Syntactic Organisation of A. D. Kantemir’s Poems

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to identify and characterise the typological features of the “syntactic portrait” of A. D. Kantemir in the aspects of identification of the “average” poetic syntactic norm of the epoch, as well as in close connection of the grammar of an individual verse with the features of genre differentiation, architectonics of poetic works, and versification. The article refers to the data of the first volume of the Syntactic Dictionary of 18th-Century Russian Poetry. Revealing the syntactic dominants of Antiochus Kantemir’s style, including the background of the general literary norm of the era, as well as in the aspect of the connection between the “syntactic portrait” of the reformer poet and the peculiarities of the genre differentiation of the versification and architectonics of his poetic works, sheds light on the essence of Kantemir’s linguistic programme. His syllabics is particularly complex from the point of view of its construction: on average, 80 percent of sentences are polypredicative. The long line length of the syllabic texts requires the verse to be filled with various distributors and complicators of the sentence, including participle clauses. The verse of the satires tends to include definite-personal, generalised-personal, and indefinite-personal one-member sentences, imperative, and interrogative statements. Kantemir introduces constructions that originate in living speech into the structure of the verse: the nominative of the theme and infinitive of the theme, insertion, and introductory modal and connecting syntagmata. Referring to antique and French classic patterns, Kantemir the rhetorician often uses such figures of speech as rhetorical questions, periods, inversions, repetition, and amplification. Kantemir’s grammar formed under the influence of various literary traditions — Ancient Greek, Latin, Old Church Slavonic literature, European Baroque, and Western Russian syllabics — and is synthetic in its origin and a very complex and strictly organised system, intended primarily for the embodiment of educational ideas and the construction of polemical discourse. The logically complex course of the author’s reflection naturally mirrors the equally logically “difficult” syntax.