partially returned to caesured verse in his attempts to renovate traditional Russian metrics. In his pentameters, there was no constant caesura as in Pushkin’s Boris Godunov; instead of this, there was a bias to caesura keeping a strong resemblance to the old caesured pentameter. This bias was repeated by many poets from the early 1900s to the late 1910s where attempts to renovate the old metrics were replaced by attempts to invent the new ones. This kind of iambic pentameter was implemented by Vyacheslav Ivanov, Ivan Bunin, Zinaida Gippius, Vladislav Khodasevich, Nikolay Tikhonov and other poets. A significant poem demonstrating how these two different kinds of metrics replace each other is Osip Mandelshtam’s “Dano mne telo...” (1909). The verse of this poem can be interpreted both as iambic pentameter and as four-accenteddolnik (strict stress meter in terms of English versification). This ambiguity is an effect of lacking routine caesura after the second foot followed by the frequent paroxytonal and proparoxytonal accents after the third. All of these make an impression of a symmetric two-segmented and two-accented verse pattern. One can say this poem was a summit in the history of caesured pentameter: in the following 20th century poetry, caesured iambic pentameter was used only by the poets who wanted to stylize 19th century poetry. Unlike the un-caesured iambic pentameter, the caesured iambic pentameter was one of the rarest meters in the 20th century Russian poetry.