POETIC SYNTAX OF ANTIOCH KANTEMIR

The purpose of the article is to analyze the typological features of the “syntactic portrait” of Antioch Kantemir, including the connection between the grammar of his idiostyle and the peculiarities of versifi cation and genre diff erentiation of poetic works. The hypothesis of the research is the assumption of the synthetic nature of the style of  A. Kantemir which is close at the same time to the traditions of the Old-Russian book style of “weaving words”, showing tendencies towards syntactic complication and ampli- fi cation, and to the baroque style, with its striving for fancifully decorated style, eclectic, saturated with contrasting features, and not to the classic order, clarity and precision of expression. The identifi cation of the grammatical dominants of Kantemir’s style sheds light on the essence of his linguistic ideas, contributes to the reconstruction of the language pro- gram of the reformer of the Russian literary language. Syllabics demonstrates the par- ticular complexity of construction: on average, 80% of sentences are polypredicative. The long line length of the syllabic texts requires fi lling the verse with various extensions and complicators of the sentence, among which adverbial participial phrases are pecu- liarly active. Focusing on antique and French classic patterns, the demands of rhetoric, Kantemir often uses fi gures of speech such as a rhetorical question, period, inversion, repetition, amplifi cation. The syntax of Kantemir was formed at the intersection of many literary traditions — Church Slavonic, Ancient Greek, Latin literature, West Russian syl- labics, European Baroque — and is synthetic in its origins and very sophisticated in ac- cordance with the main artistic task of the creator of the new Russian lyre — to translate the ideas of enlighteners condemning vices into the conditions of the emerging secular literature which remained elitist. The logically complex way of the author’s thought is naturally refl ected in the equally logically “diffi cult” syntax.