Abstract
In this contribution I shall suggest a correlation between syntax and rhythm in Russian prose of the 19th and 20th century. Quite unexpectedly one can find extensive metrical sequences not only in modernist but also realist prose. In the latter, however, readers do not perceive them. Responsible for this difference in reception is - in addition to such classical modernist phenomena as euphony and recurrence - the syntax. Compared to realists like Tolstoi or Turgenev, modernist writers as Bely, Zamyatin, Babel or Pilnyak tend to use more flat sentences as well as right-branching in compound sentences. Both factors allow readers to focus rather on the rhythmic phonetic aspect of the sentences than syntactic-logical ones.
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