A History of the Russian Hexameter by Richard BurgiReview by: Georgette DonchinThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 33, No. 81 (Jun., 1955), pp. 556-558Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4204682 .

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556 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

than a 'chamberlain'. Bijo is for no obvious reason translated in one place as Hhey attacked'; sidjose do grada Bagdata appears as 'they marched on . . .' instead of the more literal (and perhaps more colourful) 'went down to . . .' However, the only serious criticism one can make concerns the conversations with the guslari. A foreigner reading the Serbo-Croatian

text, and coming to a point he is ignorant or unsure of, will naturally turn for enlightenment to the translation. But for some reason (and with no

appreciable saving of space), parts of the original are omitted in the

English version, the omissions being very honestly indicated by dots. Thus, for example, in a discussion of the bard's late wife, the question and answer, '0/ Je ti bilafina??A. Pa jes, dobra?soj zena', do not appear in translation.

Soj zena? Similarly, one would have liked, and is denied, an English ver? sion of the following remarks on women: '?L Sto mislis, koje su bolje zene? Iii su bolje bosanske iii arnautske??A. Arnautske su vruhce, a ove su deblje.?Q. Sto je to rec' vruhce??A. One su suhse; posuhse su, pa su vruhce.?Q. Koko vruhce? Sto to vruhce??A. JJ ona kalup je vruhca, a ova Bosanka je debela, ka kobila, pa kako ko hoce koju; neko volji tako.'

London W. A. Morison

A History of the Russian Hexameter. By Richard Burgi. The Shoe String Press, Hamden (Connecticut), 1954. x + 208 pages. Index.

It is refreshing to see some interest in Russian versification in the English- speaking countries. Works devoted wholly to metrical theory are exceed?

ingly rare and, though some broader treatment of the subject is still badly needed, Mr Burgi's chapter on the history of Russian prosody is very welcome indeed. The text is reproduced in typewriter print, the presenta? tion of the book is nevertheless most pleasant. The footnotes are exhaustive, but unfortunately grouped at the back; there is no separate bibliography.

The classical hexameter was little cultivated in Russia. In spite of the influence of writers of Greek antiquity in 12th-century Kiev, the frequent mention of Homer referred only to the content of his work, and no

attempt to reproduce its form was made. Mr Burgi unearths however at least one quotation from Homer in Old Church Slavonic, rendered

syllabically. The hexameter does not reappear until the 16th and 17th centuries. Smotritsky's Church Slavonic grammar (1648) formulates a

quantitative prosody?foreshadowed by Maksim Grek?which proves of course sterile and short-lived, the classification of Russian vowels into long and short being entirely arbitrary and artificial.

The publication of a couplet in rhymed hexameters in 1704 by J. G.

Sparwenfeld marks the first appearance of accentual prosody in Russia. Mr Burgi is at his best when discussing the theory of prosody rather than its practice. Accordingly, his chapter on Trediakovsky, the theoretician, is

exhaustive, while that on Zhukovsky, the poet, rather slight. Admittedly, Trediakovsky earns the name of 'father of the Russian hexameter' by his treatise on verse, the first work to advocate the syllabo-tonic prosody which has prevailed from his time to this. After the appearance of the much-

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reviews 557

criticised Tilemakhida in 1766, the hexameter had to be recognised as an established metre for Russian verse. Nevertheless, the heroic measure seemed to repel most poets, and the six-foot iamb, regarded as the Russian

equivalent of the sanctioned alexandrine, continued to be used for epic. The metre was ignored in the main trends of the late 18th century and did not

reappear on any large scale until Gnedich's first translations from the Iliad in 1813. It was Radishchev, more than Karamzin, who proved the real

champion of the hexameter and prepared the way for Gnedich. Mr Burgi considers Radishchev the finest theoretician of the Russian hexameter and

points out the rather curious coincidence that 'it is from the radicals

[Radishchev, Novikov, Chernyshevsky] and not the conservatives in Russian literary history, that the most ancient and venerated metre in world literature received its most active support' (p. 86).

Mr Burgi goes very fully into the controversies raging around the prob? lem of a Russian accentual equivalent for the classical hexameter during the second decade of the 19th century. The intense preoccupation with the

technique of poetry which ensued was equalled (and surpassed) only by the symbolists and the formalists a hundred years later. The advocates of the alexandrine, who defended its 'superiority' because it was French and

familiar, were submerged by those who felt the alexandrine to be in?

tolerably monotonous and were weary of the exclusively iambic verse and

rhyme. Gnedich declared that the hexameter provided the answer to the

inadequacies of the alexandrine, the cadence of its ending preserving the

identity of the individual verse, and the free variation of the position of the caesura making for greater variety. Gnedich's and Zhukovsky's transla? tions (Mr Burgi makes a comparative analysis of both) remain the classic and unsurpassed versions of Homer in Russian. They achieved a very real

adaptation of the classical hexameter and converted it into a living form for later Russian poets. Nevertheless, the history of the evolution of the hexameter ends with Zhukovsky. In spite of Pushkin's mastery in variation of the metre, Delvig's and Kuchelbecker's extensive use of it, and Fet's

interesting 'irregularities', the hexameter has not been used since in any major work. Even the symbolists, who translated the classics most com?

petently and were great admirers of the hexameter, did not produce any hexametric original poetry and made no modifications in its form. With them too this metre remained merely a perfect medium for translations from the classics.

Besides giving us an extremely sober and mature account of the fate of the hexameter in Russia, Mr Burgi draws our attention to a neglected problem of Russian cultural history?the influence of classical antiquity. At first, the fact itself that a quantitative system should spring up among the East Slavs was undoubtedly the direct result of the persistent Greek influence on East Slavonic learning. In the 19th century, pseudo-classicism was regarded as an importation from France, and the 'true simplicity' of Greek classicism was compared to the Russian folk-tradition, with stress on the special affinity between the two. With the realists displaying no interest in the ancients, classicism?and the hexameter?became un?

popular. The metre gradually came to be felt archaic and merely a kind of

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558 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

quotation from ancient poetry. It is indeed the classical associations of the

hexameter that have proved its limitation.

London Georgette Donchin

The Poetry of Adam Mickiewicz. By Wiktor Weintraub. Slavistic Printings and Reprintings. Edited by C. H. van Schooneveld. Mouton & Co. The Hague, 1954. 302 pages. Bibliography.

Since 1955 is the Mickiewicz centenary year, Dr Weintraub's study deserves attention not only from scholars but also from a wider public. Dr Weintraub has presented Mickiewicz the poet: his book is primarily a critical study and not a biography. What, in fact, makes his work useful to both specialist and general reader is the emphasis on critical examination, in which biographical facts are discriminatingly selected in order to relate the writer to his time, always illuminating first the artist and then the man.

Common sense guided the author's purpose, and the result is a clear and

convincing literary portrait. This common sense is apparent as much in the arrangement of the material as in the presentation of individual works. No previous knowledge of Mickiewicz's poetry is taken for granted, and the author summarises the plots and comments on them, stressing new features of style in each work under discussion. By this happy compromise Dr Weintraub's descriptive criticism borders on analysis without imposing ready-made opinions: readers who approach Mickiewicz for the first time

through this study should be able to form their own judgment about his

poetry. They have been given many samples of the poet's writing, and the choice of relevant quotations is an art in itself. Here Polish extracts are

printed together with their renderings in English prose. These modest translations never aspire to be 'poetic'?a wise decision, for the reader has a guide to the text and may be tempted to taste the flavour of the original, though his acquaintance with Polish may be far from perfect.

Writing for the non-Polish reader, Dr Weintraub had to confine him? self to what is essential in the former interpretations of Mickiewicz. No other Polish poet has had the fortune?and also the misfortune?of being so avidly discussed and praised. Almost from the beginning of his career Mickiewicz had been placed on a monument, but the halo of the national bard may easily disappear before the eyes of those who were not born to the same national sentiments. Outside Poland Mickiewicz's claim to

greatness must ultimately rely not on communal feelings, but on the

literary quality of his writings. Too much of the Polish criticism about Mickiewicz implies the ever-ready presence of these feelings in the native reader, which is, of course, understandable, especially as the poet himself was partly formed by the tragic events in his country's political history. Now he is again a symbol for those in exile and a reminder of uncomfort? able analogies for those at home. The monument looms as high as ever, and political conjurers perform tricks in its shadow. Some would like us to believe that the poet who wrote love sonnets and mystical dramas was a secret diviner of social realism.

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