METRIC AND LEXICAL DIVERSITY IN A. A. VOZNESENSKY’S VERSE

The paper represents an attempt to evaluate the evolution of A. A. Voznesensky’s poetics according to a number of formal parameters, which include the variety of verse meters used by the poet and the variety of words in the poetic vocabulary. The traditional for biology Shannon diversity index is used to calculate the diversity of meters, and the metrics TTR and CTTR are used to evaluate the lexical diversity. The paper compares two periods of the poet’s work, an early one, including texts from the early 1950s to the early 1970s, and a later one, from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s. These two datasets differ in that the fi rst is part of the poetry corpus within the RNC and has manual markup, while the second is not yet marked up for the corpus and has been processed in an automatic way. The results of the study show that, by verse, Voznesensky is the most diverse among the major poets of his generation and probably one of the most diverse of the fi rst-line poets. Lexical diversity generally correlates with metrical diversity, but this tendency is contradicted by Yesenin’s data in the corpus. From the second half of the 1970s, Voznesensky’s verse diversity decreases, but still remains high, and he surpasses Evtu shenko and Pasternak in this indicator. The lexical diversity in his poetry also decreases, but the poetic vocabulary changes signifi cantly, and if diversity is understood as a diff erence from his earlier work, then this diversity is clearly visible in the data.