LITERARY USE OF METRICAL AND RHYTHMICAL FORMS OF LAPIDARIAN STYLE GRAVESTONE WRITINGS AND THEIR SOCIAL-CULTURAL ANALOGUES

Verse and verse-like writings on gravestones are normally short and often employ forms not very widely spread in traditional literary verse: monostich (verse consisting of a single line), two uneven verse with no rhyme (as if a line an a half), two lines with no rhyme and with uneven clausulae (as if half of a four-line stanza), three- and four-line stanzas not fully rhymed, prose, where text is written to look as a picture. The shortest of these forms are used also in slogans, on posters, billboards. Non-characteristic of regular literature they are still reflected in it and sometimes influence it. In this article we describe the interaction of these nonliterary and regular literary forms, present in the works of poets and prose writers of XVIII–XX centuries including G. R. Derzhavin, I. I. Hemnitser, N. M. Karamzin, A. S. Pushkin, N. V. Gogol P. S. Mochalov, A. I. Gertsen, N. A. Nekrasov, F. M. Dostoevsky, V. M. Garshin, A. M. Remizov, Andrey Bely, M. A. Voloshin, N. S. Gumilev, A. A. Akhmatova (as Gasparov puts it, in later Akhmatova’s verse shortness “doesn’t harm it’s monument-like stature, their fragmentary character makes them look as monument fragments”), B. A. Pilnyak, K. K. Vaginov, A. P. Platonov, G. I. Gazdanov, Yu. I. Koval, A. A. Voznesensky, K. V.Vasilyev. Special attention is paid to the real gravestone writings and literary epitaphs, popular in XVIII and less in XIX epitaphs-satires, which being opposite to tragic and full of praise real epitaphs “used the notion of ‘dead’ for spiritually dumb persons” (S. D. Krzhizhanovsky). It is shown that metrical and rhythmical structure of literary epitaphs is not as free and varied as the structure of real epitaphs normally produced by non-professionals.