RHYMING OF SIX-VERSE STANZAS IN RUSSIAN POETRY: CORPUS STATISTICS

Poems written in six-verse stanzas exhibit a great variety of rhyming schemes. This article conducts a statistical study of these schemes on the material of the Poetic Corpus within the Russian National Corpus. The analysis of 2,433 texts written in six-verse stanzas shows that the ABABCC type was most widely used in 18th century Russian poetry, while AABCCB type was the most popular afterwards. It is shown that the rule of alternans plays an important role in the structure of six-verse stanzas; it is particularly evident in the combinatory strophic experiments of Nikolai Gumilyov. The fi nal section of the article gives statistics of the frequency of stanzas in individual authors.