CAESURA IN RUSSIAN VERSE: AN ATTEMPT AT A FORMAL DESCRIPTION

This article offers a description of such category of Russian verse as caesura. The most relevant attempt to describe caesura in Russian verse was that of Viktor Zhirmun- skii and James Bailey; on the basis of their taxonomy, author formulates the classification of metrical caesura, which would be applicable to the entire corpus of Russian poetic texts, regardless of the system of versification to which they belong. During more than four centuries of its existence, Russian literary versification made use of various systems of versification, sometimes combining them with one another. According to the generally accepted point of view, there were three systems: syllabics (sillabika), accentual syllabics (sillabo-tonika), and tonika (including strict stress and loose meters in Russian tradition). The boundaries between them remained transparent throughout the entire existence of Russian written poetry. The notion of caesura is relevant for all these versification sys- tems, although each of them uses it differently. This article is a brief introduction to the theory of caesura, which, however, can be used for further research on this issue, not only in Russian but also in world poetry.