The development of Russian verse: meter and its meanings

Abstract

Michael Wachtel. The Development of Russian Verse: Meter and its Meanings. Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature. Cambridge University Press, 1998. xii + 323 pages. Notes, Bibliography, Index.The classical notion that individual verse metres are destined for particular poetic uses is taken up and renovated in Michael Wachtel's ambitious book. As Joseph Brodsky put it in an essay on Mandelstam: Meters in themselves are kinds of for which nothing can be substituted. They cannot be replaced even by each other, let alone by free In his translation of Tristia into English iambic pentameter Brodsky demonstrated, perhaps inadvertently, that these spiritual magnitudes do not necessarily survive translation from one language to another even when metre is scrupulously reproduced.Wachtel argues that particular metres acquire indelible thematic associations that recur in subsequent uses of form. Part of what makes metres distinctive is accumulated tradition of poems that have employed them. As Wachtel points out, Russian poets have always expected their readers to hear and understand historical echoes of metrical tradition they work within. Anyone who has read widely in a poetic tradition will find these assertions unarguable, and extent to which author labours his point may reflect fact that book began life as teaching materials for a graduate seminar. Wachtel's introduction gives several astute examples, including parodies and limericks, of ways in which metres can acquire thematic reminiscences in an experienced reader's mind.In tracing semantic aura around verse metres Wachtel owes a large and generously acknowledged debt to work of Mikhail Gasparov, Kiril Taranovskii and others, although for purposes of a teaching book he has sensibly narrowed his focus to representative poems in five forms that have quite distinct profiles.Pushkin's Chernaia shal (The Black Shawl), inspired by Zhukovsky's version of Uhland's Revenge, is seen as direct source of a series of ballad-like poems in amphibrachic tetrameter couplets with masculine rhyme in which recur motifs of passionate love, betrayal, and revenge. Despite contending influences of other German ballads, Pushkin's version became canonical, and Wachtel convincingly traces its influence through Aksakov, Del'vig, Lermontov, and finds it still detectable in Akhmatova's Seroglazyi korol (Grey-eyed King), even though by this time amphibrachs have been replaced by dactyls. Not surprisingly, distinctly melodramatic original gave rise to parodies as well, which may work even better than serious poems to fix thematic associations. So pungent was original example that we find whiffs of it even in Kruchenykh's Razboinik Van'ka Kain and even more recently in Dmitri Prigov.A chapter on the blank verse lyric considers influence of Pushkin's ...vnov' ia posetil on subsequent meditations in iambic pentameter blank verse. Sidestepping question of blank verse in dramatic writing, Wachtel makes a good case that an entire tradition has arisen from Pushkin's example. No one familiar with powerful original would be surprised to learn that it has left an indelible imprint on subsequent works in form, as Wachtel demonstrates with examples from Apollon Grigoriev, Blok, Gumilev, Khodasevich and Brodsky, emigres Dovid Knut and Vera Bulich, and concluding with Akhmatova's Severnye elegii. Among persistent motifs are a return (figurative or literal) to a home or building, and a meditation on time passing and change of generations. Wachtel's perceptive and informed readings of these poems are best part of book. At certain points one wonders why he goes to such lengths to avoid word elegiac, which encapsulates handily certain features and tonalities of these blank verse lyrics, but he may be trying to avoid muddying terminological waters of a later chapter on elegiac couplet. …