"A Music of Letters": Reconsidering Eikhenbaum's "Melodics of Verse"

Abstract

Boris Eikhenbaum’s daring study of verse intonation, The Melodics of the Russian Lyric Verse [Melodika russkogo liricheskogo stikha], published by OPOIAZ in 1922, was a landmark text in Eikhenbaum’s biography and the history of Russian Formalism. This retrospective review-essay sets Melodics in multiple contexts. These include the “phonocentrism” of early 20th-century Russian culture, the interest in Germano-American Ohrenphilologie (aural or acoustic philology) shared by scholars of the Institute of the Living Word; Eikhenbaum’s estrangement from both the linguistics of Eduard Sievers and the circumspect academicism represented by his friend Viktor Zhirmunsky; his attraction to the early Formalist concepts of Viktor Shklovsky and Osip Brik; and even, despite his initial revulsion for Futurism, his acceptance in verse-study methodology of a Futurist concept of considerably desemanticized poetic language. A methodological critique of Melodics and related articles correlates Eikhenbaum’s interest in verse declamation with the concept of osmyslennaia intonatsiia [“meaningful or conceptualized intonation”] then being developed by the musicologist Boris Asafyev. Eikhenbaum, a serious student of the violin and piano, and the composer-theorist Asafyev noted one another’s work on speech intonation with great sympathy. They shared an interest in Mussorgsky’s conscious derivation of melos from speech, but their models of intonation, it is argued here, proved incompatible, even antithetical. A review of logical conundrums in Melodics, partly supported by Zhirmunsky’s contemporary review, focuses on a contradictory relationship to a causative model of linguistics and “technical” empiricism, and a fundamental petitio principii in Eikhenbaum’s presumption that in verses of “the melodious type” “the melodic use of speech intonation is the fundamental factor in their composition” (Melodics 17). What remains of permanent value in Melodics is a body of brilliant syntactical observations on Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tiutchev, and Fet. As Eikhenbaum himself argued: “theories perish or change, but the facts discovered and established with their help remain” (Melodics 195).